I believe that I accomplished what the EXAM brief stated quite successfully with the THEME being TRANSITION.
I’m planed to use the elements of water, earth and fire to display the transition of myself and how I have changed over time. However I didn’t use fire because I couldn’t find any images worth putting on display. I mainly had water in the background but in similar locations.
Unfortunately I couldn’t use any camping photographs because they were low resolution and they were meant to be my more earth based ideas. Although I adapted and used the farm photographs I have of me as a child on the horse and the dogs to represent the fauna side of nature.
Transition it’s a passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to another, like ‘The Brown Sisters’ who showcased themselves yearly I think I might have succeeded to imitate Nixon, but add my own twist to the project as I have photos from 2003-2021 only missing a year from the age of 13-14.
Overall I felt as though my planning was quite thorough, especially when it came to the interview questions that I was asking my mum – that meant that i was really prepared and provided some great audio for me. One thing that I did struggle when it came to planning was the visuals for my film. I wanted the movie to be hard hitting although I knew it would be unethical and uncomfortable for my mum if I were to film her ‘being ill’ essentially. I pondered for a long time on what I wanted to actually film, and in the end I came up with most of my visuals on the spot as my planning in this area wasn’t too detailed. The ‘where’ part of my planning was easy – as it all took place in my home, however I also did end up getting some footage outside the house at the shop – highlighting that I came up with a lot of my visuals on the spot. Overall, I think my planning process was okay, I feel as though I should’ve been more thorough when it came to planning the actual footage since I found myself stuck for ideas a lot of the time – leading to some not so interesting or visually pleasing footage.
EXECUTION:
As I’ve mentioned, I struggled to come up with some interesting pieces of footage. I took a documentary style approach to my work, I began filming on a canon DSLR camera however I found this hard to use and inconvenient at times. This is because sometimes I would have to quickly get out my camera if I noticed my Mum was breathless, therefore it was easier to film a lot of the footage on my IPhone that I always had on me. However though, the filming process was an easy and enjoyable one and bought me closer to my mum to understanding her illness. One thing I did find difficult is making the footage aesthetically pleasing in some way or another. At times my visuals were not that clear and generally not that interesting. So, if I were to change anything it would be to figure out how to make a documentary style movie aesthetically pleasing. The execution of filming wasn’t a very time consuming process since each bit of footage was quite short, however coming up with visuals to match the audio was a tricky part.
EDITING:
Generally, editing was a really time consuming process. The audio was one of the most lengthy process as I had to listen to 10/15 minutes of footage a number of times and cut out the pieces that I wanted and the bits I didn’t want. I managed to slim the audio down to about 3 minutes and as you can imagine this took a lot of time, as I wanted the most important, hard-hitting bits of information in my film. Adding and editing the visuals was a fairly easy process, it was just a case of cutting out the bits that I didn’t want or need, bits that weren’t visually pleasing at all or bits that weren’t clear with bad framing. However, I did really well when it came to editing and I feel very confident when it comes to using Premiere.
Overall:
I am really pleased with how my film turned out. My favorite element of the film is the audio of my mum speaking, I feel as though she answered the questions really well and that is what made the film the most emotionally moving. One thing I would change about the movie is some of the footage, as mentioned before I wish I was able to express my mum’s illness a little bit better while still being aesthetic/visually pleasing however this was difficult to balance at times. However, it is one of my favorite final pieces that I have made and I’m glad I could show my understanding and empathy for my mother through a film.
