Reflecting Reflection

Thanks to this tiktok, I found out that Ours was hosting a Cinematic Mindfulness workshop and boy, did it deliver!

I’ve never participated a sound bath before. I actually didn’t even know what it was… and this event had two! It was about getting into a hypnagogic state and then moving forth and creating.

The lead facilitator, Nikita Moyer, shared that her process of experimental film is to first get the footage by following what is interesting or compelling and compile it in a folder (without planning!). Then, put it on a timeline and arrange it in a way that makes sense. At this point, it is time to decide if it needs audio or not. Finally it is time to determine what the film is about. Sometimes it has subjectivity, sometimes, it’s just a bunch of cool images together.

The direction given to us for our own films was to create through failures and mistakes. That our perception of the world is its own film and narrative we are telling ourselves.

With this in mind, and given the limited time of the day, I used the inspirations from the discussions and the sound baths to shoot some short clips in the area and then spent some time painting on clear 8mm film to create abstract animations (that was SO MUCH FUN).

Digitizing the film was a little challenging since the machine spools were not turning, so it was a great opportunity to take advantage of that failure/mistake and pull the film through the digitizer by hand, creating a cool, inconsistent, pacing.

I edited it all together using Davinci Resolve, playing a lot with the zooms, positions and overlays. The time went by too quickly and here is the result:

My interpretation of this film:
As I’ve mentioned before, I have a hard time feeling feelings if I can not pair it with logic or a framework. It has come up again in therapy where I struggle to locate an inner compass when there are so many “right” directions I can take.

This workshop was one rep for me to tap into feelings. This film is an exploration of my search. I am trying so hard to see myself, my feelings, putting it through filters to make sense of it all. Sometimes, however, the filters are more interesting, more distracting and easier to focus on than seeing myself.

Did you interpret something else in the film? I’d love to hear about it.

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