no ghost, no shell, just annlee.

This week’s task is to create an artist’s response to ‘No Ghost Just a Shell’. As soon as I heard the short briefing Jazmin gave us I already had a pretty vivid idea of what I want to do. I thought a video providing dialogue from AnnLee’s perspective would be interesting, backed with images of different interpretations of what she is (or is not). It would be a short video explaining her loss of identity, her ownership or lack thereof, how interpretation affects art and other topics that came to mind.

I think I will split the video into parts, with the first part being a continuation of the ‘No Ghost Just a Shell’ project. I gave some friends and family the prompt to draw “a sad girl with blue hair,” using whatever medium they want. These will of course be their interpretations of AnnLee.

The second part will consist of things that arguably aren’t considered ‘art,’ random blue objects meant to represent AnnLee and her lack of identity. She can be seen in everything and thus she is nothing. These might objects that I find around the house or while I’m out and about.

I want to express her sadness, but more importantly her frustration with the loss of her identity, and explore how that might affect a character. I thought it would be an interesting touch to ‘break the fourth wall’ in way, by having her address me specifically, since I technically am also contributing to this ‘pain’ she is feeling.

It was interesting to do this project since I had never done any video editing before, so essentially everything was new to me. Though it took much longer than expected, I have no regrets- it was fun exploring a new medium and I found I liked video editing more than I thought.

I used an AI voice for AnnLee, and tried to match it as best I could with the voice I clipped at the beginning of the video, though for me, the voice is probably the most disappointing part. I think she sounds a bit too cheery for such a serious topic.

I thought it would be fun to sort of toe the line between humour and crisis in my video, like AnnLee calling me out for being a uni student and using silly drawings to represent her, without drawing away too much attention from the message.

I was inspired by many different medias and pieces of art but surely most notably by the film ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’. The humour, using everyday objects to identify a character, the separate parts of the video- even the font I used was inspired by the movie. They are quite different in meaning, however. It was fun to draw so much inspiration from a piece of media with such a different story than the one I am trying to convey.

The ending is a clip I got from an art exhibit called “Smile Without a Cat (Celebration of the disappearance of AnnLee)”. I thought it would be a bittersweet ending where AnnLee finally escapes this identity crisis but her only way out being through self-destruction.

In retrospect, I do think there were a lot of things I could have done better, but with the time restriction and lack of editing skills I’m really happy with the final product, and had a lot of fun making it. Unfortunately, my laptop was also laggy so some of the captions are slightly out of time with the video. A regrettable technological error. My biggest gripe was the aforementioned AI voice, and with more time I would’ve liked to make it a longer video with an even deeper more meaningful dialogue from AnnLee.

Enjoy!