In the beginning of the project we were given an exercise to help us narrow down what we wanted to achieve with our project. The exercise goes: “I will… by…” and you’ve to fill in the blanks. My answer was:
I will ... acknowledge the heartache of a slow goodbye in a way that is approachable and digestible …by … using toy characters and visual metaphors to represent this uniquely human experience.
However, I am not a writer. There is a reason that my project has a total of 24 words in it. (56 if you count the title and credits) My goals were so much more extensive and developed in my head, from the get go, that to summarise them into one sentence felt impossible. I have never gone into a project with one sentence worth of a goal. That’s just not how my brain works. So here is my list of many goals, all of which I feel I have, to some extent, achieved.
Goals
Dad
My dad was my hero. He was everything you could possibly ask for in
a dad and I wanted everyone to know it. He will always be my amazing dad and I’m going to carry that with me for the rest of my life. Losing him only made me want to tell everyone about how lucky I’d been to have him. But we were in a lockdown. Everyone I had access to already knew. I had all this energy that needed somewhere to go, so I decided to put it into my film. So, I made it one of my goals, to show how great my dad was, through my film.
Interpretation
As much as this was a very personal project, it was a major goal of mine to leave the meaning of this project open for the audience to interpret for themselves. I could have created a voice over or a script and given the project a definite singular meaning, but then it would only have my meaning. It was my goal for anyone who watched my film to be able to apply it to their own experiences, interpret it for themselves and take away what they needed from the experience. This is the main reason why I opted to have so few words in my film.
Therapy
I had proven to myself in the past that I could use art as therapy. I was in a situation where all of the people that make up my usual support systems were cut off due to covid, or grieving themselves. I needed
to make my own support. So, this was never just a college project, this was my therapy. I know that it’s a cop out answer to say that my number one target audience was me, but this was always a selfish project. Looking after myself was my number one priority in making this project. This was the only part of my life that I felt I had control of at the time. I designed the project to have meaning that would help me to process the loss of my dad, but visuals that would not be painful to have to draw. In the end I had the sense that I had done something when there was nothing I could do.
Acknowledgement
Like every daughter, I want to make my dad proud. Art wasn’t something he always understood, he was more of a numbers and computers person, but he always showed his support regardless. However, one thing he definitely understood was grades and awards. Those were a measure of success that my dad could understand. I made it one of my goals to make a film good enough that it would get the kind of recognition that I know my dad would understand, and be proud of. I achieved this in the form of film festivals. So far I have qualified for two film festivals: Paus Premieres Festival and Lift-Off’s First-Time Filmmakers.
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