Screening

The screening was fun! It was the last night for me to meet my course mate as I am graduating end of this year. So exciting, yet so lost, confused, nervous and... gloomy. An indication of a new phrase of life, an indication of ending of university's life.

So my number 1 favorite of the screening was, Melissa Toh, Louise Chang, Hui Xiong, and Ao Xu's Kaleidoscopic Views. I especially love their animated images (brain, calender image) and words in the documentary. The effects are just so amazing and it adds life into the documentary. When I talked to the girls after the screening, I got to know that the effects were done with Motion 4, a software that came with Final Cut Pro. How I wish I know that earlier so I can play around with it. Too bad uni is about to end for me...
Speaking of which, the approach they took for the documentary - with elements of 'behind the scene', was relatively entertaining. It takes the audiences away from the interview subjects for a while, give us a break before going back into the topic. Besides, their effort of going all the way to Sydney to film some part of the documentary makes it even more outstanding!

Other than Kaleidoscopic Views, I really enjoyed watching some other documentaries like Silent World by Nuraliqa Sendyalaras, Albert Satya and Jerry Wang and Banana Boat by Erni Wijaya, Deanna Adnan, Yi Cieh (Rebecca) Tien and Wen Jia (Susanna)Wu.
Silent World is all about a subject who talks using sign language. Even thought there was only one subject, I find the subject really strong and interesting. Also, it matches the theme, Language, very well. Unfortunately, it is a little too long. There are some contents that can be cut out in the middle of the documentary when she talks about her books.

As for Banana Boat , it's a documentary made on ABC, Australia Born Chinese and his life journey in his original mother tongue, Mandarin (which he's not good at) and English. It's interesting in the way this group structure the film and getting opinions from the parents and also from a friend of the main subject, who is an Australian but speaks better Mandarin than the subject. The documentary's length was pretty appropriate. As an audience, I felt like every minute of the film was brilliantly utilized. The documentary also ends with an interesting ending, where the subject sang a Chinese song and couldn't finish it due to language barrier.

Even though there were some documentaries that have bad sound, odd framing, and even out of sync sound, overall, I think it has been a great night and a good opportunity to look at others' film and pick up some good elements involved.