The Eyes of Me

This was my first outside event, back in the day. But if I can make any excuse for forgetting to write about my outside events as they happened, it's that instead of writing my immediate reaction, it's interesting (at least to me) to see what I ended up taking away from it and what I remember.

I haven't had any experience in animation, and haven't really had much exposure to it at all as a artistic implement in film, especially documentary. I had a love/hate relationship with the animation in The Eyes of Me. I think it was great as, not so much a representation of what the blind 'see' (since we can't say exactly), but rather in expressing the fact that they experience things much differently than seeing people. Obviously showing gray shapes when the character says something was blurry or foggy isn't a perfect representation how how she felt or what she saw, but it's a small step in creating an idea in the mind of the seeing of how the blind and visually impaired see their experiences and feelings, or even things as basic as glimpses of shape and light. There were a couple times that I felt like the animation was unmotivated, and I would've liked it to either be more pervasive or strictly limited to when the main characters were describing their visions, memories, dreams, etc. Because when it did feel unmotivated, I was concentrating more on the animation itself and not the character or story. The director did say he knew from the start he wanted to animation, and specifically that style of animation "because it's so cool".

Something that really blew my mind is that this was the first documentary from both of these filmmakers. They had a really great partnership though, and the Q&A afterwards was really inspiring and revealing (COMPLETE opposite of the Blaze Foley Q&A, thank goodness). Also, the story that we watch in The Eyes of Me is not the story they originally set out to make. I think I'm still a little ignorant about the time and process required when it comes to documentary production. I tell myself I know what's involved, but I don't think I'll truly be able to understand or respect it to its fullest until the day I'm trying to make my own feature documentary and I hit road blocks like they did - "Yeahh, this story's not working. What do we do instead...after all this time we've spent on this...."