The childhood ceremony between Aroha and Hunapo from Amiri & Aroha gets a new look in Amiri’s Child with an atmospheric filter

It is important that the individual films in the Amiri & Aroha trilogy work as standalone productions that can be viewed independently. They are companion pieces with their own individuality, which confer wider meaning when they come together as a trilogy.

Enabling Amiri’s Child as a film in its own right requires retelling some of the background from the original film.

Creating a visual look for the backstory in Amiri's Child is proving both a challenge and an opportunity. My goal is to reprise aspects of Amiri & Aroha in a new and striking way, not by simply regurgitating footage from the original film.

I played around with a couple of sequences, editing a sixty-second précis of the story of Amiri & Aroha. I then experimented with some filters, giving the footage an old world feel, a slight sepia tint providing historical texture. With some refining, applying this technique to these flashback scenes looks very effective, giving the footage a completely new look.

The new look also confers new meaning. I have subtly changed perspectives in the retelling of the story. We have only Kōkā’a word that it was an enemy of Amiri who started the fire, what if it was really the gang? What if it was Hunapo and not an assassin that fired the shots at Aroha’s wedding?

Visual metaphors echo throughout Amiri’s Child!


Using the advanced features of Apple’s Final Cut X to create striking visual metaphors in Amiri’s Child