Ideas For My Final Essay & Final Film…………..
During the Wednesday’s studio class this week, as Adrian went around the class talking and advising his students about their upcoming project and essay, I brainstormed some topics that I could explore in my final essay. I’ve started working on my essay, so far, the essay is very informal and all over the place, I’ve written paragraphs/sentences under all the headings in the above image such as ‘love and belonging’, ‘bullying and discrimination’, and ‘modern times/globalisation’. Adrian asserted in the Wednesday’s class that we should ‘just write’ things, and that’s what I’ve done so far, I’ve written about 400 words so far.
Adrian also noted that the essay:
- Don’t make it linear
- Storyboard is ok
- Start doing it
- Identify what you want to work on now
- Essay – can be an informal essay – an informal essay with evidence
- Your essay doesn’t have to be linear
- Your film doesn’t have to be linear
Adrian gave me the advice that for my final project, the audio and the visual doesn’t need to make sense together and individually. Adrian also advice me that I can accompany 100 quotes to my 100 videos. By referring the 100 quotes that accompany 100 videos as a “poetic quilt”, these 100 quotes can be gathered through various resources and media, such as news articles, reviews, films (both fiction and non-fiction), books, and art (statues, contemporary art, etc.), and not just academic peer-reviewed articles. I will be taking his advice onboard for my project.
Somehow I want to write my essay in a linear form and create my final media product as linear, but now I’m thinking otherwise. Would it be better if I randomly place things here and there, write things here and there? Would it make sense? Would I get the marks I intend to get? Will I be able to express all the things I want to express in a non-linear form? Since I won’t be writing and organising the essay and the final media product in a linear form, I will be dependant on my reader/viewer’s interpretation of the project and essay. That is a very scary thought… Would the essay and final media product be ambiguous to the viewer/reader if it’s not linear? But then again, both would be pretty straightforward I believe.
I plan to make my essay linear a little bit – just a tad, is that even possible? – but still structured in a way that it’s not linear. Not sure if that makes sense but yeah…
I’m interested in a quote in Claire Colebrook’s Queer Aesthetics (2011), an article that Adrian reference me:
“Would it be possible to assert simply that one is: that I am the being who I am and have always been; that I do not expect or hope to change? Or, would it be possible—this time not referring to oneself—to a world or nature that is fully actualized and that bears neither a potentiality for change nor a tendency to change in ways that are not determined in advance by some norm?” Pp. 26.
I will be researching and collecting 100 quotes from various resources in the next week or so. I hope that will help me in my journey in writing a decent essay.
Okay. So, I’ve just recorded the audio for the videos. For my final project, I plan to work on a short film, a nonfiction short film, and possibly non-linear whilst at it. The Coming Out workshop was on in the RUSU Queer Lounge yesterday afternoon. After Adrian’s class in the morning, I borrowed a Zoom Z4N audio recorder with a boom mic so I could record the workshop session. I printed off 20 release forms and asked people who participated in the workshop to fill in, to which they had complied with. I’ll be using this audio recording for the RUSU Queer Department group and the Facebook page, I’ve already uploaded the file onto SoundCloud – raw audio.
I plan to have a montage of short videos with a constraints of 5 seconds in my short film with the audio track of the audio recording of the coming out workshop playing in the background. Of course I will be cutting up the raw audio recording into “bits”. I’m not sure what the duration of my final film will be as of yet, I was thinking maybe around 5 minutes, but would that be too little time? Because the audio recording of the coming out workshop was around one hour and seventeen minutes, so there is plenty of things that I will be cutting out: which if honestly, I think is rather unfortunate, I wish I could fit everything in my short film, as the content in the recording can be quite eye-opening.
Overall, I think I’m on the right track. Over the weekend, I plan to continue to write my essay, hopefully I can write and extra 500-1000 words and that I won’t be lazy but we’ll see how. It sounds like a lot to write but it’s not at the same time. Obviously, I will need to research more things, I’m really curious about queer expression in queer art and I might look into that this weekend.
I think I will focus on “queer aesthetics” for my final film and final essay. I still don’t particularly fully understand what “queer aesthetics” mean, but I will soon, hopefully.
There’s many, many things to do over the weekend.