Zie en Zwijg
One of my little babies is how I feel about this project. It was the first time I had a little more time for a project and so I wanted it to be special. I always have many interests and topics in mind for new projects. On this project I really felt the urge to do something with racism and equality. I have dived into different cultures and learned a lot by reading about their traditions and fashion styles. My goal was to tell a story by making a short film. My outfits where just part of the project.
I tried to play with a few aspects: different skin tones representing different people, full body suits with all three of the same design; the human body with veins. And finally I wanted to pay a little tribute to different cultures by designing traditional suits. In the film there is a part where I mix it all up, because to me it really doesn’t matter what skin colour or cultural background you have. We are all the same.
During the last week of this project something terrible happened. The death of George Floyd. I think it touched so many people and for me it made my story even more important to tell. I went to the Black Lives Matter protest in Rotterdam and the urge to make this movie kept getting stronger.
Visual Storytelling
In this project I collaborated with a film student. We had two weeks to tell a story and make it visual. We both interviewed someone and turned those interviews into a story. The story is about the different perspectives of being short and tall. We collected words and sentences that reminded us of how it feels to be short and tall. We also asked people around us how it feels for them to be tall or short.
After collecting all the information, we made a spoken word on this topic and tried to visualize images that fit the story. We filmed my brother and I because I am quite short and he is very tall. It created an extra layer to the story and made it more emotional showing a sibling relationship.
Performance
This project was part of a seminar I did with a fellow student. The assignment was to combine our own interests and fascinations and make them visual. It didn’t matter how the visualization would be presented. From building a sculpture to drawing a painting. We were very alike in our interest, but above all we both wanted to do a performance.
It was the first time for the both of us and we didn’t really know where to start. We decided to collect images, music and other performances to see if there were any similarities. We found out that we both liked dance movements and mysterious music. Since we were in lockdown at the time, we came up with the idea to make our own dance moves and record them at home. So we did. We danced a lot to different kinds of genres.
​
​
That’s where the story was born. The story is about a person who feels totally trapped in his surroundings and wants to be left alone. The other person tries everything to push the lonely person out of the negative bubble. It shows discomfort, it might look familiar to some, and most of all, it shows how people around you care about you, even when you are feeling lonely.
