When I first thought about memory and the idea of portraying that through space/physical settings, I wanted to do something personal like my house. When I heard that the story can be told from any object, I thought about a few ideas:
- Being a cereal box at the lowest shelf of the supermarket (interesting to see the legs of people: a child’s, a woman’s etc.)
- Telling in the POV of a memory itself: a girl has another ‘copy’ of herself which is her memories and she pushes her memories away (for some reason: don’t want to remember her heartbreak, wants to let go of someone etc.) but embraces her (memories her) to be part of herself in the end
- Being a peephole/door
- Use apples to describe a relationship that derails and ends up badly, with the girl concluding that “you were the apple of my eye” (punnnnnn)
I decided to use the peephole as I thought it would be interesting to say a story from the pov of an inanimate object. Furthermore, when I thought of memories as a theme, I came to want to do on the idea of letting go of someone and realised that this story is always told either from the pov of the person being left behind or the pov of the person leaving. I realised that by being a peephole and using the door as a metaphor for the threshold between reality and memories would be quite powerful. The threshold is between reality and memories such that once someone crosses over, that someone chooses to ceases to be a part of your reality and to confine his or her presence to only memories.
I needed a house with a peephole and had to borrow my friend’s.
When I first started, I didn’t think carefully enough about the peephole’s Pov and realised that if she is to tape up the pov the peephole has to be able to
“turn around” and see the inside of the house (at first I envisioned the images to only show the corridor/ a little of the inside of the house).
The first house I went to, I didn’t take any sounds as it was too noisy and I thought I could borrow another house for the sounds but it didn’t sound right to me so I took the images at the second house instead.
House 1 pics:
House 2 pics
For sounds, I took mostly ambience noise.
Ambience noise in this work symbolises the world outside and when she fully closes the door, you can hear the ambience noise decrease then snuff out completely, giving off a sense of isolation and loneliness.
I also shamelessly asked whoever I could to send me sounds of their footsteps as I wanted it to sound natural.