Reflection WEEK 2

Week 2 of TRANSLATING OBSERVATIONS was a less busy week than usual, as we didn’t have a class on the Monday. I missed last Friday’s class also (I was at a music festival, sorry!) so I’m feeling a little out of the loop but Friday’s class got me back in the swing of things.

It appears I missed an exercise on Friday that was basically a practice for our first assignment, filming 50 second static shots. We watched some of the other student’s efforts and I was very impressed with how some of them constructed their shots. The static format for such an extended time really can create beauty out of something that at first glance seems quite mundane or uninteresting. It has made me more excited for our first assignment, which I just read up on for the first time today.

As mentioned earlier, I was at a music festival over the weekend, and I know this is supposed to be a uni-focused reflection, considering the nature of this subject I can’t help but comment on some of my experiences. Festivals like the one I attended (Pitch Music & Arts) are smorgasbords for the trained observer. People completely let loose of the structures and limits that everyday society constricts on us, and this mixed with the extremely loud hypnotic music and intense light and art shows, they are quite the treat for your senses. I struggled in my latest observations to quite capture the more physical sensations and instead focused on the strange juxtaposition of everyday activities with the festival setting. I think the feeling of a music festival like this (several days, camping, electronic music) is something that hasn’t been captured effectively on film (in my experience at least) and is something I’m curious about exploring in the future. The sheer grandiose nature of it all however makes it a real mammoth task to re-create, however I think documentary style filming could capture some of the more magical moments quite well.

I am looking forward to next weeks classes and beginning work on my first assignment.