For my final project in NMA 3010, I would like to create a short film that documents a man recalling and reflecting on memories that he has of his past. This will be started by him looking over past home movies on a projector, which will be done either by playing videos on a real projector that I own or by adding in regular footage in with after effects. The footage that the man is watching will serve as a physical representation of his recollections of his positive memories, and will depict those events as they felt to him at the time they happened. As he sits observing the memories, he will begin to reflect on them outside of his memories from the projector and realize that things had not really played out as he once thought, or that he may have blocked out certain aspects of his memories that may have been painful.
One example of this that I will likely include is a set of memories the man recalls about the time he spent living in an apartment with his brother before the two were left separated for reasons that are not thoroughly explained. The footage that will play on the projector will be all of the positive memories that he had, or footage of some situation that played out. This will then be contrasted with stylistically different footage (grayscale, blurring in and out, etc.) that depict the more painful times or a slightly different version of the same footage that ends in a more negative outcome than was first depicted. Some of the clips will contrast activities that the man may have done with his brother but is now doing alone.
The idea for using a projector to represent memories was inspired by the movie Inside Out which I have seen several times and watched again recently. The general tone of my video will also be similar to that of Inside Out in that it will be intermittently melancholy and humorous as it cuts back and forth between the man’s memories and his more morose reflections on them and what they meant and continue to mean to him.