ROBBY: I have to say, I think one thing that I really like about your project is all of those things you mentioned. There are sort of different directions I think you could have gone in terms of exploring that stuff. But you really chose like more of an observational mode in which you’re not really– you’re not really– those things are there. But you’re not kind of overtly drawing our attention to a lot of things.
So I wonder, do you think that there are– do you think there are– were things that you found along the way, just from kind of observing with a camera?
LULU: Yeah. I think for sure like as I started kind of going around the house and just filming things, one that I paid attention to was kind of like rooms or like framings of people and how within the same house, people can still kind of be in their own world or be in like separate spaces. So kind of thinking about that was interesting to me. And that was like one of the first things I was interested in while filming.
But kind of as I progressed and started doing more stuff with like the journals and other things, I found it really meaningful to just like look at objects and not necessarily people, but like see what objects can tell you about a person and see what like certain spaces or environments can tell about a person. So I think that’s why I throughout the video, I liked filming like other people and other things. But I didn’t really want to explicitly film myself. Because I feel like it could be explained through everything around me.
ROBBY: Yeah. So those journals, did you sort of stumble upon that idea as you were filming, or were those things you had thought about working with before?
LULU: Yeah. I think just like, as I was like in my old house, I was thinking about, oh, what was I like before and trying to remember. And then I realized I had a bunch of journals that like concretely like told me some things about what I was doing before and like what kind of person I was before.
And I started keeping journals from like elementary school, because I was kind of a whimsical child in that sense. So I’d always enjoy looking back on it. But I hadn’t done it in a while. So I kind of wanted to capture like my reactions to reading back on the journals and also like show my family reacting to it as well. Just because it was kind of like– I guess, they’ve seen me grow this whole time, and they maybe know like my younger self better than I do, if that makes sense. Because I wasn’t like directly interacting with my younger self. So I kind of wanted to see how they thought about it and how they reacted to the stuff in my journals.