Process Piece - Doing Laundry

 

I decided to film myself doing my laundry, and tried to set the camera up to provide a variety of different angles, both from my point of view and from an onlooker point of view. I purposefully focused in on a couple little things, such as putting the quarters into the machine or taking the lint out of the dryer, to make my process ring true with more people and to render it more relatable. In that way, my process was similar to Walton Ford's process as described by Barney--although I obviously wasn't focusing on dark ironies during my laundry process, I was focusing on something. I decided what I wanted to present, namely the little relatable moments of the laundry process that most college students could understand, and used those moments to create meaning/set the tone of my piece. I used "icons and symbols" to represent something common to everyone, so hopefully others can see themselves in my laundry process. I didn't do any research on the history of laundry, but I did incorporate a few different aspects of laundry into my process. I had a variety of clothes items that needed to be treated differently, so you can see me hanging some up to dry, washing some by hand, and tossing others from the washing machine into the dryer. Like the kids in the story making their dioramas and water colors, I was surprised at where in this process I found my "art." I thought that the art would come from the several angles I chose to employ and from painting laundry in an appealing light--instead it came from choosing which of my 85 video clips to keep in the piece and trimming all my footage down from 33 minutes to 2 minutes. It was strategic, and even though I was very conscious of placing the camera in interesting and useful locations throughout my laundry process, it was in the editing and determining which clips, or portions of clips, communicated the message I wanted to convey best that my real sense of artistry emerged.