Final Treatment

As a combination of my self portrait project and my most recent project I would like to create a video that is based on experience and my own identity. I haven’t been able to experiment with everything that final cut has to offer so I would like to make my sequences a bit more complicated. This video will be partly autobiographical because I will be reading from my journals but I also want the experience of watching it to invoke some type of emotion. I am choosing to film it outside because nature is a universal location—its not really tied to a time, place, or a particular group of people.

Style/aesthetic: My favourite shots are the free flowing ones, not to fast but move in a way that the camera gets blurry sometimes as it re-adjusts its focus. I want to have two layers of images, one still and one moving so that one feels like a closer examination of another. I want the moving shots to be an extension of the hand or thought. I want the imagery to have a particular emotion in so I am going to shoot it at dusk and dawn.

Location: There are several locations that I have been visiting over the course of this year, various fields, outlooks and forests. Places that seem removed from human impact or places that are off the beaten path. I am going to re-vist them to shoot my video at sunrise and sunset to add a melancholy tone to the imagery.

Sound: I really liked the sound of the pencil on the piece of paper from my last piece because it flowed and it was very textured. I think to make that better I want to whisper my journal writings as well as ideas that I have been living with this semester. I want it to sound like words sometimes and then just be a sound. I want the whispering to be on the fine line between knowing and not knowing what the viewer is experiencing. Here is an extraction from my journal that I could possibly read:


“Direct experience comes from nature and man interacting with each other. In this interaction, human energy gathers, is released, dammed up, frustrated and victorious. There are rhythmic beats of want ad fulfillment, pulses of doing and being withheld from doing” John Dewey

I need to approach it from all angles and I still feel like I don’t know everything and the possibilities are limitless. Ultimitely it is my decision to see what I see and to make meaning of it, but there is constant tension surrounding that because it could always change.

These experiences and interaction reflect my own identity

In absorbing the images and the emotions that are revealed in its content, something can be revealed about ones own self, in terms of personal boundries and emotional state.

That I am collapsing, yearning, caving in, surrendering, giving up, and overwrought with feeling

The spark of imagination that carries you away, or the never ending question that becomes stuck in your mind, or perhaps just the opportunity to move someone so much, as I am by Man in Window

I see it as a push and pull- a back and forth motion between knowing and just a raw emotional experience