Condensed Evaluation

Creative Essay Evaluation

Through our research, we discovered that some synaesthetes express themselves through painting, which we believed would make an interesting subject area for our moving image piece. After some idea development, we decided to find some actors to paint us an image as we filmed them ‘reacting’ to a piece of music to represent the process that a synaesthete would go through. However, doing this did not feel as though we were creating an authentic, innovative piece of film, so we decided to be ambitious, going a step further and finding real synaesthetes to feature. Using actual synaesthetes gave the piece a much more authentic feel, and helped us to better achieve what we originally set out to do – to highlight the individuality of the synaesthetic experience. In addition, this also increased the enjoyment of the film making process for us as a group, as we felt a stronger connection to the topic and an excitement to see the results of our experiment.

One aspect that we feel could be improved in our piece was the diegetic audio. We used a Zoom mic to record our audio, but noticed quite a lot of background noise, which we luckily managed to reduce in post. After reviewing our audio from Millie’s interview we were a lot more careful when recording Tim’s audio the following week. In retrospect, we should have used a boom pole to record our audio and maybe done a few more takes so we had more audio to work with.

Another issue that we had was matching the colours of the shots taken on Shantel’s camera to Kieran’s. Although we ensured to keep the white balance and general camera settings indentical, using different apertures and ISO’s caused issues matching exposures within shots. However, this is something that we could fix in post. The process of doing test shoots prior to this enabled us to create a more refined final product, by allowing us to amend issues and create more informed decisions, such as using a clean-looking, white background rather than coloured gels to provide a focus on the art produced.

Overall we feel our project has achieved what we intended it to and it is effective in providing an insight into the phenomenon of sound-colour synaesthesia.