Media 2: Specific to Site project 1

Photos

During renovations some of my house was rebuilt and refurnished. In my opinion, although rebuilding can be necessary when your house is near ruins, it also feels like you commit to knocking down the memories you have grown with and worn into the house. Yes it may not look the prettiest, but every scratch and hole, every chip and flicker adds character, life and story to the houses we live in. Therefore I found certain sadness in searching for memories that used to be evident with the walls floors and ceilings of the house, but no longer existed. Instead were only those conventional forms of memories such as photos and souvenirs and other collected items.
Certain rooms however do bring me confront in the house, since they are the ones that have been unaltered. Two of these include my bedroom and the garage. The garage is a nostalgic place for me to visit as it stores all the bits and bobs from our childhood or what my father never got round to throwing out during renovations. Old and worn boogie boards to boxes and boxes of things such as jewellery made out of pasta from when I was only tiny.
I wanted to capture the sterile nature of the house and how empty it can often feel in some of its open and cold spaces. I also wanted to look at how, because it is a newish house it has several modern appliances that run throughout the day. So although the house can be very quiet it is not uncommon to hear mechanical type noises, which aren’t super comforting or warm sounding.
What I realised during this assignment is that mess adds life, and that a bit of mess now and then isn’t bad because it shows that people are actively living in the house. As someone said in class its not so much where you live but who you live with, and its nice coming home to a bit of a mess to let you your mum or dad was only just there.
I took 2 photos of the kitchen- one with evidence of cooking and one spotless and stainless. Comparing the two really drove my idea that a house is for living in. one other thing brings comfort in my somewhat foreign house, is its sunlight. The sun fills our house creating all kids of shadows and patterns. To me this is symbolic of life itself and almost another family member, just as we come and go, the sunrays do too.

Sounds

My sounds are isolated and have minimum background noise running through them, other then the appliance itself. This is because in my house people are constantly coming and leaving and usually there isn’t more then 2 people in the house at once. So as you can imagine it isn’t the loudest household ever existing. Because my overall theme or feel for the project was to convey a sort of empty, man-made feel I chose to record modern appliances that are very artificial. I want to stress that I am not trying to represent an artificial family but rather an unnatural house hold since it is new and still new memories to be made within its walls. I like to look at it like a pair of shoes you aren’t comfy in them until you’ve worn them in.

Film

I found the film the most difficult section, or at least the section that least fit with the overall feel of my project. This was because I had the audio for sound representation and photos for the visual. Therefore I didn’t necessarily need more visuals to illustrate my over idea. Nevertheless I drew my focus towards bleak and colourless footage, or to capture the sterile or emptiness of my house.

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