Of Color is a short documentary film about the experiences of young people of color in America.
DESCRIPTION
In 2017, I filmed myself drawing pastel portraits of people of color while interviewing them about their experiences in America. Each video was roughly 1-1.5 hours long and was shot from the perspective of the interviewee. All the clips in the video--with the exception of maybe one or two--are presented in chronological order. The audio was not recorded separately from the video, so the sound comes directly from the clip that is being played.
My editing process consisted of assembling the parts of the interviews which seemed to align with each other and constructing a narrative that summarized the salient issues that came up in the conversations. Because the interview questions were generally unscripted (i.e., I only had a couple of questions prepared for each interview) and I avoided ‘guiding’ the interviewee towards making specific comments, it was really interesting to discover the recurring themes for each conversation.
Although my initial plan was to edit the interviews independently, I decided that combining all the interviews into one is more true to the objective of my project: bringing people of color together through shared experiences. Editing the videos in this fashion naturally caused some interesting conversations to be lost due to them not fitting into the larger narrative--but I think the results are well worth the sacrifices.
