Final Project

I decided to do my final project on a narrative video work called, I Just Want to be the One. The individual talks about the changes he endured over his lifetime as a youtuber and how it led to his music career now. The motive in this video was to use time as a fundamental concept to reflect on past memories and to depict the development of the character throughout his experiences. This video work is filmed with characteristics of a documentary. According to Harun Farocki’s article, On the Documentary, “documentarians want the effect of imperfection but without a demonstration of their clumsiness…at the same time, we have to prove that we have found something and recorded it without writing or staging it.” Farocki talks about how he is reluctant to tell someone to start doing something specific at command in his works and I believe that is an essential component for a documentary-like video. I tried to achieve this by directing the individual to talk about his life experiences, however as with documentaries, I wanted to keep the imperfection of the clips by using unrehearsed scripts which set the tone for an unpredictable atmosphere. Similarly, in one of his military documentary films, he talks about how he doesn’t try to surprise the audience with jerking cameras but use more subtle pan movements, fading effects or fades of sound and those are some key techniques I used in my video work as well. In Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake, the narrator speaks through an immense amount of footage, and like the character in my video work, uses the internet as a way of documenting experiences which is essentially a “wake-up call” to a reality. At the end of my video, I insert the individuals own song which I thought was the best way of not only showcasing the characters growth over time but understanding time with the growth of his music career. This showcases how the individual has mastered the entire field of sound along with the entire field of time which is the present method of writing music according to John Cage’s article, The Future of Music. The song he performs is called I Just Want to be the One which is meant to reflect the build up of his character by embracing the struggles of his past and a phrase that is reflective of the entire video.