3662 Project 1: Gesture

In this assignment I am looking at gesture through a nervous frame of mind, the way people touch their faces or fiddle with their hands when they are explaining something personal. For this project I interviewed two of my closest friends and I had them interview me about something deeply personal to them. I had originally intended to just cut out the audio completely, or edit it so it was unrecognizable, but in the end I decided to keep the original audio because I found that most of the hand gestures or nervous motions happened when they were thinking about what they were going to say next. This project explores the nature of sharing personal information and speaking under pressure. The camera makes itself known to the viewer as a pressured force on the person being interviewed. I had a multi-cam set up with a DSLR set up on a tripod as a static shot looking down on the person being interviewed to mimic an interrogation, and I was using my phone camera as a constantly moving close up and extreme close up. I want this to make the viewer feel as claustrophobic as the person being interviewed.

While we were being interviewed, we were putting green paint in the areas of our face that we were touching so that I could key the colour out in post and layer it over tv static. I changed the colour grading in post to give it a greenish tone that would match the uneasy feeling of an interrogation and upped the gain on the close-up cell phone camera shots to make it feel like older surveillance technology. The tv static was meant to represent technical difficulties and difficulties in thought process. As the interview goes on the person being interviewed reveals more tv static and the volume of the static increases where the sound of the tv beep maintains its consistency throughout the video even at the end, when the static stops and it changes from just static to a technical difficulties coloured screen as the interviews are ending.
My rig assignment focused on ideas of mark making and I wanted to take that theme and look at how people touch their faces when they are nervous, I personally touch my face a lot when I speak, I consider it a way of covering part of my face from the person listening to me so for this assignment I wanted it to have the opposite effect where the viewer would literally be able to see right through the person being interviewed after they touched their faces.