Monochrome
For my Final Major Project for foundation I expanded on ideas I developed in the previous Game Play project where I created a series of oblique and mysterious images. The project was about my high school teacher who was murdered by a student, the imagery I used was of a building representing a school and quotes from newspaper articles about the murder. For my Final Major Project I wanted to create a similarly disrupted narrative using black and white film. Monochrome uses archival footage, original footage and stills as a well as various soundtracks to tell a story of remembrance, focusing on a young female character and the death of an industry.
For the project I started by looking at black and white photography, film and cinema. I researched artists such as John Hilliard who examined how changes to the process of printing black and white photography could affect the outcome and an audiences interpretation of the piece. This influences me to make and unclear narrative, leaving my film open to interpretation.
Within the process of creating my film for Foundation, I was heavily influenced by John Akomfrah and especially the film Nine Muses. His film is a collage of archival footage, canonical literature and severe winter landscapes. After researching into this film, I decided to explore other parallel themes rather than just focusing on the young female character, I was inspired by the shipyards in the Tyne and Wear region, which was once a booming industry that has now disappeared. Local landscapes and the vast oceans have been used to create a sense of unease and endlessness.
Though I have presented a video here, I feel the approach to montaging images, or creating layered pieces might be done with other media in future.