For my video project I took a camera with me and filmed most of my day. I chopped up all the scenes and then decided how I would arrange them to best fit the narrative I had chosen. The theme is loosely based upon the passing of time, and secrets. The true meaning of the film is up for interpretation. As a new media experiment, I showed the finished project to a number of my friends and told them it was an avant-garde art film. I got really interesting results, some said they genuinely couldn’t follow the video, but found it to be interesting. One person said it was a story about a man whose inner beast followed him, and drove him mad. Others said it was a statement about how mankind has an animal nature that we must control but never neglect. That we have to balance the good and bad inside ourselves. Another interesting view was that, the film contains a lot of high angle shots, and closely cropped, fast skipping clips that make the viewer feel that they are observing the film in first person.
While some of these interpretations may seem far-fetched, I think the fact that this film got people thinking makes it all the more successful. At the same time, I think by calling it “avant-garde” it forces the viewer to look beyond the obvious and find a deeper meaning within the film. By doing this the viewer inherently looks within themselves for the answer, bringing out deep ceded thoughts that may not have thought they had.
Justin Macri 