Week seven was about thinking a little more deeply about what you’re making and allowing this to guide your refining post for your task three experiments.
Ways of thinking about what you’re making
In Wednesday’s class I gave you some prompts to respond to as a way of doing this. In pairs you discussed these questions in relation to your task three experiments. An interesting point which came through this discussion related to how much control we have over the media we produce in terms of guiding what attention is drawn to in the video or photograph. A close-up with a shallow focus guides an audience’s attention to one particular thing, whereas a wide shot allows an audience to scan a photo or video image to notice themselves. One group suggested that video allows a great degree of audience noticing because it is less selective than photography.
Essay films as experimental nonfiction
As you’ve been using noticing as a prompt to guide and inform processes of making iteratively, the essay form might be a way for you to think through noticing in the creation of the media itself.
Writing reflections
The main thing with your reflections is to show a trajectory of thought. So, your reflection is really about asking yourself “what did I learn through doing this making.” Have a look at the iterative cycle diagram in this reading or in my slides for this week. Your reflection should demonstrate that you’ve learnt through the process of doing this experiment and what is left to still learn.
Reminders
We drew numbers from a hat to decide on the running order for the pitches next week (for those who weren’t there I chose them randomly). You can find the running order here. Pitches will run from 1pm-2:20pm in our Wednesday workshop and from 8:30am-11am in our Thursday workshop. You each have 3 minutes each (no longer!). All pitches should be uploaded to this folder, where we will use the first half hour of our Wednesday class to check that everything works.
Paul Ritchard and Sophie Langley will be joining me on the panel for your pitches.
Slides that elaborate on each of these points further can be found here.
Thursday’s workshop was for student consultations. Some things that came out of these consultations…
- Really try to articulate what you want to find out through doing your task four project. This is more important than knowing what your task four project will be
- Think of your task four prompt as emerging out of what is left over out of your task three experiments – what do you want to build upon?