Doris video

I suppose it happens to most people on a course at some stage, the “what the heck am I doing this course for?” kind of moment. Perhaps more usually a significantly further distance travelled than I have achieved at this point.

I’m fairly sure at this stage that I’m not backing away from the course, more wondering how to make the course make sense for me. My tutor, on my first post-assignment tutorial, calibrated how I should approach the course, reminding me that I have already graduated and this is therefore, to some extent, a post graduate course and that, as agreed I should take much more control of the assignment briefs to develop my voice.  And so I made some decisions…

I decided to reign-in the technical frivolities in place of trying to get the formal technicalities – as much as I am in control of them at this stage – to serve what I hoped would be the narrative. I selected a text and re-wrote it to “embroider” the visual from a single actor, first person narrative on the notion of memory, to a “two-hander” reflective. The presentation would be largely a simple fixed camera position, deflecting the viewer’s attention away from the presentation (and it’s limitations) and more directly on the narrative. I didn’t seek to explain who the actors were, nor their relationship to each-other. I constructed my first film script after finding out what I imagine a lot of film scripts look like – a helpful set of course notes provided direction to that end. I planned the shots, planned the time of day, recruited the players, shot plenty of footage, safety footage and rehearsed the players. I made an edit and it did largely what I had hoped it would do.

Upon completing the edit I showed it to a couple of people and asked for critique. And it was that feedback which has made me consider what I am doing, or perhaps what I am not doing that I should consider doing in a different way.

I found plenty of justifications for my decision making, perhaps largely because the decisions I made were for certain reasons and the video seems to have largely justified those decisions. That’s not to say that the formal qualities of the video are anything but still rather stilted – clearly there is a long way to go before my skill set with video can be described as competent. However that’s not really my concern at this stage – if it were I would not be concerned.

The feedback from one student brought me rather abruptly to recognize that, just as my tutor described, I have an opportunity to develop my practice, experiment with my voice and I am, despite some improving technical and formal qualities, not doing so.

Fellow student Sarah-Jane Field suggested I look at Maya Deren’s work and looking at it I can see much of what I think my work might develop to (into). There is a lot, of course, I need to develop in core skills, the formalities of the medium, but I also need to try and free myself from self-imposed limitations – whether they are psychologically imposed or otherwise – to create work that better describes how I can describe how I feel about what it is I want to make work about.

This latest video therefore will not be developed any further, it has served as a milestone from a very short journey so far, and hopefully it will signpost more clearly the way to go.

Please contact me if you would like to view the video and I will send you a password.