I wanted to do something a little different for my film about professional experience as I guessed a lot of people would be doing vlog style pieces. I also didn’t have many pictures of myself at work, as I’m normally the one taking the photos rather than posing for them, so thought about doing something a little more experimental.
Travelling to a work placement one morning I began thinking about how much I have grown and developed during my professional experience and realised I had been on a kind of journey from student to tentative media professional. So I decided to look at filming my physical journey to work to parallel my “journey” through work.
I used my phone to film my train journey from Coventry to Grand Central station but watching the footage back I found it wasn’t as interesting as I had hoped. So I started to think about how we all view our routine daily journeys. Do we really pay attention to the world going by outside or do we instead occupy our journey time scrolling through Instagram, catching up on Facebook or replying to emails and messages on our phones or laptops?
Right now in the town where I live many structural changes are being made. Once buildings are knocked down people often complain about places being missed, but do we ever really appreciate the architecture around us until it is gone?
This lead me to thinking about viewing my journey each day a little more clearly and trying to watch and appreciate the small changes around us.
When I view the world through the viewfinder of my camera I notice so much more beauty in every day things so decided to add an additional lens in front of my camera and revisit a previous project where I had designed my own vortograph to slightly skew my view of the world.
I added narration to the film to explain my personal journey and I hope it will inspire people to think about their own “journey’s”, both physical and personal, after watching it.
If you look closely while watching the film you can see that at some points my reflection can be seen in the train window, so despite my intention to leave my image out of the final piece it turns out I’ve managed to make a cameo appearance after all.