When presented with this task I felt a mixture of excitement and fear. I was excited for the brainstorming process; finding a person for the assignment, thinking about how I wanted to portray them and what I could incorporate into the video. However, the sense of fear was something that hung over this entire process – particularly when I had chosen my person.

I feared being too invasive, and this permeating feeling of fear probably held me back from asking some of the questions I really wanted to ask. I chose a person who is very dear to me and I didn’t want her to think I was exploiting her feelings in order to seem creative or artistic. I found it difficult to find major things that would synthesize her personality in 2 minutes – I find my friends to be the most interesting people, and I found it hard to project the image I had of my friend or do them justice.

 

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the filming process immensely. I loved spending the day with Millie, a lot of the conversations we had I’ve saved on my computer purely to have as memories.

 

I am definitely more confident when it comes to the editing process; this brief was fantastic practice and a priceless way to incorporate the feedback from my previous assignment into this project. I was able to use my newly gained knowledge about aspect ratios to create more subtle transitions between video and photographic footage – I also became more confident using audio fading to establish different tones and moods.

 

I decided to take a different approach to the whole ‘interview’ trend that seemed to be popular. I decided on a montage-esque sort of portrait of Millie – especially because half the video was Millie reflecting on her friend’s personality and how she dealt with losing her.

 

The idea of producing more of a montage relates to what I have been studying in Cinema studies – montages are used in episodes of self-reflection to obliterate time and add an air of poignancy – which I have tried to accomplish.