PROJECT 3 PORTRAIT OF ADAM HOSS AYRES 

Reflection

What stands out for me was finding, after shooting 47 minutes of footage, a theme that greatly helped to simplify the story of Adam Hoss Ayres: glass.

The beauty of his glass creations made him cry with joy but, as we discovered later, there was also a connection to great pain. He began his relationship with his stepfather with glass and ended it by trying to break glass. None of this had occurred to him before and it was a privilege to help him find that. So, the human element, finding, in a sense, closure, is the thing I like the most about this piece.

Visually, which is not always my strong suit, I think the singular framing of Adam is vibrant and colourful while motifs such as the fractured dissolves add texture and fit with unifying theme. The use of Adam’s music gives greater depth and meaning to the work, as it becomes more frenetic and louder thus matching his turbulent family life.

What was difficult was not getting distracted by other possibilities. For example, I had a quote from Adam’s website from Pablo Picasso: ‘I am constantly doing things that I can’t, that is how I do them.’ I was going to show how Hoss has expanded his craft by living this aphorism but in the end, it jarred with the unifying theme. Furthermore, making choices about found footage was perhaps the most perplexing of all: what was copyrighted, what was not, what I could use and could not. It was a conundrum. Fortunately, I found footage from a Roger Corman film which, though comically, extrapolated on Adam’s broken childhood.

Next time, I might experiment with more visual elements, perhaps a more disjointed style, as I think this piece is somewhat conventional. I also discovered a website (http://nofilmschool.com/2014/08/what-i-learned-after-interviews-first-documentary) about how to formulate questions like avoiding closed questions or getting the subject to repeat the question in their answer. These tools are just some of things I’ve learnt in expanding my practice.