My goals for my final assignment are to find the beauty in in mundane. Something as simple as a florist which is often overlooked for its aesthetics, has a beautiful process and I want to show that through storying telling. I also want to have some sort of inspirational plot for switching career paths so late with a partner and taking the risk to own a small business. I am hoping to achieve a balance between an aesthetically pleasing video that is matched with a compelling and moving story that makes the viewer interested in a seemingly normal florist from down the road.
I watched the documentary ‘Amy’ by Asif Kapadia. I have watched the film multiple times because I am a huge fan of Amy Winehouse but It’s also one of my favourite documentaries in general because of the way it was stylized. He used various elements and textures to achieve this documentary, one notably being the use of lyrics on the screen to visualize her music and the importance of her song writing. In an interview I watched of him discussing the film, he talks about intentionally keeping many of the interview’s participants out of the visuals. We would only hear their voice and story but not their face. As a result, the audience was only focused on Amy the whole time because it was her story. He achieved this by using only archive footage of her, switching lens from before she was famous and during. In the beginning all the archive footage was from close friends and family, and you felt a sense of intimacy but when she started to become famous her privacy was often dismissed and the lens switches to the paparazzi’s. I found this to be a very important and useful technique that achieved the trajectory of her rise and fall with her career and her relationship with the public. For assignment 4 I would like to take this same approach with having the focus be on his floristry and the process behind it while he tells his story in the audio. I would also like to possibly include archive photos of him from maybe he residency or time as a doctor to give some perspective of time.