Reflection:

By the time I had finished interviewing Mia, we had almost 15 minutes of footage- so instantly I knew my biggest challenge in creating this short portrait piece was going to be condensing that down to a three-minute video. Naturally, I would have much prefered to create a longer interview piece for this project, which I want to do in future as a personal project, but I am happy with how it turned out overall.

I believe in this piece I was able to show a small snippet of who Mia is, and how her experiences have shaped her as a person. I really didn’t want to get caught up in having her anorexia define her as a person in her entirety and I also did not want this video to turn into somewhat of a ‘sob story’. Rather, my aim was to keep this video somewhat lighthearted and highlight how this has helped Mia grow, and how other who suffer can also. Through the use of ‘personal’, almost candid footage of Mia I think I was able to achieve this element in the video, creating that personal connection between her and the viewer by giving them a small insight into her life.

I think that the audio quality, while not terrible, could have been improved in my portrait as upon reflection, it does spike every now and again in an uncomfortable way,  as well as the fact that it is a little echoey. I also believe that some of my cuts between shots could have slightly smoother, although I found this was the best way to stop the video from ‘rambling’ at points I could have achieved this with more cutaways, but this is just something I have to be more mindful of in future.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the piece of work I produced as I think it reflected Mia in a positive way, not drawing too much on the ‘novelty’ of her illness, but rather representing it as something she has grown from as a person.

Screenshot of Timeline: