My Creative Process

The most important lesson I’ve learned from this project was from Week 5 of CPSA250. The lesson that day was “Killing Your Darlings,” and we discussed the importance of iteration, editing, and Wallace’s 4-step creative process from our class lecture slides. In the past, with creative endeavors, the area where I struggled most has always been revision; I tend to hate my work at first, and then it grows on me to the point where any modification feels like a critical hit. However, throughout this project, I’ve had to reduce the scale of my project, revise the content, and refine exactly what the intention/thesis of my work is many times. I went from a project that provides a glimpse into different aspects of film analysis to a project analyzing film through only the lens of Feminist Theory, from a project examining an entire 3 season series, to one season of the show, down to a single episode. Giving up on certain plans made during the process, and changing aspects of my project based on feedback and revision was new to me, but ultimately yielded a piece of work that I’m incredibly proud of due in part to all the variations it has gone through.

Above is a screenshot of Adobe Premiere Pro, the software I used to create my project, and a Word document with the definition of a concept I was applying to the scene in question. The color-coding of the different sections of my video-essay can also be seen. I manually wrote notes about my analysis of the scene based on camera angles and Hughe’s concept of objectification/instrumentalism.