Project 4: Portability – Reflection on Iteration #1
The first iteration of this project involved a number of short sketches that captured people who work on the streets of Melbourne. At this stage I hadn’t put these together into one piece as I was still considering how I would work with the content. These iterations all focused on an interview based piece where I talked with various workers about their work. An example of this is the interview with kiosk worker, Harun.
Clearly this is a documentary style piece with the subject talking to camera and interacting with his clients. Following the presentation of the other sketches which are in a similar style I decided I really wanted to make this project a more fluid and creative response to what I was seeing in the city.
As well as interviews I have been shooting additional footage to capture the feel of the city around where these people are working. I have been thinking about documentaries and the interview documentary, which this project could easily become. But I am moving away from this being so much a ‘factual’ or ‘informative’ piece to it being a piece that’s more about communicating visually and aurally what it’s like to work on the city streets.
An example of this is the work Overheated Symphony, a collaborative project remixing works submitted by women around the world. The film is directed by Sarah Turner with sound design by Annabelle Pangborn. They created a blog for the project Overheated Symphony.
This work raised questions about shared content, collaboration and authorship which I found really interesting but is slightly divergent from this subject. This writer asked:
I cannot help thinking that it is a use of collaborative energy for the sake of a single author… and somehow this disturbs me.
http://www.interactivedocumentary.net/2008/03/19/overheated-symphony/
Aside from the question of using user generated source material, I found this video a really useful ideas generator in terms of telling a story visually and will explore this in my next iteration.
sharedfragments 