Dinosaurs and Dolls – Tiahne Frederic

Tiahne Frederic – Dinosaurs and Dolls from Media Factory on Vimeo.

Reflection:

Noticing and nonfiction go hand in hand. When noticing the world around us we are contextualising what we see, and we are understanding the mechanics of our everyday life. Through noticing, we remember, we learn and evolve. It is through Assignment Four where I realise that by remembering our past and reliving our memories we make sense of the world around us and all the little things that make us who we are. For example, in my piece one of my characters said that she was a creative child. This sense of creativity has developed from when she was little and now as an adolescent as she adores the visual and performing arts.

Additionally, I found that making a media piece about memories was both fiction and non-fiction. Fiction in the way that memories are often fragmented pieces of information about our past and present living and festering in our minds. And sometimes in our minds what is made up becomes our reality. I think this is definitely the case when remembering our own naïve minds and the imaginative worlds we once lived in as children. This notion I believe is heard throughout my piece, Dinosaurs and Dolls.

On the other hand, the non-fiction element of this piece are the people and what they believe their truths are. In asking my interviewees about their childhood toys, their responses are products of non-fiction. They are telling me pieces of truth about themselves, and therefore it can be seen as non-fiction. Peoples’ perceptions blur the line between what is real and what isn’t. I am intrigued by this murkiness which begs me to ask the question, “Are memories a fabrication of our reality?”

The methodology of notice includes the acts of pondering, lingering and wondering about the mechanics of the world. This sense of exploration and being sensitive is imperative to the art of noticing. These important recognitions help us to create a work of non-fiction about our own discoveries. Here, we are becoming more aware about the littlest things, like the importance of our childhood.

We can do this with our media instruments. Our camera and recording devices mark and collect artefacts that support what we notice. In this instance, I heavily relied upon interviewing and recording people’s answers to support my own curiosity of how I could visualise peoples’ memories in relation to asking them about their favourite childhood toys. For project Four I used an object as a catalyst to trigger memory and allow my interviewees to notice the feelings associated with their favourite toy. This was my tool to notice. By asking a question for this project, I aimed to experiment and collect responses that would best fulfil my own sense of wonderment in regard to the nature of noticing. By marking and collecting these responses through a media format, I am crystalizing an answer and solidifying something that we notice.

This whole semester has been full of intricate and multifaceted insights about the notion of NOTICING. Through the acts of tuning, lingering, wondering, priming, encountering, and vanishing I have come to understand the many ways that noticing can take shape and form. By making experimental media about the things we notice, and through non-fictional means, this has really opened up my mind to all the abstracted possibilities that media can be.

This semester I have also continued to develop my own distinctive stylistic hand as a media maker. I have learnt that I should not to over think or over do my media pieces. I have to create space in my pieces and allow for my own audience to ponder and understand what is in front of them. I have also learnt that I need to seek out deep responses to fulfil my own questions in relation to what I notice.  This understanding was developed through class feedback.

I liked the array of piece that were given to us throughout the semester. It really opened my mind up to all the possibilities that media is and how noticing is everywhere. I have also discovered that noticing is an innate, intimate thought, a thought that helps us to determine how we see and understand our own world.

Here, below is a screen shot of my edit for Project 4.

 

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