Experimental Self Portrait Project Brainstorming

I have been brainstorming my experimental project for a while since reading the brief, as I wasn't sure how to create a movie in self portrait, what aspect of myself to focus on and how to portray that in a creative way. My first idea was to have my life experiences as individual playing cards, and making animations on actual playing cards portraying moments of my life that have formed who I am today. The idea being all the cards in the deck go in the box, and that is me, but I don't really like that idea because I don't have much personal connection to the object, playing cards, and I don't think it fully made much sense to be honest.
I ended up settling on the idea of photography, as when I think back photography has always had some significant presence in my life and a lot of my most important memories. And I think photography in general is quite closely linked to the idea of memories, capturing a moment in time and looking back on it is what we do not only when we take a photograph but when we make memories.

So I have decided to base my experimental self portrait film in a dark room, being a metaphor for my mind and the drying photographs representing my memories, significant events, places, people that have informed who I am today. And the images in the chemicals represent memories forming, coming from the outside world, through the camera and developed as a still shot of a moment in time, set up to dry in the dark room with the other images. Since the dark room is essentially my mind I won't be drawing an explicit representation of me, but rather a silhouette that processes the images as I process memories. I want the piece to look roughly like the image above, the only way you can see the figure is by the lights highlighting the edges, like a uv light in a dark room. I also like the idea of having the look of degraded film over the entire movie but I'm not sure how to achieve that affect, I'll have to look into it.
My current plan in terms of the animation is to first animate it in tv paint, then print out the frames, cut them out, and animate it physically using actual red lights to create the affect I want, I'm not entirely sure what method I want to use currently however so I'll have to do some animation tests and try to find out what best creates the tone and mood which I want.
In terms of 'narrative' I don't think I want to follow a conventional narrative, but rather just an exploration of the metaphor, and my personal experience with memories and the significant points in my life, good and bad, which form how I am today. It's more of a reflection than a story.