My gathering lists video is based on my experience of walking home from the bus stop at night and the joy and happiness returning home. Through the readings as well as content and class discussions, I developed an understanding of gathering lists to be a catalogue emphasising details of an experience or the mundane which convey a particular mood or tone to the viewers. Items on this list can be ordered in a way where it reveals a connection. 

An idea I learned in class was the word ontography which involved revealing a set of objects which do not provide clarification and ordering these items or fragments to provide context and attention to how they are connected. I experimented with this idea by having glimpses based on my observations of details in walking home. These shots of them overtime revealed the bus stop to be the main figure to my video and me walking home.

I also learned ontography to be “cataloging  things,  but also drawing  attention to the  couplings of  and chasms between them.” (Bogost Ian, 2012, Pg50). From this idea I categorized similar shots such as the street lights and wind blowing through trees to give further context to how these details are connected and the overall surroundings of what I would experience and only notice. 

Whilst making my video, I aimed for an aesthetic that was dark but ambient at times to convey my experience walking home at night to be scary but not unfamiliar to me. I used warm tones and various colors in lights and objects to symbolise the comfort and experience in familiar details I noticed on the way home. Also to convey moments where it is scary, I used shaky camera movements to accentuate an intense disturbed feeling I feel at particular times. 

Another idea I learnt in class to express the happy feeling I have of returning home from the bus stop and to add tone and a particular mood at times to my video was the use of the Kuleshov Effect. I found faces that looked like they were smiling in figures outside and inside my room. I then used these faces to convey happiness and joy in the close up shots following a previous shot of a bus stop or me walking home from the bus stop. However in peer feedback I received, the viewer found that close-ups of these faces and figures were distracting and took away from the main theme and experience of returning home from the bus stop. 

Resources: Bogost, I. 2012. “Ontography’ in Alien Phenomenology. Or What It’s Like to be a Thing.” University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. pp. 35-59.