Shame- Memory Artefact

1. Shame- Memory Artefact By Kiren Chanchal

2. What is Memory? • Memory is the ability to record, store and revive information. Memory is specific to an individual and no two people will have the same memories as the mind is a powerful thing and can recreate memories with false information. Let’s first look at types of memory: Long term and short term. Memory can be stored and triggered through the 5 senses, and we can have informative memory, visual memory, which incorporate the senses. • Memory can be triggered through photorgraphs, videos, thoughts, smells, emotions and many others. • Memory is such a a broad topic for an artefact as we can look at an individuals memory, a passed birthday, or a mass memory, for example, the war.

3. Ideas • The initial plan was to get enough footage from the Blitz event to also do a memory artefact. Unfortunately, due to the loss of footage, this isn’t possible. But i do have quite a few ideas which I’m hoping to put into play very soon. • A mature person looking back on their life back to childhood days, could be a person reliving memories through watching films or going through a photo album. • Can possibly show a memory being triggered, for example walking passed a restaurant and smelling the bombay spices triggers a womans memory of her childhood days in india. • Could possibly pick a subject and using images/personal archive film go backwards in their lives, remembering how they used to be, final image/video would be of a baby. • A difficult one to portraybut the idea that so many only remember God in times of need, even when they initially thought they had no faith. Could possibly show a scene of someones having a terrible day,then crying out to god perhaps? Alot of development would be needed for this concept. • a girl looking at her collection of shoes, zoom in on shoes, each shoe has a different memory attatched with them. Would be the simplest concept to make, but not challenging enough.

4. Research • memory through emotion- In This is England 86. We can see the girl is remembering an event from her past, and this is shown through her expressive and exaggerated emotions which draw in the audience and allow them to empathise with the pain of her memory • Memory through triggers- Reading an old journal: The Butterfly effect. literally being taken into his memory just by remembering by reading his old diaries. The way we know we are going into his memory is through the room shaking everything changing whilst he’s sitting there • Memory through feeling- In Misfits the guy triggers a memory, through a de javou, a memory yet to be made. The way this is done is through looking into his eye and watching time forward/rewind. • South park shows displacement memory where Cartman creates his own memories to suit him better, and completely denies the facts. Whenever he goes through a new emotion, we’re taken back to his memory and see how he’s changed it to suit his own feelings and perception of himself.

5. Proposal For Memory Artefact • Title and Pitch • Title: Shame • Pitch: an experimental piece to display ones memories • Pitch • A short artefact that allows the audience to be taken into a girls memory. The audience will not understand it, but accept it as a memory as its not their own. • fiction • Experimental • 45seconds long • series of still images and short videos. Images have been drawn by myself. • Rationale • Issue is dealing with ones present, regardless of past. Being ashamed of the past, and not being able to do anything about it

6. Memory Artefact • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGRaxHhMbTw

7. Evaluation, Reflection & Conclusion • I quite like the abstract feel to this artefact, as its new to me and instead of following a smooth easy to follow story-line, I found this an invigorating challenge as I usually like structure and an obvious narration to my work. Having experimented though, although its personally a hard affect to achieve, I think I might play with this style a bit more in future as its fun and different and definitely outside my comfort zone. I’m hoping that the concept that the artefact shows memory is translated through the round iris transition which conveniently swipes from an eye. If the audience can’t tell from the transition, I had to put in text which should be more clear that the visuals in the centre of the artefact portray memory. • I wanted to achieve a similar effect as Misfits, as I said in my development and research post, unfortunately my knowledge or lack of, let me down. It would have been impressive if I could have zoomed into the iris and created a fish eye/glass memory effect. I think the round iris transition still works, so I didn’t do terribly bad. I also think I did relatively well in syncing the visuals to the audio. I had troubles with syncing in the past, but spending time on moving by a frame or two does pay off. I’m also happy with the black and white images for the memory visuals, as I feel that it translates memory better. • My first attempt to export went miserably wrong and the quality came out ridiculously poor. My second attempt the quality was fantastic, but the file came up to a 2 hundred megabytes, and I thought this was inappropriate for for a video less than 1 minute long, I managed to resolve it using a file converter however but lost masses of time and energy.