A Girl from Jasmijn van Houten on Vimeo.

My background is a big part of who I am. I also like foreign films, so I thought that for Project Brief Two I’d blend these two. My intention was to create a video that was a parody of/inspired by foreign, especially ‘art’ films. However, to reflect my nationality, the narration would be in Dutch.

I tried to achieve this effect in several ways. Firstly, I shot the footage in the 4:3 aspect ratio, to create a more vintage look than widescreen.

I wrote a short script for the narration and then asked my father to help me record the voice over, as he is more proficient in Dutch and his voice suited the style of narration I was trying to achieve. I wish I could have used better recording equipment to record this, but I was limited to my phone, so the audio quality wasn’t as good as I would have liked. Similarly, I also wanted a higher quality recording for the forest sounds at the end, as my phone’s microphone wasn’t able to pick up on the subtle sounds.

It was difficult to get some specific shots as I was working by myself. If I were to do it again, I’d plan my production so I’d have time to ask someone to help me.

Whilst initially I imaged the film to be in black and white, I changed it to be in colour because it looked better. Whilst this distances my project from the stereotypical ‘art’ film I was trying to imitate, I think it is still an improvement.

Since my first foray into Premiere Pro with the Haiku exercise, I already felt like I improved a lot. The overall production process of PB2 went quite smoothly. I knew what I wanted to do, I created a storyboard, got the shots I wanted, recorded the voiceover, and was able to edit it all together with relative ease. I’m a lot happier with PB2 rather than PB1, and I think this might be because I put a lot more time into planning before I actually started the exercise.