“Diary Film” dir. Mo Miao

 

I invited my friends to watch the exhibition with me. Before the exhibition, I was not confident about my work and was afraid of the opinions of other audiences. I’m afraid the audience will think my work is not good enough and won’t give me applause. However, after watching the exhibition, my friends gave me some encouragement and recognition. They said that my work was much better than they expected and praised my editing skills. It gave me more confidence to make more films.

I have seen many works similar to my concept. Some other students try to make diary films to record their daily life or study experience in Australia as well. This time, my production technique is also about diary films. My main inspiration came from Jonas Mekas, some daily trivial shots and the use of voice-over to reflect stories on my life. My hope for my film is to let the audience feel the poetry from my film, and the central idea that I want to convey to the audience is that in life, beyond compromise to present life, there will-as always-be the poetry and far afield. Just like John Keating said ‘We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.’

I want to convey to the audience’s optimistic attitude towards life through my works, which may have little effect, but it also shows others my own attitude and a love for life. So I made my diary film in the form of records and memories and poems.

As an extension of my film production, I would like to make more diary films in the form of records. I think keep the record of my own life is quite meaningful things, making more movies series diary and upload them to my own social platform. On the one hand, this way I can share my life story with friends and strangers and wants to convey my thoughts to others, on the other hand is to replace the paper diary of a record of my daily life, when I review the film series, hope I will feel gratified to watch what happened to me this period again.

In addition, by sharing video, I can also listen to more people’s opinions and comments, which is also an encouragement for me for my creation.

For other classmates’ work, I really like the way Nat Lauriola shot the memory part in his film “7 Minutes”. In the memory part, he deepened the echo of the voice and the soft exposure shots, as well as added multiple layers of pictures, making the characters and scenes look wobbly and blurred, which made the audience feel the same absentminded feelings of the protagonist.

And he used some special effects in this film, which made me feel very technical. His whole movie is slow and quiet, which catch audience’s emotions and feel touched. This is a fairly mature work.

Michael Tucci’s “Existential French For beginners”, my favorite work is this one. I don’t even know how to praise it. The movie’s pacing is unique but the effect is perfect. I love how did he use the still images in this film. And he created lots of animation elements in his work, this diversity of art is a big project. His work revolutionized my understanding of filmmaking. Some pieces of photos and videos across the screen made me feel a great visual impact, and he used a way of explanation which similar to news or science video, this editing technique made me feel very novel.What I feel from his works is unique, art and youth.

Through this exhibition, I felt a lot of encouragement from my friends and some interesting works of my classmates, which innovated my ideas and gave me more inspiration on how to make my future works. This exhibition has shown me that art has no boundaries. Everyone expressed and shared their own artwork in their own way. I also want to try to make more works with different styles and improve my editing and shooting ability. I also feel the team work will be a more meaningful thing, I didn’t form a team in this year’s course, so there will be a little bit not confident and hesitant during the production process. If there is an opportunity, I hope to be able to work on my project with a team next time, so can someone thinking and working together. It will make me more confident and motivated. Thanks to this course and the exhibition, I learned a lot.