ROBBY: But I think also you point out something interesting that maybe not everyone who watches your video might realize on their first viewing, which is that the audio and the video are often not synced at all. You recorded them at completely different times. So I wonder– yeah, what interests you in that sort of approach, that’s almost collaged approach with audio and video?
LULU: Yeah, I think I like the word collage because I feel like that’s often how we think of art, the space that we’re in, or our memories even. It’s not necessarily kind of a linear event by event thought process. It’s more just like– for me at least, it’s more just a lot of little data points and then drawing links between them and pretty abstract and nonlinear ways. So in that sense, I feel like to get– because with a short film, you kind of have to distill a lot of what I was experiencing down into a couple minutes or something like that.
So in order to get at the essence of how I was feeling, or the things I wanted to communicate, I thought the best approach would be to collect as many things around me as possible. And then when I’m going through them, try to see what kind of themes reemerge. And more often than not, themes that I would hear in the recordings during our family dinners would correspond with some footage that I shot. For example, if we’re talking about coronavirus and how this is an unexpected time, and just a crazy experience for everyone, I notice that just me being in my house kind of corresponds with that.
And me seeing the TV around and with always the news on kind of brings up those same feelings. So that’s kind of where my approach started. And then it got more fun to think about the emotional undertones of each of the different types of recording. So maybe I would show some video that doesn’t really seem linked with the audio. But to me, the emotional undertone is kind of the same. So I would try putting them together and seeing if it would work.