I Notice.

By Alina Povelikin

The city is full of sights and sounds, so maybe it is time we look around. On a journey in hopes to make others notice, I present to you my little green notebook.

Process

This story begins on the subway. Since childhood, I absolutely adored writing, so when a kind lady walked up to my family on the 2 train in 2014, asking one of us to write a short poem for an organization she worked with: Poems By New Yorkers, I eagerly agreed. At just 7 years old, I wrote a sentence or two, but that was enough.

Since then, I’ve always found the New York Subway to be a source of inspiration. Yes, the rats scurrying about, the gum stuck to walls and floors, even the trash strewn about the subway tracks. This is where I felt my first taste of writing fame. This year, I was gifted a little green notebook. I don’t quite remember by whom or on what day, as I ignored it for quite a while. Soon, however, I brought it along on my many train rides. The combination of a familiar setting and the pitter-patter of rain onto the top of the moving 1-train served as great inspiration for this piece. The rain reminds me of staying inside. Likewise, writing on a rainy day, wherever I happen to be, allows me to sit inside with my thoughts.

‘I Notice’ is a conglomeration of excerpts from my little green notebook, videos from across the city, photos, and acrylic paintings of my own. I used the Youcut-Video Editor app to stitch together the final product and narrative. Throughout the process of creating my multimedia piece, I paced back and forth between different format ideas. Initially, I was interested in making a video with different parts of my day around the city, while my writing played on-screen. Then, inspired by an English project I had done in class, my mentor and I thought it might be interesting to create a gallery of photos, each with its own caption. At last, I reverted back to the idea of making a video, as I wanted to have the effect of telling a story.