Catarse

-Experimental Shortfilm // Experimental Sound Experience

Project made in academic context for the Sound & Image subject from my first year in the Photography Degree on ESMAD, promoted by the teacher Gonçalo Piroto in june of 2021.

This project was created in my first year on the Photography Degree at ESMAD (Escola Superior de Media Artes e Design).

This is the Sound & Image Subject project, managed by Gonçalo Piroto. The work goes through mainly three phases:

- Development of a sound composition.
- Development of a visual composition together with the sound composition in photovideo format, in order to develop a kind of video storyboard.
- Create the final project, a video with all the material created so far.

The fact that the team was a one man band, that the equipment is limited, as well as the space, implied some things, such as capturing the image and sound separately, with the entire sound being done in post-production, mainly with foley.

Catharsis is a word used in different contexts, such as tragedy, medicine or psychoanalysis. It means "purification", "evacuation" or "purge". According to Aristotle, catharsis refers to the purification of souls through an emotional discharge caused by trauma. In other words, the tragic hero must move from "happiness" to "unhappiness" so that the spectator can reach catharsis.

From the perspective of psychoanalysis, catharsis is the experience of freedom in relation to some oppressive situation, both psychological and everyday, through a resolution that is presented effectively enough for this to occur. ("Catharsis", 2020)

Three different reports, from three different people, wander about the same feeling, in different scopes, culminating in a transformation of martyrdom into a flight of freedom. The feeling of imprisonment and enclosure undergoes a cathartic process in a narrative where three stories intersect and unite to create a larger structure.

Working on this project I got so involved with the poems, the narratives, and these voices, that I ended up putting all my effort on the sound experience, which meant that, in the end, the visual part was only a complement to the sound that the spectator would be listening to.