Synopsis
Love and affection is a universal language, but how can it manifest through different thoughts and perspectives? Exploring the five love languages – physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, gift giving and quality time – this media artefact navigates through experimental depictions of how these actions can be received or shown.
Creator Reflections
Bella: We took quite an iterative approach to the making of our media artefact. Initially, we didn’t know how we wanted the audio and visuals to present on screen, so everything was thrown together in sort of an ad hoc way before reaching a cohesive narrative. This allowed us to be more experimental and find new ways to view the media materials, without limiting ourselves to one direction. I learned significantly about the power of sound and how it can be transformed through a multitude of layers and blending. As our shots are simplistic, the evolution of sound layering encourages our artefact to be more poetic and random. I now understand that media works don’t necessarily have to follow a linear story and can just reveal various components of a concept.
Ellis: Our experimental short film, Up Close, initially did not have a set structure or linear progression throughout and through various visual experiments such as using using our media fragments within collages and visual layering and audio experiments through sound layering and voice muffling/echoes, we were able to make deliberate creative decisions that would help inform our research question of: How can we create a poetic experimental media artefact on how we express and receive affection through multiple perspectives? Throughout the progress of creating this media artefact I became increasingly more aware of how significant the added sound and audio tracks are in terms of supporting the visuals that we had spent a considerable amount of time collecting from our communities, whilst still allowing our audience time and moments to interpret the media fragments and the significance of those themselves. Our poetic media artefact explores various key concerns that we have learnt throughout the duration of this studio, specifically through non linear narrative within a poetic video format, exploring different realities of experiencing affection and love and through allowing our audience to be active in allowing for personal interpretation and moments of contemplation and reflection.
Trevor: Up Close is an experimental documentary exploring the multiple perspectives of how individuals express affection and how it can be shown through a poetic video. This video first starts out segmented showcasing the different types of affection with small layering of video and audio which aim to express the idea of affection. It then evolved into an explosion of multiple interpretations of how affection can be seen in an audio visual context. In making this video, it was my first time learning about an interactive approach as our group took a process based method on how the aesthetic and overall form of our video would be created as we initially were not too sure about it and what it would look like. From this method we identified patterns and experimented with what worked with our footage which we were then able to use in our final project. In this project of creating a list about affection, I also learned how sound can affect the overall video and how it can create moments of contemplation and question the audience about the overall theme and idea.