Project brief #3 was the most exciting of our projects thus far. I decided to choose my
grandmother as my subject, for stories of her life have always intrigued me. She is one of
the most interesting people I know, and I have always loved hearing her stories.
Unfortunately, I encountered many problems in producing the final piece. The first was
access to RMIT materials. Whenever I went to hire out equipment, I wasn’t able to use it
within 24 hours. My Nan has been suffering from altzheimers for years, but the things she
repeatedly tells us are the stories of her youth. I expect my Nan to come alight with
retelling these stories as she usually does, but found she became immediately shy and
withdrawn when the camera was rolling. This was not entirely negative as it taught me how
to make my subjects more comfortable, which I shall adopt in the future. I asked my Nan to
repeat the question in her responses for coherence, for example, instead of saying “Alma
Hart”, say “My name is Alma Hart” but sadly she kept forgetting and thus I had to cut a lot
of the original material as it did not make sense. In terms of creative possibilities, the
opportunities I had planned where (once again) limitless. I have learned that in these sorts
of projects, there is no way I can capture the entirety of a person, so instead of trying to
cram in as much as possible and producing a lower quality final, I should focus on one or
two main ideas to develop. Upon attempting to import footage, export my project and
upload the final, I encountered numerous difficulties, some of which are captured in the
screenshots below. The most successful part of my final (for me) was the relevance of the
found footage in relation to the topics covered in the video. Problematic areas include the
lack of creativity in presentation which I was unable to add due to the time constraints and
(once again) my terrible organization.
My final product can be viewed here; https://vimeo.com/126223098
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