For the object story project, I teamed up with Jack and Yve. Initially, I attracted to Jack’s story about his box–how it could be perceived as something different if seen from another perspective. I immediately thought of Issey Miyake’s origami pieces and Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett.
For the project, I am thinking of making something based on the psychology of shape and colour. But Jack and I came to the conclusion that it would be quite difficult to execute. He also wanted to highlight the philosophy behind the box, and not the box itself. Yve then came into the group and added her own object story: illusion, a dream and reality, a concept of betrayal. With a mix of abstract ideas, we tried to search for common ground.
The starting point came from me. I realized when our class present their object, the object itself became something of identity and broke my prejudices about them. Later my flatmates did a room tour and some of their room looked completely different than I anticipated.
This intrigued a question on my mind: if one stripped bare, would we be able to identify them? How important is an object to identity? I found a photographer from China, Huang Qingjun, who has been photographing Chinese families with their household possessions in front of their house. It’s interesting to see how objects can differentiate one with another and even tell others about their social status and financial condition.
Huang Qingjun’s “Family Stuff”
Based on my idea, we explored some possibilities for the outcome:
After a lot of considerations, we chose to present a video about prejudice. How you perceived someone’s outer self or their “ephemeral self”, and how you perceived them when you see their objects in their most private space: bedroom. Reaching this final concept was quite a challenge for the three of us since we all had a lot of ideas, but we were confused about putting it out there. The three of us speak different languages and English is not our mother tongue. Even on the shooting day, we had a brief discussion on how the video would turn out. So we decided to get a lot of footages and compromised when we edit the video afterwards.
The shoot for our object story took place at The Costume Store, an accommodation own by UAL. Jack recorded the video, while Yve and I directed the talent and set the room. The muses, Sophie and Timami, helped us with the styling and makeup. We took a lot of footages, including the detail of the objects.
The shoot went smoothly, and we went straight to editing the day after. Jack contributed his ideas of how the output would be, while Yve and I edited the video separately, but with similar editing. We got inspired by one of the films showed by Vicky in the class (I can’t remember the title, I’ve been searching for it on Youtube but I can’t find it) about a man who brings out women from behind his umbrella. The technical way of cutting the clip, put another clip, and back to the first clip to create an element of surprise. We put moody/ ambience sound to better enhance the scene. I found a site called epidemicsound.com that has a lot of cool sound effects to use for free.
The last thing we do is colouring the video. We agreed on colouring the videos in a different colour to emphasize each persona. We also added the credits as it is important to mention all the people involved in the creation.