Self-Portrait Artist Statement

Molly's Self-Portrait Artist Statement

In my self-portrait, my brother Max and I played the popular game Pie Face. I hoped this video would show my love for spending time with family and enjoying the little things in life. It's important we live in the moment and I liked how true this video was to showing my relationship with my brother. We were competitive with each other yet having a great time. In comparison to the work my classmates produced, I felt fairly good about my piece. Alex Pauli's however, was my personal favorite. His started off very serious but then transitioned to having some comedy as well. His was different from mine in the way that his showed some planning whereas mine was very on the spot.

In this short 3 minute piece, there are several components that make the video either really good or allow for some improvement. For example, I used one consistent camera angle throughout because Max and I were in the same chairs two as we played. However, at one point towards the end, he got up to grab a paper towel and got slightly out of frame. In addition, the audio was there, but with natural noise of being outside, maybe next time I could work on finding a way to make that clearer. In contrast, something I thought looked nice was the lighting. The sun being behind us made it so that you could see what we were doing but our faces didn't become lost in the light.

Ultimately, I feel this assignment has been a comfortable start to a new year in Video Exploration with lots of room for growth. With the requirements being around 2-3 minutes in length and no editing allowed, it really made me think outside the box. One of the biggest challenges I came across was the amount of time we had to shoot. With only being given the weekend to work, I really didn't have a whole lot planned so I had to find something at home that would portray my personality in a creative way. The most important thing I learned from this was that sometimes you'll have to work under very specific conditions, sometimes making you get out of your comfort zone to produce your best work.