This week could have been pivotal to my development as a director. But this week has been mostly missed due to two major events, these events are significant and frustrating enough for me to note them in prose, on this blog. I am recording this as both a reminder and as a form of stress relief so I can concentrate on my work. The events are as follows:
I was forced to take a sick day on monday. On monday the 25th I had a serious case of food poisoning, or other stomach related illness. early on this resulted in nausea, later on this resulted in other more serious effects that to describe would be unprofessional. suffice to say, i was unable to leave the immediate vicinity of my home for more than five minutes at a time.
on Tuesday the 26th I made a critical mistake, I read the wrong timetable. having slept badly after the events of monday. I checked an out of date timetable sheet for this week, meaning I missed the workshops on Tuesday.
Rest assured lessons have been learned from these events. the seriously frustrate me and this situation annoys me thoroughly.
in this post I will explain my formatting choices, shooting style/visual language, and a summary of the talking points and content of the film.
Visual Language
I want this short to express my creative process visually, my process begins with tiny fragmented, half formed snippets, memories and ideas, and then through the process of research, review, exploration and focus, these slowly form into a solid build, a backbone for a project.
I plan to translate this into film by starting with a narrator, voicing over appropriate visual metaphors and short sections of my older works, as the film goes on I want to use more and more fresh footage, with less and less old stock.
I will not show my face until the start of the third act, this is a deliberate decision and i do this to allow for a stronger focus on my mind, rather than my physical body.
Shooting Decisions
I want to shoot the first two acts of this project gorilla style using my smartphone, this should provide a raw, real feeling to the whole thing, it needs to feel dirty, it needs to feel intrusive, it needs to feel like the camera is a part of events, it needs to ignore the 4th wall.
during the third act I want it to feel crisp, clean, planned and slightly clinical, I want to shoot using an EX1, diegeticly lit. I want to do this so I can contrast with the earlier sections, show the difference between my mind at work and my mind at home or at play.
I want to shoot a few 24hr time lapse shots from my window, I want to use these to express the passage of time and the changing of focus between acts.
Content Summary
each act has a theme, a focus, a series of talking points. I will express these through narration primarily, the tone, going from fragmented and metaphoric, in the first act,expressive and emotional in the second, and ending with direct and confident in the third. this will mirror and hopefully exacerbate the effects of my planned visuals.
Below is an abbreviated overview of what each act is actually about.
ACTS:
act 1 at home
act one will express how i feel and act when alone, how breathe, how i rest, how I relax and how I exist without human input.
act 2 with friends
act 2 will express how I am socially, how i exist among others outside of my work, how I express, how I relieve stress, how I distract myself, how i emote, how I relax, how I care.
act 3 at work
act three will express how I think, how I work, How I concentrate, how I compute, how I exist in action, my diligence, my intelligence and my love for what I try and do.
since the beginning of this task I've been having trouble coming up with an idea. Emotionally i dont generally feel like I, or my life are worth talking about, this emotion has been negatively effecting my creativity in this project, however after having done my research I found an interesting concept that I have been exploring since and this concept is the driving force behind my self portrait project since.
My inspiration:
during my research I discovered a very interesting collection by the artist Bryan Lewis Saunders, his collection, as described in my research post, examined how different psychoactive substances effect a persons perception of themselves. during a bout of self reflection I came up with my concept.
My concept:
my concept is related to how a person can appear to others in different situations, for instance one does not necessarily act the same way at home as they do at work, different partitions of their personality are exemplified, different sides of their psyche are in action, at work a person can be subdued, diligent and focused, while at home they can be loud, exuberant and expressive.
My execution:
my plan is to split my self portrait into three or four sections, each one focusing on a different facet of my life and how I approach it, how i express myself, how I act and how I do what i do. I want to shy away from the basic "Hi, I'm Niki, and these are my Dreams, Hobbies, life etc."
a more detailed description of what I want to do with this project can be found in the next update, "THE PLAN"
I started my research by watching and examining several different video-based self portraits,(below are my favorites) each of the videos below are described as self portraits. each one shows a different aspect of the concept, a different idea of what a video based self-portrait is.
SHORT films:
this one is fairly straight forward, it shows the life of the subject, using their living space as basis for this,through their possessions we may know them. this idea is the most similar to my first thoughts on the subject, something visually defining, a montage of different aspects to ones self.
this one is slightly more interesting, the subject uses a style like an expressionist artist, fiddling with sound and vision while still maintaining the central themes of the one above, I enjoy its experimental style, it feels like an A/V experiment, the musical experimentation effects the visual fiercely, it exhibitions something more than the last, it shows the subject's experimental attitude to work, their work spaces and even expresses their life in its short but clear scenes. All below cannot be embedded properly or at all.
in this short, the subject uses his image as seen by a camera to digitally sketch a self portrait, the camera is rolling and we get to see his mind in action as he produces the art, this visualizes his thoughts in a way that a non-motion-picture self portrait cant, it shows his comments as he works, it visualizes his creative process and allows us to see how he see's himself.
this short shows a side of the subject that an audience is unused to seeing, it shows her underneath everything, underneath social or object related facets of herself, it shows her bare, in black and white, it shows her hidden vulnerability. it expresses reality through a dark and dirty filter. it shows her cut back to the bones. this one i find interesting because it sends a realist message through a filter of unreality, its realism but also exaggerated, it makes things feel too real, too small in some ways. Self Portrait: A film by Max R. A. FEDORE
this film i enjoy because of its use of stock footage, and its narrator, i dont enjoy the tone as it seems rather morose, this is caused by the deliberately unreliable narrator's tone of voice, he seems to be producing a deep yet dark tone, his talking point is all about how our individual truths are more important than facts, he explains his life view, his personal truth and his story throughout. this film makes me stop and think about my own timeline of events, and will probably influence the style, if not tone of my own self portrait.
STILL images:
Secondly I examined a number of different still self portraits, I used numerous sources, much of this section is in relation to my fascination with the artist Bryan Lewis Saunders' collection "under the influence", the rest of this section is reserved for interesting self portraits that i found while searching. Bryan Lewis Saunders LINK to collection HERE!!
"After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of self. So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug or intoxicant and drew myself under the influence." -Bryan Lewis Saunders
This collection is interesting and a source of inspiration for me, it explores the sense of self through different filters, all of which are exterior, feelings and expressions created by the psyche while inebriated in different ways, from a purely scientific point of view it allows the audience to see the subject as seen through a mind changed by chemical introduction, from an artistic point of view it allows us to see how his sense of identity is changed by the substances taken, how different parts of his psyche leak onto the page dependent on the substance.
personally this collection made me stop and examine myself when i first looked through it , how i am sober, how i am drunk, how I represent myself in different environments, admittedly i self reflect often enough anyway, often this is unfortunate as i tend to feel a low sense of worth, HOWEVER this collection made me think of how i am in different social situations, rather than merely alone and has influenced my ideas in relation to how i want to translate my "self" onto the screen.
interestingly vague self portraits
the following images I feel represent interesting ideas through still's, they are all self portraits, but all say different things about their subjects, i found them likable and interesting in their designs.
my final piece of externalized research is in relation to interesting content, stuff that i might use in my self portrait, things like old photos and documents from my past, but also thing in relation to media that is within the public domain, stock footage to use etc, the two below are royalty free and i hope to use them as visual metaphors at some point. the documents and old photos are with my parents and will be scanned and sent to me when needed.
