At the culmination of a semester’s worth of observational writing and reflecting, this final video project felt very much like the conclusion of a journey. By exploring observational writing over several months, the aspects of filmic potential from each of these observations became clearer. The observation this final video was based on centred around a group of friends at a pier listening to their friend perform on the radio. The image was quite interesting but it was the sentiment at the heart of the story that had the real filmic potential; the ability of live radio to connect people from different places, tethering them together in a single moment in time.

This sentiment combined well with a filmic technique I saw in Guava Island, the short film made by Donald Glover and Hiro Murai, one of my favourite directors. It was a simple cut from one location to another, through a live radio performance and of a factory full of people listening to a small radio. Combining this intimate performance of a singer in a small radio booth with a large, industrial factory through diegetic music was really effective and was a key element I wanted to use in this video.

I thought this video turned out well, and effectively created a simple story and sentiment the audience could easily follow, which is something a few of my previous videos have struggled with. By keeping the majority of scenes to a small amount of shots, I was able to focus on the sound design, manipulating the music with convolution reverbs and other audio techniques, to place it within each of a scenarios, as well as recreating each scene sonically. The issues I ran into with this approach was finding a single, visually interesting shot to represent the scene, which wasn’t consistently interesting throughout the video. In particular the opening headphone and bathroom door shots were not visually interesting enough to justify them being the only shot for the scene. With more time and planning, these scenes would’ve been more fleshed out, potentially re-staging the scene in another location that has been set designed to increase the visual interest of the scene that would convey the mood and tone of their respective scenes. The car and final headphone scenes were noticeably more fleshed out and textured, both sonically and visually, which was a great result that I was really happy with, but also exposes the poorer scenes that occur beforehand.

Overall, I am very happy with how the video turned out and is a great experiment of exploring transitions from drastically different scenes through diegetic music, as well as exploring transitioning into different tones and attempting to create a consistent feeling between scenes, which was sometimes felt like in the transition from the car to the final headphone scene into the return of the studio. Upon reflection, with more time I believe it would’ve been possible to create a much more consistent video that maintained a high standard. If I were to recreate this video, exploring this theme and sentiment that stemmed from the original observation, I think I would extend the video to a longer short film, potentially to 10-12 minutes, and include more narrative and story elements to draw an audience in more.