James Leahy

Student work by James Leahy (Toronto School of Art, 406: Introduction to Final Cut Pro, 10/11).

James describes his project, “Two Rooms is an exploration of a photograph, and the memories and emotions it brings forth in the filmmaker. It is a film about loss; about the separate worlds of father and son, living in the same house, but in separate rooms, separate worlds. The film tries to reconcile these two worlds through exploration and understanding. The video is based on a single image: an accidental triple exposure that occurred when the film got stuck at the end of the roll in my old Olympus rangefinder camera. I took two shots in my bedroom in 1973, one of a chair, and one of me sitting in that chair; the other shot, of my father, was taken in the living room, either the same day or a few days later, while he was watching a sports event on TV. When I got the film roll back from the drugstore, I realized the technical error, put the negatives away in a drawer, deemed the photos a “failure,” and forgot about them until almost 40 years later”.