When I asked my family and friends what they would expect to see in a video compilation to act as a “self portrait”, I had many answers. “You in some weird outfit, dancing around” and “you falling asleep in random places” were popular response, but the overwhelming amount of feedback (as I had expected) focussed on my general petty bad luck. I have discovered I have very bad depth perception, which means I am often slamming things or completely underestimating how far away something may be. In this video, I aimed to capture the idiosyncrasies that occur in my everyday life. Set to an audio track compiled from recordings of the sounds that clutter my world, my film was meant to portray me as I am; clumsy, uncoordinated, forgetful and just the right amount of weird.

My main problem was condensing all my material into one minute. The audio track itself originally went for five minutes. I have managed to trim it down now and it includes sounds such as a kettle boiling (I love tea!), me playing bongo drums, my toaster popping and recordings of my dad and brother calling my name (as I am almost always responsible for some sort of mess). I have also included clips from the children I babysit. As a nanny for eight different families, I am so accustomed to lots of noise; whether it be singing, screaming or the sound of things breaking. I play many instruments and noise is a very vital component of who I am which I have tried to recreate this in my audio.

Interspersed with the video I have included photographs of me that I have used as previous “self portraits”, and have synced them to the clip of my brother saying my name to break up the footage of my daily havoc with a photo that represents all the wackiness I love. Ultimately, I am not happy with my final product as I believe it only really skims the surface of the “chaos” that I was attempting to display, and it is very hard to follow.

Link to final product here; https://vimeo.com/user9432239