Reflection:

I set out to show place as a part of myself and discovered that actually the relationship is the inverse. Part of myself is left behind hence the dialogue, “I have left something of myself behind”. I wanted to document who I was through places and as an only child, I have grown to learn how profoundly the spaces you are in influence the way you think.

The brief suggested that Lo-Fi elements could be incorporated and this presented a limitation I was excited to explore, how could I use Lo-Fi artistically in the piece. A key motif that repeats is the montage of images of the places I go from the city, to home and beyond and back again. The images and video clips, lead, in succession further and further away from the noise of the inner city and in doing so become less and less Lo-Fi. I manipulated the frame rate of the initial shots in the sequence by speeding them up, rendering them at 4x speed and slowing them back to 2x speed. The effect created was a vintage film effect that was then colour graded to reflect an old projector projecting the images back. This technique of course, created a sort of anachronism in the sense that modern train technology is shown with a vintage Lo-Fi film look and I think this is somewhat key to my personality in the sense that I love to explore things that don’t really belong.

The photo of my face which flashes is a screened image created from a photo, then a threshold effect added and animated, combined with a Screen blending mode in Premiere Pro to achieve the effect of the video transitioning through an image. Lastly I incorporated the titles and similar start and end shots to evoke that sense of repetition. The journey through these places is a somewhat routine journey, though the video ends with a black on white title instead of a white on black title, to reference the idea that through the journey change occurs and it is through this change that we leave a part of ourselves behind.