Overview

Solo Dolo is my first short film, created during my undergraduate career at UCLA as the final project for my Digital Media course. The course focused on exploring how contemporary media is giving way to new media forms that are more immersive, connected, distributed, procedural, and interactive. It allowed us to develop familiarity with the unique concepts, challenges, affordances, and limitations of computational and interactive media.

This project served to creatively reflect what I learned throughout the course. The purpose of this film is to create an interface—an interactive space—by weaving a complex network of different semiotic registers within one overarching narrative, encouraging various forms of engagement with the film. In doing so, I aim for my audience to gain different insights and interpretations of what they have seen, heard, and felt within this interface.

An important concept in achieving this is maintaining rhythm and flow throughout the film. I ensured this by carefully mixing the music and layering the text and actor dialogue to synchronize with the visuals captured by the camera. These choices were made to explore how three distinct registers—visual, audio, and text—can combine to generate a space of interactivity where the viewer also becomes a reader and a listener.

This unconventional approach—a silent film in terms of dialogue, audible through music, and visual through displayed text and captured imagery—is intended as an experiment. It challenges traditional storytelling narratives by recounting the same story through different registers of interpretation. By distorting inputs, the narrative is strengthened, creating a space for the viewer to engage and interact with the abstract presentation.

Works like this support the avant-garde perspective in film, characterized by innovative and experimental art. By shifting our realities, we can view the world from a different perspective. This shift influences our interpretations of our own reality, prompting us to question the world around us. Through such questioning, we can generate something new—or rather, uncover something previously hidden—by altering the way we interact with that “thing.”

The use of inputs such as audio, video, and captions can have a similar effect, causing us to interact differently with something already familiar. This transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar enables us to experience something new. It is this creation of the “unfamiliar” that fosters discovery and innovation.