Performance

Editing Alex's footage, I've found individual variation contributes vastly to the scope of this project. Perhaps due in part to her having taken acting classes, Alex, whether consciously or subconsciously, treated her role in the project as something of a performance - in stark contrast to Sean's preferred realist, documentary approach. While Sean forced himself, as he himself said, to behave as honestly to his own sense of normal behaviour as possible, Alex was, in the words of another viewer, very careful. She had never explicitly described the direction she wanted to take the project in, even on the day quite eager to leave everything to chance.

In a sense, this affects the variety of engagement between herself and the viewer, offering more of a challenge in her handling of chance and taking a more active role in negotiating the camera. She chooses, on several occasions, to deliberately show self-consciousness, even describing it. She also asked me questions as often as I asked her, bringing my own life beyond the camera and the project into the fold and introducing a quality of self-reflexivity to the work, as well as a further challenge presented to me during the editing stage.

Sean had conventions in mind, and to him rules governed, or at least regulated, the use of a camera in any setting in order to produce a desired output. Alex's experience as an actor, however, encouraged her to focus less on the rules of being filmed and more on her own subjectivity and its digital decription. I can only imagine that I would find another entirely unique angle, and therein another creative challenge, were I able to film another individual. But the technical creative challenge of physically filming somebody for an extended period of time has been mostly resolved - I understand the prerequisites, the commitment needed and how art can be formed from it. If I were to film people in the few it may well involve further segmentation and focus on the subject and their relationship with the camera and their environment, as well as with themselves and other people.