NOTES ON PROJECT 3

I am not really satisfied with my project 3. Initially, I just shot a whole bunch of super 8 film during the break because I really wanted to try out the camera. That was a really exciting process. I have never shot film before (except for still photography). I've only shot with a video camera and the experience is fundamentally different. I think that for people who really love to make things the process of shooting something on film is so much more rewarding. When I was doing it, I guess I was imagining the best, or imagining some version of the choppy, colorful super 8 films I'd seen but I had not idea what I was going to get. And the surprise when you see a roll of film you've made is so great - it's better than any other surprise because it's something that you created.
Anyway it was really rewarding shooting the super 8 because it turned out so much better than I ever could have imagined. The colours are so beautiful and the really mundane things that I shot - like fields and the view from my car and the montreal streets looks so dream-like and anachronistic. The quality of the movement and the fact that the medium is so visible in the product - like the film grain and the imperfections- gives it such a nice aesthetic.

Anwyay so I had these two rolls of super 8 that I was so in love with and I've just had a really difficult time figuring out what to do with them. This has often been a problem for me because I really like to create imagery and my initial interest was in photography and not design and I often feel that when you add words to something it can become so literal and straightforward that it ruins it. But it didn't seem like enough to present the film on it's own.

So at the time I was reading Susan Sontag's On Photography and I had noticed some really beautiful lines in her writing (my favourite being 'a photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence' and I thought that it would be really great to do something with these words and pair them with images to try and make a really dreamy sort of unsettling instructional video of sorts. Which sounds really strange but made a lot of sense in my head!

So I did a TON of research and then I also read Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes which I thought was even more beautifully written than Susan Sontag's work and I wrote this whole script about it and recorded myself speaking and it just sounded awful. I thought it was pretentious, and it also became obvious that pulling all these quotes from these really famous authors without the context wasn't really working. I had also tried to tie it into a script of my own writing which didn't really work either.

Anyway so then I paired it down to a few quotes that I thought were working and telling a more ambiguous story. But it's hard to see what your own work really looks like sometimes and when I showed it to the class it was too fast and busy and hard to read.

So ultimately I ended up with about one tenth of my original writing (or less than that) just a few lines that don't entirely make sense together but make sense with the images. I am not really satisfied with it. I know that some of the type is still too fast. And it doesn't entirely make sense. Anyway I guess it doesn't entirely need to.

I guess I'm just really glad that I shot the Super 8 and I've been shooting more since and I know it is going to become something that I do all the time so I think that was a really great thing that came from this project. I really want to accumulate an archive of super 8 films from my life and from this time.

I think that this was a really good project for me for that reason but I am not entirely satisfied with the final results.