If you’ve kept up with my blog, you’ll understand what my title is referring to. If you haven’t, let me briefly summarise.
The ‘creative self-portrait’ was our first project for our bachelor of communication course. The self-portrait comprises of different mediums of media (image, video, audio and text) that represent one’s identity. How we chose to represent ourselves was completely up to us and our creative imaginations (hence the ‘creative’ part). So without further ado, here is my creative self-portrait.
Imagery
This first image represents my wild imagination. The things that run through my mind are some of the most bizarre things that I’ve ever witnessed. I used a whiteboard to dictate my thoughts as a way of bringing my imaginations into reality. The lighting surrounding the whiteboard in contrast to my face being in the shadows, was designed to make my world of imagination have a ‘fantasy’ feel – something not real, away from reality.
This image represents my gaming hobby. Let me preface this by saying; I love gaming. I’ve been doing it ever since I was young; playing mario kart on my Nintendo 64. A lot of people generalise gamers as people who are trying to escape reality, or are addicted to the instant gratification it provides. But for me, it’s the immersion. As a story telling medium, gaming has evolved immensely from what it once was. Nowadays, the stories told through gaming have been some of the most emotionally felt for me, when compared to other mediums such as movies and books (not to say that these mediums are bad). As such, I’ve used the camera on a Nintendo 3DS to show me smiling in reality, to show my enjoyment within the virtual world.
This image represents my happiness. Generally speaking, I’m always happy. I may not seem like it sometimes, but usually it’s because I’m too lazy to make any facial expressions. I’ve used the bright sun and the green grass to project a warm feeling, sort of like the feeling you get when you’re really happy. I’m also jumping for joy to emulate that happiness, using body language.
This photo represent my hot-headed nature. I’m a super competitive person, so I always like winning, and when I’m in competition for first place, I get passionate. Really passionate. It doesn’t really go well with my gaming, but it’s something I just can’t help. The lighting turned out to be pretty dark, so all I can really say about this photo is that the fire on my head literally makes me ‘hot-headed’.
This image is my favourite image that I’ve taken for this project. I’m a dog person; always have been, always will. Not to say that I hate cats in particular, but I just like dogs a lot more. In this image, I’ve used the shadow of a cardboard cut-out of a dog and angled it in a way so that it would look like it was my shadow – literally being a dog-person.
This photo… I must admit, is a bit odd. It represents my childish nature. Even though I’m eighteen years-old, I will always be a child at heart. As such, I’ve used the forced perception technique in order to impose my head on the body of a fake baby (no babies were harmed in the making of this image). Yeah, even with context given, it’s still weird.
Video
This video is in reference to the discussion we had on “hyper-attention vs deep-attention” in our first week of media one. I am definitely a hyper-attentive person, so I’ve used forced perception here to make it seem as if I have four arms. Didn’t work too well since my friend is much more bigger than I am (his skin is also a lot darker), but it still counts.
I love puns. I love how dry and obvious they are. They sum up my sense of humour (if you don’t include the dark part of it). As such, here’s a video of me being punny (see what I did there?).
I’m a pretty random person. If you look at my ‘wild imagination’ photo again, it shows exactly what goes on through my head every single second of every single day. This video was taken in one shot, so it’s all over the place (as it’s supposed to be).
Audio
I do not enjoy reading. I don’t hate it; in fact, I wish I could enjoy reading. But every time I get a new novel, I just get bored after only a couple of pages. So here’s the audio recording of me… being bored.
Melbourne’s weather these past few days can be summarised into one word… hot. And I hate the heat. Being in the cold is so much better. The cold is where you can have a nice cup of coffee or tea, put on as many layers as you want, and go to sleep comfortably in the night. But in the heat, the only coffee or tea you can drink is it’s chilled counterpart, you have to be almost naked to be even mildly comfortable, and sleeping is an ordeal for many.
A lot of the time, I’m super lazy. I sleep-in a lot, barely exercise, and sometimes; on rare occassions, I can’t even be bothered eating. It’s a really bad habit, but it’s my bad habit, so I guess it’s part of my identity… unfortunately.
Text
“If there was a zombie apocalypse, I’d probably tell you to ‘relax'”.
This sentence; despite its shortness, explains a lot about me. The main point I’m trying to convey is that I’m a pretty easy-going dude. Even in the midst of the end of humanity, where the dead are eating the living, and the living are betraying one another to survive, I’m still just trying to have a good time. Maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but as long as you get my point, that’s all that matters.