Self-Portrait through art and film
How can I represent myself through the means of art and cinema?
Starting from the question “can a work of art represent who you are?”, the activity aims at exploring other possible ways of self-representation than selfies.
Starting from the platform, we have analyzed the ways and mechanisms that filmmakers and artists have used to represent themselves through their works. What tools have filmmakers for telling their story? How has the concept of the self-portrait evolved in the history of art? Through lessons and projections of film sequences students discovered the symbolic and allegorical ways of the contemporary self-portrait and from this they were asked to think of different ways to tell something about themselves.First of all, the students made portraits of themselves, pictures of objects and places that represent them. Then the next step was the actual workshop, which consisted of creating a video self-portrait using the rotoscope technique.
Structure of the workshop:
- The students made a short 5-second video self-portrait through their own image or through objects and places that represented them.
- For each video, eight frames were extracted each second for a total of 40 frames which were printed on paper.
- The students modified the paper frames through the traditional drawing technique of animated films by adding elements or transfiguring their own image.
- The frames were scanned again and joined together to create new animated self-portrait
The main goal of the workshop is to give students new and different possibilities of self-representation by reflecting on the deeper concept of self-portraiture and experimenting with the techniques and expressive possibilities of cinema and art. Knowing the elements of artistic languages gives the possibility to reflect on one’s own image in a different way than the daily dynamics of social networks.
The workshop aspect is essential in the shared creation of content. After the lectures and screenings, the students experimented a manner of self-portraiture through audiovisual and art techniques. Through the exercises that preceded the making of the video, the students experienced the possibility of talking about themselves also through places, traces or objects. This awareness and experimentation was functional to the creation and manipulation of the final video-portrait.