Out Loud is a series of fourteen video portraits directed and edited by Nadia Ross and produced by STO Union over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants spoke about what they were experiencing; their voices were recorded and then played back to them while they were filmed listening to their own words.
As life abruptly moved online, human presence was reduced to small images on screens and voices carried through unstable internet connections — sometimes clear, sometimes fragmented, sometimes barely audible. The diminished quality of those early recordings is part of the work itself: a record of a time when connection became more remote, more fragile and less complete.
As screens became increasingly central to everyday life, the language of the screen entered the project as well. Claire Bestland was invited to create music inspired by the dramatic, emotionally heightened soundtracks of reality television — music that can turn an ordinary glance, pause or encounter into something charged with significance. During the pandemic, ordinary life had itself become heightened in this way. Going to buy food, taking a walk, passing another person on the street — the most banal activities could suddenly feel tense, risky and emotionally loaded. In Out Loud, the music reflects that strange convergence: lives increasingly mediated through screens, while everyday reality itself had begun to feel amplified and cinematic.
Over the course of the project, the portraits trace how people changed through what they chose to say, remember and reflect on. As the pandemic continued, relationships, beliefs and ways of understanding one another shifted. Taken together, the fourteen videos document a period in which the social fabric began to fray in profound and transformative ways.
Directed and edited by Nadia Ross
Music by Claire Bestland
Produced by STO Union