In this place, at this time
This short essay film explores audio-visual ways of capturing the mobility of humans, trees and insects in a colonised landscape. This mobility has led to them coming together as a part of a place. In particular, the filmmaker and sound designer are thinking about how to show the non-human alongside the human as agents within the story. Techniques include âover the shoulder shotsâ of trees using their trunks as the âshoulderâ to capture them in relationship to each other. The use of miking people at a distance to bring in sounds of the location as well as the human voice. These are entwined together into a filmic reflection on both our ability to move around the world and how we become part of what creates a place in ways that can combine love and destruction. This film forms part of a larger research project. It contributes to findings in the exploration of filming a visual dialogue between trees and the disruption of this through absence. It also forms part of my attempts to bring people back into my frame in a way that does not let them dominate the frame. These findings are not evident in this film per se, as the film forms the initial experimentation, and they are instead explored in further work I am creating.
Briefly, over-the-shoulder shots that imply dialogue between humans can be replicated in an âover-the-trunkâ shot where focus is pulled to imply dialogue between trees. The filming of absence is not resolved in this film, and led to further experiments where it is resolved through the depiction of the absent thing as a way of noticing its absence (rather than showing it not being there). Finally, the merging of humans and non-human elements is still a work in progress.