Yas’ reflection 🙂
I hope that the short film my group created for our final assignment, can successfully combine a variety of media skills and plot ideas to highlight our main themes. For our final project my group created a short film that centred a papier mâché ladybug as the main source of focus and followed its journey through both natural and man-made landscapes in the city. Through using an object or character for the main scenes of our film to centre around, we aimed to draw in viewers and give them someone to root for.
The main purpose of our film was inspired by Anna Tsing’s “The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in Capitalist ruins” specifically the idea surrounding the art of noticing. We homed in on the idea that geologists have begun to call our time the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human disturbance outranks other geological forces (Tsing, 2015) highlighting the ways which human presence proves to add a sinister factor and obstacle to the lives of smaller beings in the environment. We aimed to begin our film displaying the ladybug interacting with its surroundings positively and curiously exploring a natural ecosystem. We then edited the film to take a jarring and dark horror inspired turn when introducing the ladybug to objects such as litter or life from a up close and uncomfortable angles.
Scott McDonald states in the text Ecocinema Theory and Practice that “Recent decades have seen the development of a tradition of filming that uses technology to provide cinematic experiences of being immersed within the natural world”(McDonald, 2012) Â This tradition of Eco cinema, looks at immersion in the natural world to fosters mindfulness, directly relating to outdoor filming. Aiming to capturing the beauty of nature in a way that encourages viewers to reflect on their connection to the earth and environment. My group wanted our short film to capture the peace and beauty of the natural world in a way that led our audience to calmly enjoy the flora and fauna being displayed. Once this had been achieved, we wanted to hastily insert darkened fast paced and unsettlingly close camera angles and shots, paired with loud abrupt sound to shake viewers to life and allow them to recognise the dangers of becoming complicit with man made destruction.
Looking at the text “The work of Terrance Malick: Time Based Ecocinema by Gabriella Blais” for my individual research. I discovered that the text commented the ways that individuals reflect on their ethical responsibilities in relation to the environment and encourages critical reflection and a call to action and the ways in which humans relate to the more than human world and to their environments, be they real or virtual… (Blais, 2019) This relates closely to the aim of my groups final short film as we strive to draw attention to the little things that humans don’t usually notice and the one off actions that can cause landslide effects on smaller creatures sharing the same eco systems.
A problematic issue we faced when creating our short film was overcoming our go-to filming techniques in order to follow through with our plan to use horror type filming styles. I myself lean more towards peaceful calming scenes of nature and natural colours in my filming works, but for this particular project we wanted to push our creative abilities out of our comfort zones. This proved to be much harder than we thought and even with our finishing product presenting our audience with jarring uncomfortable sound and editing, I still feel we could have pushed ourselves a little further in relation to how we set up our shots to present sinister vibes.
I feel that our most successful part of our work was the audio. The way we edited our final film was done in a way that viewers at the exhibition could listen carefully to the different wildlife sounds and enjoy the peaceful natural audio of the focus area. This was then abruptly contrasted with loud unsettling audio of the city (for example, pedestrian crossing noises and car engines). The audio allowed us to encompass an uncomfortable and lingering sense of wariness. Overall, our audio to me was the star of our piece and was a success.
If we continued to work on our short film media piece, I would hope to really flesh out the scenes. Removing some of the black images with white writing on them would be integral to create more flow between shots and allow more time for viewers to tune in to the audio. Something I would also be keen to look more at in future would be the effects of audio and the way different sounds can promote different emotions in people.
I found the class of Invisible Environments this semester to be thoroughly enjoyable. Although at moments I felt a little uncomfortable I found that those moments helped me to grow as a person and improve my ability to make new acquaintances and work with different classmates. I found that collaborating with other students helped me to stay focused and interested in what I was learning and prompted me to try my best. I genuinely will miss some of the people I got to work with in this class which is a new thing for me as someone who usually liked to go to class then leave to get home.
 As a nature lover this class has helped me grow in relation to discovering new ways to represent the environment through media and sparked a new passion for me to create new eco-conscious media, perhaps even my own short film. I look forward to what the future holds for me in relation to Eco cinema and am so glad I chose this class.
REFERENCES:
Blasi, G. (2019). The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048541515
Rust, S., & et al. (Eds.). (2012). Ecocinema theory and practice. Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203099627
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400874334