Mog

When I look back over at everything we’ve done in integrated media this year I think, ‘damn its been a long year’.

I don’t mean this in a bad way, not at all, but we just seemed to have covered so many different things ranging from lumieres to mash ups to experimenting in eZedia. Its been a packed twelve weeks or so. So now looking back over what i’ve created this semester, what I have to show for myself - what do I think?

When it comes to my videos i’m reasonably happy with the way they turned out. As i said in part one of The Ride when I began thinking of how to approach the videos for my manifesto I was pretty stumped there was simply so many ways I could possibly take it. This then could be seen as one of the problems with my manifesto which arose almost instantly, maybe it was too vague? The whole point of mine was too give people free reign over what they wanted to create but giving them light constraints to bounce their ideas off and work from, kind of like drawing an outline of an illustration for someone else to color in and if they choose to stay within the lines or get creative and break out of the box it is up to them. So for my own approach I just went back to basics and got at the heart of what vernacular video truly is for me, my own everyday life, and selected a few fragments of this which i thought would translate well and challenge me in portraying that through my constraints. I believe the videos I made reflect the propositions in my manifesto well as each conforms to a sense of video aesthetic design, using the principles and ideas brought to us by film and photography and applying them to a medium which normally wouldn’t bother with them. For my manifesto and thus for my videos it was not so much the importance of the content as such but the way it was being said. The emphasis as I wrote in the manifesto on directorial intent, which i think is something which comes across in the videos. The process of making these did change my mind slightly on a few aspects of my manifesto especially when it comes down to the medium of the camera and how we interact with our surroundings. Being forced to use a different camera than i originally planned made me rethink a lot of my preformed conceptions on how to shoot these kind of videos and what can be told in such a low quality medium which is something that didn’t come too easy for me as I’m used to having massive HD video canvases to work with. Scaling yourself down and learning to achieve the look your after, going from such high quality practice to super low end can be a challenge but is something i think was ultimately rewarding. Then just experimenting outside of the constraints of a tripod really allowed me so explore ways in which a camera can be used creatively. Initially i was skeptical about my “emancipate yourself from the tripod” proposition as so much of the aesthetic quality of what my manifesto was trying to emulate from film comes from the use of the tripod and to bolding suggest to throw it away was a risky step, but after making the videos it was definitely worth it and a necessary constraint. Working outside of the tripods creative box, being able to do things like tape the camera to a handlebar, or hold it with one hand inches from the floor while speeding down a backstreet, yes might have been slightly risky attempts themselves but created shots which if i had been limited to the steady, traditional limitations of a tripod would have never gotten. There isn’t really much i’d change on my manifesto now that i’ve gone through making my own videos, the few small changes i made were to do with the camera, but other than that i think the propositions in it stayed true and worked throughout my videos and were solid, for me this process has been more adapting myself and my own practices to the manifesto and reach out of my comfort zone than altering and modifying the manifesto to suite me - which i think is a good thing as its allowed me to grow as a media producer on a much greater level. This of course is what it comes down to at the end of the day, how the project relates back to our own professional media practice and the implications this has on how we approach our work.

[From Portfolio Reflection]