Project Brief 4: WIP 2

After writing my previous WIP post, I shifted my focus (somewhat), deciding to instead explore the world of ‘maker spaces’ – communal/collaborative workshops in which individuals can gather and work on a range of predominantly handcrafted projects.

I began planning an interview-driven investigative documentary piece, with the intention of further exploring the ideas of handcrafted practices that we touched upon in our neon glass-bending documentary. I also wanted to try and represent the collaborative spirit that these maker environments seem to foster in order to try and understand what draws individual makers towards these shared workshop spaces.

ANYWAYS…

Thanks to a very poorly timed five day bout of food poisoning/gastro/stomach bugginess, my plans to set up interviews and visits to the maker spaces I’d found had to be put on hold. By the time I’d recovered I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to shoot and edit everything in time, so I again decided to shift focus.

Looking back at some of the other exercises we’d completed throughout the semester I came upon the work we did during our home video/photo week, as well as the more recent Super 8 class exercise. While reviewing some of my family’s home videos and a collection of Super 8 clips online, I decided that I wanted to return to an idea I had earlier in the semester – one which looks into nostalgia, and the reproduction of memory through photographic/video documentation.

The raw, more tangible nature of analogue photography and film is something that began interesting me in the second half of 2016, and is partially what led me to selecting the Old’s Cool studio. While travelling I experimented with some analogue photography, and I think there’s definitely a unique quality to the images. Ideally I’d like to shoot a video piece using an analogue film camera, however logistically I think that’ll have to be a project for another time.

Using a DSLR (and perhaps snippets of my family’s home videos) I now plan to create a piece which embraces some of the the aesthetics and principles of Super 8, and analogue filmmaking. I’m in the process of setting up my camera to shoot with a Super 8 format in mind and soon plan to conduct a few experiments to test some of the Super 8 effects I’ve found online.

Recreating the Super 8 aesthetic will be an interesting visual experiment, and I hope that by blending new digital technologies with the principles of analogue filmmaking I’ll be able to create a visually intriguing and engaging video piece.

I’m currently leaning towards the creation of a observational, documentary piece – set either within my family home or the Melbourne CBD. Through the piece I’ll attempt to discuss and explore the notion that we record video and take photos with the intention of constructing memory – shooting for a future presentation of our lives.

Perhaps I’ll collect audio recordings of various memories (from friends and/or family) and then set out to shoot video in an attempt to match and construct a visual representation of those audio memories.

I’m disappointed that my investigation into ‘Maker Spaces’ had to be put on hold, however I do think I’ll return to the idea in the future. Shifting focus areas will also allow me to work with some less familiar concepts to round off the semester – as I feel my MakerSpace idea would have been thematically quite similar to our Neon Glass documentary.

[SUPER 8 TESTS]

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