This week saw the development of my first story. Provided by Sheena.

This represents a life long link to Rivers, from all over the country. Sheena has grown up alongside and lived along rivers for most of her life.

A very compelling pice, Sheena goes into great detail on a range of life experiences, all have been shaped or involved rivers to some degree.

I found working with Sheena to be a very productive and enlightening experience. Fundamentally it has proven that the ideas behind Riparian, that of an emotive journey through river connections, as told through the voices of local people – would in fact work.

I was astounded at how effective and emotive such a recording meant to myself. I now felt a great sense of responsibility to ensure such moments in Sheena’s life were reproduced within the work in a way that would compliment and enhance her story.

I now saw myself not only as an FMP student but also as a custodian of local stories, ones that had to be treated as rare moments in time. This changed the nature of my FMP, and suddenly I found myself with an earnest job to do.

Firstly I had to decide what sort of visuals would work best for Sheena’s story. In the audio, she is very much reflecting on her life. This to me meant refective images.

I then decided to develop the first drift using such a mix of stills and video to create the first pice.

This first attempt is very usable, and it does help develop Sheena’s story very well. In fact, on seeing the draft, Sheena also agreed that the images did give the film a very reflective feel to it.

However, on further consideration and additional viewing of works by Kechun and Kander, I started to feel that the mix of images did not gell. It was also notable that Sheean’s film was longer than I had initially been planned.

That said I did not want to cut into the film as it felt it would brake her timeline of events and as such, lose some of its impact.

I, therefore, have decided to leave Sheena’s story as it is while I consider what additional visuals could work best.

Overall for my first FMP piece, it has been a very steep but rewarding learning curve.