I have created a ‘shout-out’ poster to try to raise some participants that I can interview to find out their experiences of being HIV+ in Cornwall. This will hopefully give a grounding to the film as well as possibly giving me some creative ideas on how to proceed.
I need to start looking at experimental shorts in order to get some aesthetic ideas of how to go. I don’t want to throw every visual trick in the book at this; yet it still has to impress. I feel that simplicity is the key, but again it also has to be eye-catching in order to engage and get the message across. The potential audience could be a mix of the visually savvy as well as Joe Public so it has to appeal to a broad range and still be accessible. I do not want to tread the strict documentary genre, but likewise it cannot be so avant garde that it is indecipherable.
I shall collect some scraps of still & moving image along with voice and sound recordings so that I have a large library to pull together into the final piece. I am thinking of moving visual postcards rather like 8mm cine film of scenes and items that symbolise Cornwall as the rural location. Along with this I shall capture domestic vignettes to normalise and show the mundanities of day-to-day life. This could potentially be overlaid with voices and or text that speak of the harsher side of living with HIV. We have been asked to provide subtitles to any films that may be in a foreign language (this is a World Wide Project & last year had films in Spanish & French) – this makes me consider translating into Cornish as a metaphor for us not being understood as a minority.
I have to be very aware of the political implications of representing a minority in this way. I have the distinct advantage of being part of the group, but that does not mean my experiences speak for all. Initial interviews show that most people have experienced a distinct prejudice when they reveal their status & unfortunately this is predominantly from within the gay community who really should be more forgiving and better informed. There is still the image that HIV means you are unclean / dirty / contaminated. The theme this year is Undetectable = Untransmittable and I need to make sure this is the predominant message that comes across. My angle is to come from a Rural perspective to question if experiences are different to those in the Metropolis…I suspect they are the same as people do seem to be lazily ignorant at protecting their health.
These are a couple of test shots taken on my phone and then processed with an 8mm simulation app; I am aiming to get a feeling of family holiday memories that invoke an atmosphere of more innocent times before this virus started to devastate my peers. I choose this aesthetic as it represents the Family Album that we were invariably excluded from… either through ostracization by our family or because we withdrew from this ourselves; the media, after all, portrayed us in the most derogatory way with some outspoken vocalists calling for us to be quarantined at best or euthanized at worse.
I think I will definitely need more of these…some a little more obvious maybe of sea-gulls & ice-cream & fish-n-chips maybe…as well as specific identifiable places – St Ives, Penzance, Tin Mines & beaches. The vignette, colour cast, flicker & film scratches all invoke 8mm to me, but the underlying image is still a little too crisp and needs the muted tones & soft focus that illustrates cine films. There is also the wide-screen format where cine was squarer. I may have to try this in an Adobe program, but I was rather hoping the simplicity of the smartphone app might suffice.
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