Assignment 4

Wounded

“The love that helps heal wounds”.

The struggles servicemen and women face returning home from war zones can be debilitating, but one therapeutic tool has proven to have the ability to not only help recovery but change lives.

Reflection

Studio

This semester I have really enjoyed this studio and the flexibility it has given me to experiment with various different approaches to film making. I have been able to explore different ideas and through that exploration develop and enhance skills within After Effects and other post production tools to execute my visions. The studio has also reinforced the importance of detailed preproduction work such as scripting and storyboarding.

What I gained a great deal from though was my peers. Despite the restrictions of having to move to an online environment we had very engaging discussions each week and a high level of enthusiasm. Watching my fellow students work presentations throughout the semester was incredibly beneficial for me as each one of us interpreted the briefs very differently and produced vastly different bodies of work. This gave me inspiration in areas which I hadn’t previously thought to explore and different methods with which to create things, especially considering the constraints we were all experience when going through our creation processes. I thought this studio was great, the subject matter was incredibly interesting and was a lot of fun creating work to reflect it.

Collaboration

At various point throughout the semester we worked in group environments, before we moved to distance learning there were several occasions where we would break up into groups with a variety of tasks to complete and since moving to online there has been a number of times where we have been split into breakout groups from the main video session to have discussions about topics and present work to one another. As mentioned earlier I gained a lot from my peers this semester and this is another area in which I benefited. Working in these group environments especially with the current learning format gave me an opportunity to engage with my fellow students and bounce ideas around and get there perspective on things, furthermore as a mature age student I haven’t previously had much experience with online communication and video conferencing at all and have a very different learning style to a lot of my peers though through discussion and collaboration with them I feel a great deal more confident with myself and my ability to learn under these conditions.

Production

This particular assignment was a bit of a difficult one for me as I struggled to come up with a clear concept that I felt met the brief and additionally how I would execute it with the current restrictions. My first idea was to look at the availability of clean drinking water to remote communities around the world and how the use of desalination plants could help with this issue, then resigning to the fact that it was a topic that was going to be incredibly hard to convey with the filming limitations I decided to explore wide spread solar energy as an alternative to the use of fossil fuels, and again I had great difficulty visualizing and coming up with a plan on how to represent this. At this point I unfortunately had an unrelated decline in my mental health which gave me the thought to focus on that as a global issue and began forming ideas and concepts based on my own experience as a veteran suffering from PTSD from overseas operations and what has assisted me in overcoming my conditions.

When thinking about how to execute this it was very apparent that sensitivity was the most important factor here, I simply put myself in the mindset of the audience throughout the entire process constantly asking myself, how would I react watching this, is this triggering in any way and is the subject matter broad enough as to speak to all returned servicemen and women and not alienate any. Furthermore, I did not want this to be a documentary of sort and certainly did not want it to be an advertisement which I was originally thinking of doing with the previous concepts as I felt it would have been disrespectful, I’m not really sure what it turned out to be or what you would classify it as to be honest.

This thought process had influence on some of the creative decisions I made for this project, for instance I purposefully did not show a title at the beginning because I wanted the audience to absorb the information without any preconceived notions or expectations, additionally I left my name until the end, creatively I wanted the visuals and score to grab the audience’s attention.

I wrote a script for the narrated element and storyboarded the shots. Out of all the footage I took in line with my storyboard most of them ended up on the cutting room floor. I had thought to have shots of my battle vest being put away into a trunk and my parade uniform complete with medals being stored into a wardrobe with the door being shut all to symbolize a transition or end but it just all felt too much on the nose and did not fit the tone I was intending. The footage that did end up coming together in the final work is very simple and understated, there are some long shots designed to be somewhat uncomfortable but they are in keeping with the overall message.

I was faced with some technical difficulties during the filming process one of which was horizontal banding across my interior footage. I wanted it to be shot at night and under warm light however I had two trade lamps positioned to give further fill lighting and even when adjusting my shutter speed the footage continued to have banding issues so I unfortunately was only able to use the existing lighting within the room. I also had some overexposure problems with the exterior shots however that was due to me not setting up the camera sufficiently for that day.

My feelings are ambivalent with the final product and how it’s turned out but I think it might be a case of me being too close to the subject matter.

Peer Feedback

In relation to the presentations from week 9, the students whose work I’d like to reflect on is Neville’s. Neville has chosen the same topic as I have landed on however where I have been very specific focusing on returning soldiers with mental health issues Neville is looking at the topic of mental health more broadly as an issue. I think it’s really great that he chose to do this because mental health issues are prolific within all societies and discourse around the topic definitely continues to raise awareness and remove the stigmas surrounding it. I love where he has drawn his influences from being Blade Runner 2049 and Her and how he intends on framing the relationships between those suffering from mental health issues and the artificial intelligence assigned to assist them. It will be interesting to see how he decides to portray the different element of his project especially what type of A.I. he decides on and how he conveys its interactions. I am really looking forward to seeing the final product as his previous work was quite abstract and somewhat cerebral and made for fantastic viewing.