I combined both mine and my classmates draft copies of our artist statements. The final statement is below.
Eyes is a live action video integrated with animation and narration, which used human senses to tackle ‘The Everyday Sacred’ project. The topic addressed an everyday action which touches everyone. The video depicted a man transformed by the repetitive action of waking up, finding his glasses, cleaning and putting them on, into a sacred ritual and until the final days of losing his eyesight. The concept behind the video was to show how eyesight and vision were sacred from the perspectives of being blind and wearing glasses. The challenges were illustrated in the repetitive action of cleaning the glasses, which was an everyday ritual amongst people who wore glasses to enhance their vision.
The narrative of the character within the video was to make the audience aware of how ‘Sacred’ eyes were and how privileged it was to ‘see’ every day by the opening of eyes to create visual memories. The sound wave effect was matched to the audio of the narration, to show how the man now ‘sees’ the world after losing his vision completely.
We took inspiration from various sources such as Daredevil (2015), Tommy Edison, a blind film critic, ‘Using Your Hearing’, ‘The blind photographer’ and ‘Be My Eyes – helping blind see’ videos.
The Eyes video achieved the requirement of the project brief, ‘The Everyday Sacred’, by addressing the means of ‘Repetitiveness’, ‘Transformation’, ‘Ritualism’ and ‘Sacredness’.