April 11, 2022  Blog Post 

 

My senior project is centered on filming a variety of locations in NYC, interviewing people and then editing my footage into a short form documentary. I began working on filming over spring break, picking up the equipment from school and traveling around NYC with my camera on my shoulder. I was able to interview several people and take many hours of footage. It was a little challenging to get the footage off the camera chip the first time and I spent several hours going online to learn about transferring information, external and internal hard drives and more hours getting my laptop cleared of unnecessary data stored. I was eventually successful. I have great footage and a strong idea of how I will edit interviews with locations and overlaying music. 

 

In the process of starting my filming project, I was invited to join a fellow student on her senior project trip to Italy. Her project is centered on painting and restoring artwork and if you know me, you know I love art, drawing, painting and I decided I could do both my senior project on my film and also take the amazing opportunity to go to Italy and study art restoration and visit historical art museums. I will be living in Orvieto, Italy, working with a local established artist Viera, who will be teaching techniques of restoration and painting. We will be assisting her with her own work too, including renovations on an old and empty house. We are working on a  schedule of meetings. We have an apartment for the month of April that is a five-minute walk from Ellen, my friend’s adult cousin, so although we are on our own, we are also not alone. I have been learning some basic Italian, but because I know Spanish, I can auditorily understand Italian the majority of the time, and I can read it too. (They are very similar languages because they are both derived from latin, so is french.)

 

Finding the balance between editing my hours of footage and also getting involved in the artwork in Italy is probably the hardest challenge but worth it. My film is my priority and am finding how to get the balance as each day goes by. I look forward to continuing to learn about art restoration and know that I will be editing and formulating my short film and I have been discussing how to incorporate some filming in Italy to add to the concept of my project. One day in the town some people asked us where we were from and we said New York, they laughed and asked why would you come here then? They gave me the perfect question to answer. Orvieto and New York City are clearly different, but where do we specifically see those differences? Do they have any similarities? I’m going to find the answers.