The film I chose to write about for the the Integrated Media course is “Dear Diary” made by Kai Ebato, Sherilyn Wong and Kyesha Keleher.
The interface is made up with a black and white zebra-like patterned background, a broken toy bear with 4 strings with balloons of small thumbnails on each of them, tighten on its arm and pulling it up flying. A much bigger thumbnail is placed at the lower right corner of the interface, which shows the footage that is being played.
The toy is broken, one eye is injured and the whole bear itself looks devastated. Its movement is passive, being hung and lead by the 4 balloons, it has no control of where it will be flying to.
The background, especially the zebra-like pattern, however, doesn’t look connected to the mood (or atmosphere) of the story to me. I think I would prefer a more “actual” background…maybe a tattoo design, or a piece of art, drawing, consists with only black and white.
The piece, “Dear Diary” has no sound in any footage shown in the interface, what I could hear was only the voice over of what the girl writes in her diary. Along with some sounds of bike passing by, trains and trams, I can feel her isolated personality and how much she is emotionally attached with her brother, who is disowned by their parents.
I don’t have a sibling, but I have the history of hiding things from my parents, just like the girl. I guess what dragged my attention so deep into the piece of the work was the story of the girl and her brother took so much effort to achieve what they have always dreamed for. I used keep diaries when I was in my last year of primary school and I kept writing until I was 15, when one day I decided to burn them all. They were 16 books, big or small, thick or thin, I wrote down quotes from books I read (I also hid those books from my parents, not that those books were published illegally but they wanted me to study hard instead of reading stuff not related to course work), my naive but back then pure love sick, my loneliness of being isolated by my classmates and myself, my anger towards the discrimination I got because of my father as a government official and I was one of the most “stupid” students in the class and later on I was the poorest looking and weirdest behaving girl in the boarding school; and my desire of going overseas and living my own life – as what? I had no idea. I was only 16.
The girl in the film is also 16, at one of the stages of the film. Her brother has left the family for 4 years and he works in Miami as a tattoo artist. Her mother found what she has been hiding since her brother’s left, letters and sketch books. Her mother burned all the letters and the girl tries her best to keep the sketch books safe. She is always clear about what she wants to be, an artist, or say an illustrator.
I believe that a good piece of cinema art work is something that makes its audience reflect on their past, their present, remind them of what they have done or experienced. This piece is for audiences to watch again (and again) after sometime and they often have new thoughts and reflections. And I believe the content in this piece of art does not have too much dramatization but lots of things that we see and we do in our daily lives.
Thus I think the film is much more about real life and going for what a person dreams for than a common drama we see on TV. I wouldn’t doubt that the story is something actually happened in someone’s life. It makes me reflect on what I have been thinking or struggling about – where I want to go, what kind of person I want to be, what I want to do for living. The most part that the piece has made me think again and again is what I have been worried about – after I found out I in fact really enjoy drawing and photography – I am worried that what if after putting in so much effort in archiving an illustrator career for years and at the end everything happens only proofs me wrong about what I am capable of and I had only been living in a dream? But the piece also told me, the only thing I can and I should do for what I want is only DO IT.
When real life makes everyone struggle, media seems to be what always where we escape to from whatever we don’t want to deal with in everyday life. However this one piece, the audio lasts less than 10 minutes, at least makes some of us think again – about what we want to be, about defining our own positions in the society – I didn’t even need to watch the footage in the piece for what the producers what their audiences to feel. The voice tells it all.