The conception of “Botox Parties”

(by Tin)

Visual Anthropology and - wow - my first blog ever. Tighten your seatbelts. Your crew: Ryan, Eddie, and myself - Tin. What are we up to? What have we done?

We defined a filming project, and we finished two Missions (assignments).

Got a green light to work on “Botox Party”, a film on methods of beautification now in fashion, covering the invasiveness of some procedures and the boldness of the participants. In two meetings Ryan, Eddie and I defined our vision of the project. In the class presentation, after we listed (so many) ways to approach this topic Professor Schindler asked us to tighten the scope of our interest. Zoom in, focus.

The first Mission, a short film edited “in the camera”, about two guys clashing their interests in the street, acted and filmed by Ryan and me, turned to be a challenge of storytelling continuity. It was surprisingly hard without preemptive storyboarding. “Editing in the camera” turned to be “editing in the head”, that’s our heads in the street running, filming and spinning the story. End result: our audiences get it - we did good. Ryan is an excellent cameraman and a great guy to work with.

Then unsynchronicity and sickness stroke our group and we crashed with a late delivery of our second Mission - a sound recording; then couldn’t get our heads right to do it the following week; so eventually I dared to take a camera and record a moment of some interest at an unconventional location. The transcript of the conversations reads funny to me, will the class be amused? Nothing is perfect with that sound yet I like it, it feels real.

The lack of synchronicity in our group was called upon by Professor Schindler who had a briefing with three of us to establish communication protocols and scheduling.