Translating Observation Assignment Two
Observational Writing
Three children are sat on a table. Two boys sit together on one side, each engrossed in their own drawings. On the other side of the table sits a girl, lost in her own world, she states out loud: “beware! I’m a vampire!” Unaffected by the inattention of the world around her, she takes two red pencils and sits them under her gums so that they protrude like fangs. Evidently, she doesn’t require validation from anyone else.
There’s a man slumped at a table in the dark recess to the side of the bar. His centre of gravity is haphazardly balancing somewhere between the stool and the floor. He finishes what’s left of his seventh glass and clumsily clangs it into the rest as he puts it down. He folds his arms on the table and rests his face into them; fed up with his situation.
Assisted by her mobility aid a woman wheels onto the train carriage. Her right leg, bandaged from foot to knee, is cradled at a ninety-degree angle. It couldn’t be any more inconvenient. Her young daughter boards with her and with no seats available around them, the mother heaves herself from atop her mobility aid and allows her daughter to use it as a seat. Valuing her daughter’s comfort above her own, the woman stands by her mobility aid closely, hanging onto whatever she can support herself with.
There are at least twenty fish in this pond, at least there were at one time, we know for sure at least a couple have died, but we can’t remember how many we started with, and we don’t always see them all at once. They like to hide amongst the reeds, but when they’re hungry, and only when they’re hungry, they’ll pool together by the edge of the pond. You can do your best to count them all, but they all look so alike, you can’t be sure you’re not counting the same couple of fish over and over again.
There were three of us on each side of the dining booth sitting opposite one another. Half of which had decided to order the pizza for dinner. A tropical, a veggie delight, and a margherita. The waiter arrived with only two pizzas in hand. Through his long fringe and lip-ringed mouth he stated: “I’ve got the pizzas here.” Quickly looking around the table we asked: “Well which pizzas are they?” “How the fuck am I supposed to know” he jokes, feeling confident and comfortable in this situation, he places them in-front of the two of us seated at the end of table before walking away. It was another waiter that brought out the rest of our meals.
A medical centre is supposed to be a place of caring, this is where you go to get better, you’d have thought that the décor would at least try to resemble this sentiment. The drab white walls, the rigid furniture, and the uncomfortable silence besides the intermittent cough or uncomfortable noise from the patron across the room don’t exactly make you feel at ease. You never wanted to be there, and it would appear that they never wanted you there either.
Individual Exercise Two
In the development of my film content that would accompany the reading of Neville’s observation, I first deconstructed the key images, ideas, and elements that I believed would make for interesting visuals. Firstly, I interpreted the visuals in a very literal manner, taking a line such as: “the once white untarnished wall now has a shade of black dots constantly swerving its way from the top to the bottom floor,” and figuring a very literal visual interpretation that would accompany it. Later, I unpacked the symbolism and themes that Neville had touched on, and then went back to my initial interpretations, hoping to be able to better represent them with an abstract visual. Therefore, the earlier quoted line was visually represented by a short clip of soldiers traversing a landscape, occupying the lowest portion of the frame: the soldiers are used to represent the ants which are repeatedly described with war-like language; and the framing representing the ants descent to the bottom of the wall. To a larger degree, visuals utilising people were incorporated as substitution for ants in order to further connect the humanity and distinctly human-experiences used to describe the largely mindless lives of ants. The entirety of the film content was depicted in a 4:3 aspect ratio inside a curved frame surrounded by large black borders, the visuals presented with a black-and-white filter occasionally allowing red to be present. Neville’s observation implies that the ants’ struggles are a timeless debacle, and as such the black-and-white filter, accompanied by the polaroid frame were utilised to add a quality of age to the visuals, which allowed the modern and historical imagery to blend together to form a timeless tale. At times red was allowed to be prominent in the frame. This is because Neville specifically draws attention to the colour red in his observation when describing the bin. Furthermore, the colour red is a striking cautionary colour, which exudes danger (as does the foreboding soundtrack I created to accompany the reading), the inclusion of which adds to the dark and disturbing emotional qualities of the observation. Provided the opportunity to recreate the filming of the interview, I would be mindful of capturing some room tone at the end of the recording so that I could better enhance and cleanup the audio quality thereafter. Furthermore, I would better consider the visual backdrop accompanying Neville, hopefully finding someplace that better represented a quality of the observation.
