Yue Xiao
A Pencil Sharpener
Class of: 2024
Major: Communication Design BFA
Medium: Video
Faculty: Seminar: Anya Kurennaya / Studio: Jen Mazza
Prompt: This assignment required us to make a "film without words" based on own memory. The memory could be either recent or from the past, and the story needs to be translated into a video in the form of a memoir. The aim of making a film without words is to explore how much can be ‘said’ without words.
I chose a very ordinary memory to film and I use the camera to record the process of buying a pencil sharpener. During the recording, there was no sound of me speaking except the noise around me. In fact, when I first conceived the story, I didn’t want to use an interesting story line to get attention. Instead, I used more effects and composition to make the story meaningful. I also got a lot of inspiration from the movie “The Night I Swam” shared by the teacher. At the beginning and the end of my video, the same action was shot in the same place, but the result was different. I borrowed the same technique as the movie to express the idea of cycle.