REFLECTION – Individual Exercise 3

When faced with the task of IE3, I immediately got excited by it. I brainstormed different ways to reinterpret the image, and if I should go for a direct interpretation and try and create some clear sense of meaning, or to go for a more abstract attempt. I considered writing some kind of poetic dialogue relating to the imagery, but I thought considering the vague nature of the images, I was better off going full abstract and creating a juxtaposition between the audio & imagery. I wanted a realistic, natural sounding dialogue, but something seemingly mundane and not over the top.

What springs to mind immediately when I view my images are ideas of the city, the anonymous people living inside it, and the everyday grind. The traffic makes me think of the vast and wide city, with thousands of people living their lives, anonymous to us. I decided to try and capture this idea with a one way phone dialogue. I didn’t want any specific details or narrative elements in the dialogue, just simply a block of dialogue, as if taken from one of the cars shown, or a person walking down the street.

I had some ideas about what I wanted to say during the dialogue, but also ad-libbed in mainly in order to keep an authenticity about it. I purposely didn’t finish sentences, and responded to the other side of the call without specifying, in order to create a distance between the viewer and the voice. I considered adding some ambient sounds in the background, but after experimenting decided that pure silence in the background worked best as it put all the focus on the voice, and how the images correspond to it without context. I also considered getting another voice actor for the recording but settled on my own voice as it means I could dictate exactly what I wanted to do, instead of relying on someone else’s interpretation.

I recorded using my iPhone. I considered an external microphone but thought I didn’t want the quality to be completely perfect as to add to the aesthetic so went with my phone.