Out Front is a short mood piece I experimented with across 4 weeks, collecting various pieces of footage of peoples front lawns, which I believe show off various aspects of their personality. Whether its that they take the time and effort to maintain their lawn and garden, beautifying it so that it presents a hospitable and welcoming exterior. Others however, seem to almost purposefully neglect their front yard. Overgrown weeds and grass were always common, and some people just simply threw their garbage out the front of their house, with two main examples being an old water heater, and two large mounds of dirt and concrete.  I tried to find some houses with not only the extremes of “beautiful” and “neglected”, but also some more in a grey area; with some people who would perhaps mow the lawn regularly, but dont really maintain it other than that.

The film was shot across 4 days, with all the initial shots being cut and replaced with more visually interesting compositions. Its production was difficult, and I really had to consider how I would show this concept to the audience visually through my shot composition and order. I initially had voice over, which I felt was too limiting in how the audience could interpret the images being shown. I feel as though the small additional context given through the first piece of voice over was all the project needed.

I feel like I got a lot from this project. Focusing on such a niche and insignificant topic made me really try to figure out how I could convey the thoughts and emotions I had while observing and creating in interesting ways. I played around a lot with the editing of the piece, and I think it turned out well. Ideally, I would have had better music for it, but plans surrounding that fell through before the due date. Ultimately though, I’m fairly content with this project, though I feel it could have been better in a few aspects, mainly its audio, which I couldn’t do much with. Looking back, to stop the audio being as bad as it was, I should have recorded a second track of audio on my phone or recorded different audio to slot in place of the existing captured audio.