The exploration of evoking emotion in a gallery space has extended into my Final Media Arts project. This projected aimed to achieve this through creative story telling. ‘Smoking Gun’ was a multiscreen installation telling the stories of several counts of domestic abuse. The varying abuse stories were told through several characters, joined together through their knowing each other as friends. This makes for a connected story and gives it a greater feeling of depth. The types of abuse that are shown are physical, sexual, psychological and financial abuse. Although these are different types of abuse, they all hold similarities within each other, these are all shown on screen. Abuse such as verbal abuse and varying kinds of physical abuse, some more severe than others. Verbal abuse is a strong theme throughout, because that is where all abuse starts, through disrespect and that disrespect is verbalised.
These varying abuses have their own greatly distinctive way of being shown on screen. For the instance of physical abuse, there is the overpowering shot of the male character, beating his wife savagely, because he can not hold his temper and abuses his right to drink alcohol by becoming drunk and doing a completely inhuman thing to his partner.
In the story about sexual abuse, the male strikes his partner to make her submissive, so she does as he wants, which is not what she wants to do because she knows the outcome. She knows that after she dresses like the sexual object he views her as, he will have his way with her. This is the result, and an image is made using sound, and the viewer makes up the rest of the story through what can be heard but not seen. This shows the power that sound can have when telling a gruesome narrative; it does not need to be viewed to draw emotion and have its desired effect.
On the point of using sound to our advantage to create a mood in the psychological abuse story, we decided to use headphones to consume the audio. This is contrasted to the loud and chaotic presentation of the other stories. This is because psychological abuse is in the head and we wanted a far more personal and intimate feeling using headphones. Closeups were utilised when the male character thought about what his partner would say when he was only trying to express himself. These were shot to bring that intimidating feeling and discomfort the male character is feeling from this barrage of abuse.
Throughout the scene shot in the café, the female character lays down her assault onto her male partner. She abuses him the entire time about not being financially able. This is a savage and a difficult type of abuse to overcome, because it is generally out of the financially incapable persons’ control, as someone else is not choosing them for employment. The female’s character is not understanding of this and is being selfish. This strong character is thanks to a well-rounded script with powerful dialogue for one character and less for the other, the perfect way to contrast one character to another and raise one higher than the other.
Regarding the physical installation, we went with the advice to use carboard boxes and be outside of the gallery space. This concept was to symbolise moving on and transitioning to another place. This is a very in-depth concept and would be challenging to understand without the accompaniment of the artist statement. Personally the installation would have a different feeling if it could be in its own room, where it can be heard from outside the gallery space slightly but as you open the door, you are hit with a chaotic wall of sound that really seems like you have just entered a huge domestic situation you don’t have any input on.
With all these elements playing together, a well told story is made, all linked through the male characters’ mate ship and story told. ‘Smoking Gun’ told the stories about domestic abuse well, but we had a few minor issues with the way it is told.
Positives
The objects that worked well within ‘Smoking Gun’, was the collaboration of Fadilla and I. Fadilla brought her talent of script writing and building the story she wrote, during editing. These two strengths she had, allowed her to build the story from start to finish, the way she had understood our mutual friend’s own domestic abuse. This friend of ours, was the motivation for why we wanted to do this project. We made this project to draw attention to the topic make people feel uncomfortable and look at their own relationship, and other relationships of people.
The look which the images have, was my task, to outline the shots I wanted to get from the shoot to set a tone for the story. This was completed with two cameras to make the shoot quicker and editing flow easier. With Fadilla managing the other camera, this was achieved, and we were really pleased with the look and emotion we captured within each story.
Negatives
One of the most notable obstacles and issues about the story being told, was the availability of one of our actors. For the filming of the gathering at the bar, I had to stand in for an actor who couldn’t attend that night. After arranging days before, he didn’t show and only told us of his inability and poor excuse after the shoot was complete. This makes for a very dysfunctional looking film look as I am not in any other shots or story and looks horrible and difficult to follow the narrative. We would have liked to do it at another time, but with other actors’ availability and willingness to show up after we had arranged a first time, didn’t seem fair, so we wore the trouble that the actor gave us through telling his story and lines through another face.
The time we had allocated for shooting was also tight to reshoot that scene or other scenes which we were not entirely satisfied with. There were scenes which we wanted to add more or change slightly, such as different angles or greater acting ability. We couldn’t change due to the number of actors we could call upon because we weren’t satisfied with their performance. Regarding reshooting scenes for the sake of new angles and preproduction errors, would be to say the audio captured for majority of the scenes was not up to the highest standard. This was mostly due to the fact of borrowing equipment that did not work the way a separate external mic did. We learnt a lot about sound recording from this project, and sound recorded correctly during shooting, makes for post-production work to be far more time efficient.
Throughout my experimental Media Arts projects, I have explored the concept of film and physical installations and experimented with different ways of displaying some of my weird concepts. Most recent tasks I have completed that are related to my Final Media Arts project include ‘Flying Over the New Part of Town’ and ‘Printer in the Gallery’. These two tasks each contributed in some way to bring together the presentation of ‘Smoking Gun’.
A video experiment I produced was a two-screen projection of
drone footage flying around a new housing estate. Called ‘Flying Over the New
Part of Town’, this work brought an unusual life to ordinary ‘slow-moving’
drone footage, as with footage being projected over two screens, if one became
of little interest, the viewer could watch the second screen. Another point
which this work explored, through the footage the drone captured, was the
images being shown are not seen by many people. The footage being of the early
stages of a large-scale construction project by few people, particularly from
eyes above. The type of work this is, can be kept shaded due to a variety of
reasons, and being brought into a gallery space, let’s all viewers consume this
sight in comfort, through footage that shows everything from a height.
This same concept was brought into ‘Smoking Gun’, to bring shy but ferocious ‘domestic abuse’ into the gallery space.
A physical installation which I worked solely on, was
‘Printer in the Gallery’, which brought interaction and a physical object into
my completed works. This work was an exploration into interaction and the way
people approach an artwork. This made way for my idea, to bring a printer into
this space with a few instructions and permitting people to use the printer in
a way they have unlikely used it before. The installation worked to prompt
people to place their face onto the photocopier and do as they wanted with that
permission. This created some very unusual and disfigured works during testing,
and this led onto what more can be added to this work. That directed the final
work further, being a person’s face, with words over the top of them. These
words fit with the images of people’s faces as they look pained and
uncomfortable. When people interacted with this work and words were printed
over their image, there was a lot of genuine confusion. Interactors couldn’t
figure out how the words had come to be there, which made some people feel a
little lost after their printout which was a pleasing result to see after their
interaction. Seeing interaction with a work was interesting to see, drawing
emotion from something in the gallery space was interesting and was the most
satisfying result from this installation piece.
Getting a reaction from viewers has always been interesting to me and this followed with the domestic abuse that is the statement of ‘Smoking Gun’.
MATTHEW FAVALORO 