When we first got the brief for our narrative module, we
were told to find an idea and stick to the initial idea that we had. I decided
to do a narrative based around my family, more specifically my Granddad. At
home my family always have Sunday diner together and it is not uncommon to
share stories about people that have passed away. As I am the youngest of my
family, there are a lot of stories I have not heard or were not able to
witness. I thought that a good idea for this module would be to film things
around different members of my families houses that they have felt were
significant enough of my Granddad’s to keep. I also decided to include images
of my Granddad and members of my family, a mixture of recent and old images as
I would also be recording my family members telling stories that they remember
of my Granddad and they would vary from recent stories to older stories. I
decided not to put these in a chronological order as I felt they would work
better that way.
One thing I liked most about my narrative video was the fact
that it was so open to interpretation. Everyone who watches it will bring their
own experiences and therefore will see it in a different way. Personally I
didn’t see it as a video that would make people sad as it is so often that my
family will tell these stories and they are most likely stories that will make
you laugh so to me this is a positive bonding experience for my family as it is
something that brings us all together. However I know a lot of families aren’t so
open about things like this so they might see my family sharing these stories
so openly as a negative thing or it could possibly bring up memories of their
own that are not necessarily pleasant for the to think about. I put a small
clip at the end of my video of everyone I interview had smiled after they had
finished telling their story, this was to try and convey to people who are
watching it that for me this is a positive video, I decided to put it at the
end so it gave people enough time to make up their own minds about how the
video made them feel before seeing how it made me feel.
It was a different experience working with my family,
obviously they were very cooperative however it felt like there was a lot of
pressure on me to get this project as perfect as I could as they all wanted to
see it and I wanted to make sure they liked it. It also felt quite strange
telling them what I needed them to do and if we had to do another take or if
they had done something slightly wrong. However I also thought it probably
helped a lot that I knew all my subjects as they probably felt more comfortable
telling these stories to me rather than telling them to a stranger which
creates a less robotic feel as they are talking about a very personal thing.
Another thing that was challenging about this module was that I had never done
filming before and I had never recorded professional quality audio before. I
decided to go to the film department to get help from one of their technicians.
He looked at my camera and talked to me about my project and told me what
microphone would be best to use, he taught me how to use it and gave me all the
equipment I needed. I had also never worked on editing a video so once all the
components for my project were filmed and recorded I used iMovie to create what
I wanted my video to look like and then asked the film technician to help me
use software that linked the audio up with my images and synced it with the
video. I would like to create more Video based projects in the future so this
module really helped me expand my knowledge of the different technologies and
software that I can use.
I found it very difficult to find artists that related to my
work. My main influence for this project was Michael David Murphy, specifically
his video ‘Success Story’.
