Assignment4B-Reflective essay -Xinyue Dai 3633457
To be honest, the first time that I heard about Girona was in the first class of this studio. After we had our imagination of Girona, I started to search this Europe city online, the information most related my life is <Game of Thrones> and a famous Korean drama <Legend of the blue sea> had both filmed in Girona, through the images of these tv shows, the first impression of Girona is kind of similar what I imagined, small city, ancient buildings, Europe atmosphere. However, this first impression has been more and more specific and clearer with our deeper conversation with the Girona group and the video they sent us. After we had the first skype with our Girona group, what they told us was those ancient buildings are just a part of Girona, which is one of the most famous areas in Girona. Then after I saw their fragments in Girona, I got more and more familiar with the city that I never been to. I learned that there is a river, named Onyar river, there are many color houses beside the river, many of them are passing the river every day to school. Furthermore, Girona is more modern than I imagined, they got trains, streets like what I have seen in Melbourne. From what I know now, Girona is a city that has a Spanish cultural atmosphere but also catching the international step.
In our final film, we use familiar and un familiar to present Melbourne that we feel familiar with and Girona that we’ve never been to. The fragments that our Girona group sent us was their memory in Girona, this is an interesting thing that what we know about Girona is based on their impression to Girona. Equally, what they know about Melbourne, has also coincided with our memory in Melbourne. Pattison (2016) stated that urban space is objective and physical and it is also subjective and psychological. It is painterly, it is diagrammatic, it is recordable and interpretable in innumerable ways and by necessity, it must always undergo change. The most of my memories of Melbourne are located in the city, the film locations like St Kilda beach, streets in the city, are the place I feel most familiar with. In St Kilda beach, I use the camera cached people sunbathing, swimming, running with friends, those are all the scenes I usually see on the beach, the role the camera played was just me, sitting on the beach and watching people. With the scene of people’s feet walking on the street was also my impression of Melbourne city, there are always many people walking fast, I had a time like to see people’s feet walking on the street, to feel their emotion, nervous, happy, sad, hasty… So, these scenes in the film are the truest connection of me and Melbourne, we also used voice-over to enhance our feeling, and explain the shots.
In the film News from Home (1979), the director uses voice over in the whole film, the audience gets information from the letter (voice-over), the scenes of the cities change by the content of the letter, some related to it some not. This setting has given me and Zarina an idea, that combines sounds (auditory) and screening (visual) is going to make the film clearer and going to convey the right feeling to the audiences.
To connect these two cities, we choose the train in two cities to capture the connection, train is a transportation tool for people to go somewhere, as a student, trains are the commuting tool between home and school for us, when we put the train scenes in to cities together, it conveys a feeling that that’s a train from Girona to Melbourne. The sound effects can be a really good tool to bring audiences into the atmosphere, such as the Spanish sounds on the streets, the Spanish music, when the first time we heard those sounds, we felt that we are in Spain, so we decided immediately to use sound effects in our film.
Contemporary social media allow people to meet and get to know each other at a distance. We can even see and get to know about cities or countries through social media that we have never been to. When I do the works of this studio, it enables me to truly experience how to get to know a city that I never heard before through social media and the video of people’s normal life in that city. This is really an unprecedented experience. However, there are some limitations hiding behind the advanced technology, and when we’re accustomed to this kind of convenient way of “knowing the world”, We gradually have a sense that we can fully understand a person or a place through social media. Indeed, the video of somewhere we see on social media must be real, but sometimes we didn’t realize it may be unilateral, or we just know a small part of the place or the person. For example, when we got the video from our Girona group members, their journey was to go to school by train, so we see the scenery of their way to school, the way of transportation they took, this is the part of Girona, but what we didn’t see is the other parts of Girona under the camera of tourists, office workers.
Reference:
Pattison, M., 2016. ‘Strife and the city: urban space and the essay film,’ Sight and Sound Magazine. https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/strife-city-urban-space-essay-film.
