Story · The Sequence
Thank you for being with me
Tracy and her partner · Seoul Forest · Autumn
iyagi
Tracy told us at the start that she and her partner freeze in front of a camera and can't pose to save their lives. What they can do is talk to each other. So we made their talk the film itself: we recorded a real conversation between them at Seoul Forest and cut the whole film to their voices. On the walk we gave small nudges and otherwise stayed out of the way.
Posing made them stiff, so we dropped it early and set up the one thing they do naturally. We sat them down in the park with a recorder and let them talk, about the years she preferred to be alone and about who gets the chocolate. That recording became the soundtrack, and the edit follows their words rather than a shot list. Somewhere in the middle one of them says "I already accept you who you are," and that line set the tone for the whole cut.
Seoul Forest in late autumn means bare birches and russet leaves underfoot, and the light goes low and warm from mid-afternoon, so that is when we filmed. The route is a single slow loop that opens and closes at the red phone booth; the same image begins the film and reads differently at the end, after everything they have said. In between, our nudges stayed small: stack a few stones on a rock, split a chocolate bar at the picnic table. The grade holds the walk in warm amber and cools to mint-grey for the bench close-ups, the quietest part of their talk. Twice the film cuts away to clouds, a pause before the conversation picks back up.
Shot on the day by our photographer, working right beside the film camera. Real photographs, not frames pulled from the video. Two crafts, one shoot, one team, and you keep both.
The Sequence is our photo-heavy option: the film plus a full set of photographs from the same shoot. Here the stills were made along the walk itself, in the same autumn light you see in the film. When the two of them stopped noticing the camera, that held for the photographs too.
