I struggled to come up with something for this. I tried multiple different things and was never particularly happy with the outcome. Below is one of four different experiments that I took and edited out. I was happy with aesthetically most, but it doesn’t exactly line up with my made documentary. But, it does use one of my favourite film making tools, which is getting close and changing the viewers perspective. In my feedback I was suggested thinking about the perspective of my story, is it mine? Analiese’s story? Or can I try to do it from the perspective of the ocean or fish?

Which kind of spawned this idea.

I grabbed my phone (using the camera) and went out into my courtyard. I crouched down low and close and started snapping pictures constantly as I followed a path from what I put as the perspective of a bug. I wanted to start away from the vines, for juxtaposition and also to provide a little context. This took a few takes to try and get it as clean as possible, the photos are actually larger than what we see and I kind of played around with scale and positioning to make it follow along much smoother. There are around 6 photos per second of footage here, so I ended up taking around 200 photos (multiple times) and chopped out a bit at the start and finish.

I wanted it to have a bit of a stop motion cartoony vibe but found it was coming off a bit more choppy if I was using fewer photos per second or larger jumps between snaps.

I also wanted to try and get closer and further into the vines, because that was the original idea to fully replicate the perspective of a bug, surely he’d go into the vines not just waver around the outside. But it was quite difficult to steady the photo path once I get my hand in there. Hence landing on multiple takes and giving up. I didn’t manipulate the vines or anything, but for future ideas maybe I would go in and make sure there was room for me to get my arm in there and solidify the footage that I wanted.