28 Letters

In this short film a lesbian couple fall in love through a series of 28 letters (this amount of letters, however, is implied by both the beginning of the video and its title). The original inspiration for this film stemmed from a gif by Alex Turgeon entitled "Better Homes and Gardens Revisited". As a way to show tribute to the original piece of art the two characters form a relationship using words passed through a door - an action that imitates the motion of lines of poetry in the gif. I also wanted to show tribute to the title itself by showing imagery of both nature and the home.

The subject matter of this video holds a very special place in my heart simply because it features a lesbian couple instead of a nuclear, straight couple as society would expect. I, myself, have recently come out to many of my friends and family as bisexual; a incredibly difficult thing for me to do considering most of my family is heavily religious. Although society as a whole has made leaps and bounds forward in regards to the LGBT community, there are still people who struggle and are scrutinized for their sexual orientation. I hope that, even though it is merely a few seconds over a minute long, this video will help those who watch it to at least see the members of this community as similar to themselves and perhaps open the mind of the audience to want to better understand our perspective.   

The video above is the completed rendition of my digital media animation project. The project developed from the beginning tryptic stills, constructed in photoshop, into an animation of one of the three, constructed in photoshop as well, and, lastly, ending with the additional sound as shown above, constructed in audacity. In this project I wanted to continue with the idea of juxtaposition. In this animation there are two ideas of juxtaposition that I aimed to present. Firstly, the sounds an images are juxtaposed against one another. They seem to not quite fit, but still have a flow about them. This is perhaps due to the juxtapositions of sounds not necessarily found in nature with several naturalistic images (with the exception of the clock and the ticking). The other juxtaposition takes place with the idea of the sound itself. The items that are animated within the image are all associated with silence; a quiet butterfly, the lightly ticking clock, the voiceless rays of the sun, the gentle flow of flowers blowing in a breeze. All of these are not things we would think of as predominant sounds, so, in order to challenge this idea, I decided to focus the sounds on these "silent sounds". The sound in this video features the background noises I recorded while sat in a library, the sound of a ticking clock, a sound of breath mimicking the wind, and the sound of a pen scribbling across paper.