Self Critique

1. When I'm Alone
2. Sense of my own personal place- the world i create in my bedroom
3. My initial intention was to focus in on certain parts of my personal space that revealed different aspects of myself. In this video i am specifically focusing on an environment where one feels completely comfortable, where there are no pressures to put yourself in any particular "place", other than your own. A place where you know where everything goes and you are in control of where it belongs.
I am concentrating on one's personal living space or bedroom. The way that people keep their environment reflects on who they are.
4.i wanted to expose my tendencies to be a slightly neurotic and indecisive dreamer. I waned to try to add relatable aspects, like getting dressed and collected items to connect with the audience. The things i have are not entirely for me, but partially for the public, for guests when they visit my room to elicit another idea of who i am, by the things i own.

5. Set in a sort of "fly on the wall" perspective, I open the film with my accordion playing because it is an important part of who i am, and it is a sound one may hear through the door before entering my room, so it was a very realistic element to draw the viewer into my environment. Then a series of shots of myself, intentionally unidentified, doing other habitual things. My hand lights an incense and slipping my feet into sandals. i find myself going back to certain things, playing accordion, then going to my closet trying to decide on clothing to wear, looking up at my walls. There are empty envelopes pasted on the wall, i start to look at certain ones, because they remind me of people and places. Being a nostalgic and slightly sentimental person, that is exactly why they are hung on my wall. I glance at my encyclopedias, the maps on my wall to elicit myself day dreaming and staring off into space. Then i light incense again to try and do something productive to pull myself out of my dream world. I try listening to records, looking into my trunk full of shoes to maybe pick out a different pair of shoes. Then once i start to feel lonesome i listen to a recording of my grandfather and grandmother's voices on a cassette tape to feel some sort of comfort. I glance at my bed, so's maybe to get in it and take a nap, but i restlessly pick up the accordion instead to play a song again. Then i return to bed. The second to last shot is of the dream catcher to symbolize sleep. I close with the lit incense still burning to leave the viewer with the idea that the cycles of my normal day are never ending.

6. I discovered that there were too many ideas competing throughout the piece. The theme was not cohesive enough to really even discuss any further.

7. The strengths are that the viewer does get a sense of a person being in a place, but the shaky camera work and other technical aspects of the piece are distracting. I have a lot of different ideas to draw from, which is helpful for future work. I think it was interesting having the accordion as the main character for the piece. The shot of the shoes was interesting and mysterious because it was difficult to decipher what it was exactly.

8. The piece overall is too staged. And my shots are too long and boring. I got suggestions to use the accordion music continuously throughout the piece, and to include more mundane objects to have a different kind of balance.

9. The alligator head was kitchy but could be used in a more effective way to maybe show the misconceptions or mass produced ideas of what society or people outside of the Louisiana culture think "Creole" is. It was tough maneuvering the laptop camera to shoot things in front of me. I need to distill this film and widdle it down, create more of a focus. i need to pay attention to my use of sound and rhythm, i need some structure throughout and continuity through all the shots.



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