Creative Media Practice Project Evaluation

The Creative Media Practice module has been an interesting and enjoyable module to explore. With the brief being open to interpret and create any work that could fit into experimental film, originally it was quite difficult to come up with an original concept, however it opened up many possibilities in terms of the approach that we decided to take. I wanted to challenge myself with this project, and from an early on stage the idea of something internal within the mind was a concept that I felt inspired to explore and that appealed to me, as opposed to choosing to follow the route of recreating the sense of a physical place.

With this early idea in mind, the concept of exploring the mind through sound and film seemed largely broad, and it felt quite challenging to condense the ideas that the group had into one simplified idea. I have found that the research blog has been an incredibly useful element to this module, as this is where I have collected many of my ideas in one space, and it has helped me to develop the concept at a progressive pace and keep a record throughout the creative process of what has worked well and which ideas are consistent throughout any changes we chose to make.

Working alongside Sarah for this project, I have found that although we have previously worked on film work together, this project in particular has made us aware that a lot of our ideas are similar and we worked strongly together as a team throughout the different stages of the project. I found that holding regular group meetings in between seminars and spending a lot of time together in the locations that we intended to film in before recording to be particularly useful. This was especially the case during the times when we were struggling, and when the project felt a bit disorganised in terms of attempting to fit the film and audio content that we had gathered into our original concept. 

 As memory seems such a broad topic to cover, we originally decided we would like to explore the concept of showing the scene which occurs during the last few moments of a life. When we went out and recorded some rough audio, we found that by listening back to it, it reminded us of a journey, and several different aspects to a person’s life. This was what then inspired us to work further upon the idea of a series of memories flashing before a person’s eyes. At this stage, when we were paying attention to focusing our ideas on the audio side to the project, this seemed like a strong concept to explore, as it was open to many possibilities and the audio that we needed could be collected in easily accessible and every day locations. However, after we had edited a very rough version of this together into a sequence for the rough cut crit session we had, we felt like the concept was not refined enough, and that our concept would not come across strongly to listeners. The feedback we received during this session was useful, as although we were correct in assuming members of the audience were unlikely to understand our concept from hearing the audio as a standalone piece, some of the comments gave us inspiration to slightly adapt our idea and move forward with the project. I think the main problem with this was that we had been a bit over ambitious with developing the concept, and could in fact have just used the theme of memory as a whole from the beginning, instead of trying to cram too much into the life flashing before your eyes style of sequence. The original idea felt overcomplicated due to the fact we had so many different ideas that we felt a bit lost with what we were actually gathering footage and audio wise. However, after re reading the brief, and taking into consideration the three minute restricted running length, we thought about what we could do to turn the project around; the content for a simpler concept that would be achievable within the remaining time and the next stages to go from this point onwards. Although this was not ideal, we managed to work effectively as a production team to sort this out reasonably quickly and soon came up with a concept that we were both happy with and was still manageable to achieve within the remaining time outlined on the production schedule.

I feel that our ability to work well as a team and manage our time worked to our advantage really positively during this project, as we were both able to problem solve effectively and come up with a concept which we felt comfortable with producing and that we found enjoyable to explore. The final concept for our ‘sense of place’ project was decided upon; to show a series of memories within a lifetime through the eyes of a person who is experiencing progressive memory loss. We felt that this improved concept fit more strongly into the theme ‘sense of place’, with the place being the mind and the main category of approach that it falls under being non linear, as the memories shown are sometimes in a non chronological order. However, the project does cross over into the pure abstraction approach to some extent, as we chose to have a particular emphasis on experimenting with adapting the focus on the camera within our film to create meaning linked with memory loss. We also chose to experiment with lighting the further the film progresses, to work alongside the out of focus shots to lower the tone of the piece.

The influences for this concept came from originally doing a lot of in depth research into already existing experimental short films, and then narrowing this down to a few which particularly stood out to me. I liked the concept of a journey through the mind from an early stage in the module, as it feels like quite a personal concept to explore and is something that I feel can actually be hard to show realistically through film. The idea of exploring memory loss within the piece appealed to us as the project progressed, as we began to think about the range of possibilities available for us to explore both technically and creatively within this developed concept. We felt more positive and inspired by this concept, and spent a lot of time planning and experimenting with how this concept could visually be achieved by exploration with technical choices in terms of camera and sound. An idea that was agreed on early on was our choice to use focus pulls and explore different lit situations within this to portray vaguer memories, which we feel worked well and came across very strongly towards the end of our film in particular. I feel that this helps to add perspective from the subject’s point of view and intended for this to connect with the viewer and change the tone of the film to quite upsetting within a short amount of time. I also feel that the speed in which the film changes tone works quite successfully alongside the narrative, which is intended to represent that a memory can be lost very quickly and I wanted to show this sudden change  within the visual build up and progression of our project. One of the key connections we established that we wanted to go ahead with during the production process was time and memory and how the two can be connected visually, as well as with audio. With this in mind, this was the main reason for our decision to include the frame shots, as well as the ongoing background track of the clock ticking throughout the film alongside the other visuals, sounds and voiceover narration.

The addition of voiceover was an idea which we were initially unsure about. After gaining feedback from a number of different viewers perspectives, we received mixed feelings about whether this aided in making the film seem believable or not. The original intention for this was that it would create an extra layer for our piece, and not guide the viewer away from the visuals as such, but add more of a personal perspective on to the piece.  We didn’t want to include a full voiceover, and instead focused on a few repeated words and key sentences which would represent the fragments of memory that could be remembered. After listening again and taking on board the feedback given, if this project was to be approached again the voiceover may have to be reconsidered.

 

In terms of the finished piece of work, there are definite strengths of the piece. Some of our intentions do come across to viewers, as demonstrated in the mock crit. feedback session. The choice to include focusing as a main area to explore works well to keep the tone of the piece quite upsetting, alongside our choice to hold on to shots for slightly longer than usual. Within this, we aspired to achieve a believable sequence that at times may feel quite real to the viewer.  The decision to include a voiceover was a weaker area within this which we did not intend to originally include, as we weren’t keen on the idea of the viewer being driven by the voiceover as opposed to the carefully planned out and focused visuals.

 

 

 

 

Our intention for the piece is to make the audience feel as if they are being taken on a journey and given an insight into fragments of memory from the subject's perspective. The piece is purposefully in non- chronological order at times and our intention with this was for the audience to view it as quite moving. In terms of the intended audience, we wanted to explore quite a personal topic, and show the memory loss process through film from the perspective of the subject as opposed to someone who might not necessarily understand it from the outside. We aspired to take a less informative approach and instead more of a reflective and experimental one. Within the experimental nature of the film, we would like to see what different members of the audience take away from this piece and how they perceive it and connect with it on a personal level.

The process of creating the piece of work has been enjoyable. I feel like the project has greatly improved throughout the process and believe our team work and motivation has been a key strength during this project.

In terms of weaknesses, I found condensing my own ideas down to be quite difficult at times, as I was passionate about the idea and had lots of ideas at the same time. For the final project, I was responsible for filming and editing the video content, whilst Sarah took on the role of recording and editing the audio content.

The strengths of this project were our organisation and the efforts that we put into experimenting with new ideas together from an early on stage in order to develop our concept. As a team, we managed to use events outside of the course as opportunities to create our film and audio piece. For example, some of the sounds we include, such as the childhood scenes and the party scene are genuine scenes and not acted, which is intended to make the piece seem more real. If a similar project brief was to be approached in the future, an improvement would be to show our work more openly to people and on a more regular basis to gain further feedback as this is something we both struggled with at times.

 

Overall, I have very much enjoyed this module and learnt a lot during the creative process. I have also identified personal strengths and weaknesses of my approach to a creative brief, which have been useful to know and can be applied to other projects and film work.