The Look

The Look is an appropriation film pieces that takes some of the most famous romantic kisses from films and combines the moments of anticipation before the kiss whilst stripping them from their musical soundtrack, flipping the expectations common to the romance genre of Hollywood films.

The Look
Natalie Fong
Appropriated Film
37 seconds
March 2018

The Look is an appropriation film taking the moments right before some of the most romantic kisses in Hollywood movies, often a pivotal moment in a movie’s plot. The clips from each movie show the main characters giving each other “The Look”, often described as raw emotion, without showing the actual kiss, aiming to flip the tropes or the formula typical to romantic movies.  This is done through the removal of the kiss that signifies the "happily ever after" moment that we have come to expect from the romance genre.  The removal of the soundtrack aims to place the scene in real life, when there is not a whole production team behind it, showing it to be not as romantic as they seem on screen.

This appropriation piece has allowed me to use and continue to develop several skills:
Creativity: with this project that combine works that have already been made, it forced me to think about other ways I could change their meaning.  Once that what settled, I continued to develop my creativity skills to find ways of deepening the purpose of this piece.
Visual Editing: as each scene from the artwork came from individual sources, along with different audio inputs, I was able to learn the Adobe Premiere program and how to make cuts, adjust audio, and adjust visual qualities in order to shape these scenes to convey my idea.
Problem Solving: considering this was my first project using Adobe Premiere, it was a bit of a process to figure out the mechanics of this program and how to manipulate the tools to do what I needed the program to do. However, I was able to work with the different sized visuals and audios with various sound qualities to create a cohesive piece of work.

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Learning Significance

  1. Due to this piece, I was able to learn a new set of editing skills in Adobe Premiere and how to find new meaning in existing works. I find it to be an interesting way of trying to see things through more than one perspective and gives a glimpse as to how different people may interact with the same piece.