Girl Missing

There were signs posted up all over the park of the girl, missing. On the side of the slide, the lamp post, the rubbish bin… The girl’s face smiled back. I didn’t catch her name or any of the details on the poster, just her face – pale with black hair pulled into braids – and the thick red lettering of MISSING. M-I-S-S-I-N-G. How strange that a sign so upsetting could be pasted against the backdrop of a green suburban dream.

She could have been my sister or my friend but as it were, I had never seen her in my life.

Signs like this always scare me and force my senses to go on full alert. Is that a shadow of a man watching me over in that blue Honda? What are the group of boys over there doing? I fear abduction more than I fear anything else in the world. The notion that one minute I could be here and the next, gone. Missing.

Alien abduction. Is that real too?

‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’… How does one explain that incident?

Children were laughing in the distance.

My friend would be here soon to meet me but this girl on the poster would stay put until the rain washed her away or someone took the signs down.

FILM IDEA –

The film would begin on an empty rural road where a girl is trying to hitch a ride. A young boy offers her a lift and over the span of a night, they become close friends. He awakes in the morning to a letter from the girl explaining that she had to leave.

Prior to filming my piece, I was under the assumption that interviews had to be held with a person of some extraordinary standing. Thank goodness I was corrected and made to realise that an informal interview could see the subject being anyone, so long as it broke the boundaries of the ’60 Minutes’ style. With this in mind, I chose to film my boyfriend, Drilon.

I didn’t inform him well on what I’d be doing, merely telling him where he should be and at what time. I had no concrete questions planned and the aim was really to just have a chat. He was a little shy at first, but once I made him focus on me instead of the camera, the conversation got rolling. I ended up with seven minutes of footage regarding his explanation of a high concept film that he wants to produce someday, which I cut down to a small snippet at the beginning. The remainder of the footage is some small talk that we engage in. I chose to splice these two types of footage together because in the first, I feel as though he is acting animatedly, aware of the camera’s presence and of the fact that he wants to appear ‘interesting.’ The second group of clips is a contrast to that – he’s smoking and just doing whatever he pleases. The audience can also hear my voice, which I chose to include since my relationship with the subject is an important aspect.

The decision to also film outside helped the informality since we had a lot of distractions that a controlled environment wouldn’t. Apart from the sound of the heavy machinery, pedestrians kept walking past that would steal our attention.

I’m not at all happy with the way that the footage turned out colour wise and Drlion isn’t in focus – horror of horrors (Despite it looking great in the monitor…. Rooky mistake.) The picture quality looks hazy and as though I’ve added a glow effect in post, which is most likely a repercussion of the lack of focus. The change of brightness between the footage is also due to a van blocking the sun during the end of shooting, which I should’ve been conscious of but only realised later. The composition is quite solid, though I would have liked to have my feet poking into the frame, which I didn’t do only because it obscured Drilon’s face and made for a rubbish shot.

We used the lapel mic and the boom for filming, though I’m pretty sure I only used the boom in post. Either way, Drilon’s voice can be heard clearly but also mine, which comes from off-screen.

All in all, my approach to this interview was effective but the actual execution needs a lot of work.

There’s a Man at the Laundromat, 

sitting all by himself. I had to look twice because I thought he was a part of the furniture – his body screwed tightly onto the blue metal seats upon which he sat.

So still.

He had 5 plastic bags by his feet. The kind of red and white candy-striped plastic bags that one’s grandmother carries home from Footscray market. The kind that my grandmother always seems to stash away at the bottom of the pantry.

Some of these bags were filled with clothes, some of them were filled with food.

How old is he? What’s his name? What’s he doing after his clothes are washed? 38. Chester. Feeding his cat.

If this were a movie, I would’ve introduced myself and he would’ve offered me an apple from his groceries and we would’ve exchanged stories to the hum of the dryer spinning around and then we would’ve dot dot dot who knows.

A missed opportunity that wasn’t an opportunity at all.

Empty Chairs and Empty Tables, 

covered in the drops of rain that fell earlier that morning. Orange and white plastic, sitting, waiting, for a customer to come by, for the interaction of a human body. Click. I took a picture. One of the saddest pictures I had ever taken.

In summer, the line of bodies waiting for a place would wind around the corner, past the post-office and into the nearby park, the waitresses smiling as they suggested, “It might be up to a forty-five minute wait. Sorry!” Now there was no one. Not a single soul in this ghost town of fallen leaves and wind and pitter-patter. No one but me on my way home, stopping to observe and think.

Whoosh. The sound of a V-Line charging forward. Beep. A car honking its horn somewhere in the distance. Ding. My phone alerting me of a new message.

Where Do School Girls Go?

In the middle of the station, a young girl unbuttoned her checkered school dress and let it slip to the floor to reveal a mini skirt and turtleneck. Scrunching the dress into her backpack, she proceeded to check her phone constantly and then hastily walked onto the train, taking a seat in the far corner.  Ignoring the stop that lead her to school, she stayed on board until she reached Flinders, hopping off until I lost the sight of her blonde head amongst the crowd.

I assumed she was keeping her whereabouts from her parents and I began to wonder why? Where could she possibly be going on a school day that she felt the need to sneak away?

Do parents ever really know their children? It’s only natural that we keep secrets.

No, you can never truly know anyone and this is where ‘Citizen Kane’ springs to mind – how this huge media mogul died without anyone knowing what “Rosebud” meant to him…

Perhaps this young girl was off to see an older lover and I liked thinking about this. Through out the entire day, I thought and thought about their affair, placing myself in imagined scenes between the two and watching on unashamedly.