User:Thalia de Jong/R,W&RM

Assignments

Descriprion of previous projects / Assignment 1

A MAN OF MYSTERY, 2012
A Man Of Mystery is a film that I made for fashion designer Mevan Kaluarachchi. It is a kind of teaser, since it's very short and shows very little. The film is in black and white and portrays a young man standing against a white background in close ups and medium shots. You never get to see all of him though. As the camera slides past his sleek blond hair and jawline, you wonder what the shape of his nose is, the look in his eyes. When he stands with his back towards the camera, a single tone sounds again. He turns his head and reveals nothing, turning back just as the shapes of his face start to appear.

As the camera slowly skims across his features, what does show are the details in his clothes. The button on his crisp white shirt, the seams on his black dinner jacket. Because Mevan Kaluarachhi designs such minimal pieces, this is where his beautifully different style shines through. The details are shown close up, making even the weaving of the textile visible. I've tried to trick the viewer into paying attention to these things, relying on our natural talent for being nosy. By tauntingly not showing the models face, the viewer will pay attention to whatever else ís there, hoping to catch a glimpse of this mystery man.

I am quite pleased with the result of this teaser and it's impeccable look. The perfectionist in me had a blast polishing these scenes. This was my first time filming for a fashion designer and we got along really well. And after two days of endlessly stressing the model to make the same tedious movements over and over, he did not seem to hate me either. That surprised me, really. I hope to be making a lot more of these fashion films in the future and am happy that now I have made my first and not even a bad one. And when I make a second fashion flick, I will know that I have to make more shots than I intend to use. For A Man Of Mystery, I had very little material to choose from. It was enough, but barely and it would have been nice to be able to try out different things in editing. I miss a full shot of the outfits and even though the films concept was about concealing, it would have been nice to show mister Kaluarachhi a bit more of what he makes.

FLUFFY OBSESSION, 2011
Fluffy Obsession is a series of three video portraits of Persian showcats and their breeders. Each video presents a different cat, put on display before a studio backdrop and made to sit still and look pretty in front of the camera. The owners are not in the spotlight as much as their beloved breedings, but they are very present: you see their hands holding the cat and pushing it into the frame, hear their voices sweet talking it into cooperating. Each portrait is displayed within a silk rosette, it's ribbons softly fluttering to an artificial breeze. The colors are toothachey sweet, the music is subliminally carefree.

These moving portraits are directly inspired by  photographs that can be found on cattery websites. I find them fascinating, because the cats in these photos always look so unreal. Their eyes too big, their  fur far too fluffy. And where cats are naturally quite characteristic, here they just sit and pose, like dolls. So who are the people that put them there and what drives them to do so? By filming 'the making of' a cat portrait, the breeder becomes part of the image, showing us how a pedigree cat is more than a pet: it's an artistic expression. 

Looking back on this project now, a year and a half after I graduated with it, I can finally see these videos the way I intended them. They are peculiar and special and they display a kind of irony that I love. At my graduation show, a lot of people started smiling when they saw the project. They were mostly my kind of kids, who look for design to entertain and not necessarily educate them. These portraits show part of a subculture that could easily be ridiculed, but I think I've found a nice balance between showing the beautiful and bizarre.

That being said, this was the hardest project that I've ever worked on. Because it was part of my graduation, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make it the most meaningful work I ever made. In trying to explain my fascination over and over to teachers that did not really understand it, I sort of lost the love for it. I no longer trusted my own instincts and started to adjust my work to their expectations. In the end, after receiving generic grades for a generic approach of something that was once wonderful to me, I did manage to turn it back into a project that is my own. I stripped it down to what I initially believed would be interesting and left out over explanatory stories about the owners and their personal motivations. I'm so happy I did that!

On a more technical note: my sound recordings were horrifying. Audio is not my thing and these days I always ask someone else to look after that for me.

COMMON TRAITS
What these two projects have in common is my obvious striving for a 'clean' look. I always think about every detail of what I want to film, so that there's never anything on the screen that I did not want to be shown. Constructing the environment that I am filming has a sort of calming effect on me and allows me to tell a story without any distractions. Also, I really strive for my work to be 'pretty', because I truly believe that the looks will be the first thing to sell it to my audience. What follows very closely of course is the concept, but I feel like you can only do that justice if you make your work esthetically appealing in the first place.