Poster:
My piece was focused on quite a heavy topic of shame and discussed personal examples that carried quite a lot of weight. My hope with this was to engage the audience through points of relatability, as well as prompt thoughts around whether they ever talk about this feeling, or how they may subconsciously contribute to the culture that promotes shame. Hans Richter states that “documentary film reveals possibilities that are at least as interesting as those of a feature film” (Richter, 1940), and given my piece was most similar to the documentary form, I hope to create a level of engagement and uniqueness that may come from other forms.
I hope this is achieved through the reflection of both how we change as we grow up, visualised through the use of archival home video, as well as the discussion of a topic so frequently avoided in the day-to-day, that topic being shame.
Our studio prompt was “How can we work with this flexible form to make innovative, challenging films that speak about the world, and our place in it?”, I believe my piece engages with ideas that are prevalent within our world and focuses quite heavily on our role as individuals within it. Rascaroli stated that “the filmic essay decidedly points to the enunciating subject, who literally inhabits the text” (Rascaroli 2009). In the case of my piece, the subject initially appears to be the interviewees, but their insignificance being normal people is their significance, as the true subject is not them, but the topic of shame. The goal was to provoke some sort of thought about ourselves, whether that be “Do I let shame affect me regularly?”, “How can we have these discussions more regularly?”, or “I had no idea other people had these same experiences as me.” Regardless, I hope that was translated properly to the audience.
I think the greatest strength of my piece was both the topic and the discussion from the interviewees. Although I had to trim a lot of the dialogue down, the responses from the interviewees nailed the main points I wanted to focus on.
On the other hand, the editing and main camera angle were weak points. With the restricted timeframe I struggled to perfect the colour grading as it is a skill I am still not spectacular at and am still learning. I also could have removed the black screens in between questions, getting feedback from a peer after the screening that it was slightly jarring. I also messed up with the main camera angle, with it being slightly overexposed, which made correcting it whilst working with a cyclorama quite challenging, and I don’t think it looked as polished as I had hoped.
With more time and resources, I would hope to maybe add in some more personal aspects, rather than have 4 minutes of interviews. Whilst I liked the green screen of the home videos as a sort of window into the soul of the interviewee, I felt the piece was not as dynamic or experimental as others. Obviously, to do this I would have to make the piece significantly longer, but I think that some variation between each question maybe introspectively exploring the theme of the question within my own life would make the piece more personal and engaging, as the length of just interviews became quite dragged out by the end.
One key thing I have learned from the studio experience is that the essay film is one of the most flexible forms of film. The main aspect of an essay film, as described by Laura Rascaroli is that “an essay film makes an argument” (Rascaroli, 2019). In the exhibition, we saw narrative pieces, montages, documentary-esque pieces and in all just a wide variety of different pieces. I think the essay film is a simpler form, despite its broad definition, and I intend to continue to experiment with my own filmmaking in future. I think a lot of the pieces we saw were nostalgic as expected from a group of 18-20somethings, but I am curious to create a piece that maybe strays from the interview documentary format and is more future-focused. One of the most important things to do in this unique form is to experiment and just develop as you move along, which allows the filmmaker to learn and develop thoughts alongside the audience as they create.
As this piece was an individual piece, it did not require much collaborative work. However, organising interviews, collecting home videos of the interviewees, and getting input in the form of feedback and help from people more skilled than myself, were all collaborative aspects. To bring the final piece together, I had to be in contact with all the interviewees regularly, prompting them to please send the needed footage when they had gaps in their busy schedules.
I also believe that showing clips and bouncing ideas of both friends, peers and our studio leader Liz Burke was a key collaborative aspect of the final cut of my piece. There was some feedback I did not necessarily agree with, such as cutting major parts of the introduction animation, however, I still decided to test these out, and after trying them out, quite a few ideas did improve the piece despite my own reluctance to stray from my original vision.
References
Rasacaroli L (2019) ‘Thinking with Pictures’, Sight and Sound , Vol 4 (12): 12-13
Rascaroli L (2009) The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments. in Alter NM and Corrigan T (ed), Essays on the Essay Film (2017), New York, Columbia University Press, 183-196.
Richter H (1940) The Film Essay: A New Kind of Documentary Film. in Alter NM and Corrigan T (ed), Essays on the Essay Film (2017), New York, Columbia University Press, 89- 92.