‘Categories are grouping that individuals or societies create to organise their knowledge of the world’ (pp. 343).

‘The categorical film often begins by identifying its subject’ (pp. 343).

‘In categorical form, patterns of development will usually be simple’ (pp. 343).

‘If a documentary filmmaker wants to convey some information about the world to audiences, categories and subcategories may provide a basis for organising the film’s form’ (pp. 343).

‘Because categorical form tends to develop in fairly simple ways, it risks boring the spectator’ (pp. 344).

My final project will be a list of videos of the things in the Queer Lounge. It’s more than likely that I will be using the categorical form for my documentary practice. I plan to categorise the videos into “areas” of the Queer Lounge like I did when for the project three.

Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction – Non-narrative, pp. 343-344.

This is what I will be saying in presentation in this afternoon:

“Many people know from an early age that they are attracted to people of the same sex or don’t identify with their assigned gender at birth. Sexual attraction and gender questioning are not choices that can be changed voluntarily, but people do choose how they express their sexuality and gender identity and how much information they share with others.

Same-sex attracted, gender questioning and intersex people who experience discrimination, bullying and abuse are at higher risk of mental health problems than the wider population. This risk is greater if they do not have family and community support.

My project is a field trip to the RMIT’s City Campus’s Queer Lounge.

Queer Officer – The Queer Department – Student Representative – RMIT Student Union (RUSU). Advocate, support and represent Queer students at RMIT.

Queer Lounge – what is it? A safe place. This is a place of belonging. There are events held in the lounge: movie nights, workshops, crafternoons, collective meetings, whine and whine, afternoon tea and games night.

Why? Adrian asked us to do our project based on the things that we are passionate about, I followed his advice. I’m passionate about the Queer Department.

For this project, I had the following constraints:

• Filming for 5 seconds
• No full shots of the Queer Lounge + only parts of the lounge that make up the Queer Lounge

I’ve categorised my video clips into “areas” such as the hallway, study area, the kitchen area and the aesthetics of the lounge and within that, the colour palette and patterns of the videos, or at least I tried to.

How I filmed it:

• Point-of-View – A newbie entering the Queer Lounge who is exploring the things that make up the Queer Lounge.
• A lot of my collective members first experience in the Queer Lounge were scary. They were entering a room unknown to them. Foreign almost.
• When you are a newbie, you notice all the little things because you are more aware of your new surrounding.

I’m interested in Postic’s (2011 pp. 507) view that connections arise from the complex interchange between ways in which feminist and queer theory are informed through construction of terms related to sexual desire and pleasure. As well as Marinucci view of the construction of concepts of sexuality, sex and gender, by illustrating their emergence and presumed meanings, created as a result of historical and cultural developments.

For my next project, I plan to continue to work on the Queer Department Queer Lounge as the basis of my study. I am passionate about queer issues and I plan to explore this further. I plan to focus on sexuality, identity and queer feminism and the attitude changes toward sexuality issues through queer cinema. I’m interested in the interconnectedness of feminist and queer theory. How I’m going to relate this to my making of things will be something to think about in the next few weeks.

I will be reshooting a large number of videos, all my footage used for this project was raw footage, I didn’t edit the videos besides editing it to meet my five-second constraint”.

Hopefully, the presentation will go well. I’m more organised this time round, so I know this presentation will definitely be better than my last one.

Here is the link to my Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130954785@N06/

This is my last upload of videos for my project #3!

I did some reshoots of my videos early this morning. It was pretty well. I shall edit it all tonight and compile it.

I captured all the shots that I had intended to last week, that is, I filmed clips of the ceilings, lights, walls, windows, the floor and the carpet. I was quite surprise at the videos that I filmed, they were more aestheticly pleasing to the eye.

I’m setting out to edit the unedited clips as well as obtaining all the good copies and put it all in order from 1 to 100 and uploading it into my Flickr account. I feel like deleting all the videos that I have right now in my Flickr account, I want to start anew. So, that’s something to certainly to think about.

I plan to group the videos in “chunks”, that is arranged them to “areas”, for example:

• RUSU area – where the toilets are/hallway towards the Queer Lounge and the Women’s Lounge.
• Resource table
• Kitchenette
• Study area
• Board games/Xbox games
• Bookshelf – self-help resources
• Crafternoon cupboard
• Lounge area – where the couches are
• TV area

Of course, I’m not going to put it in that order, but this order sounds perfect to me right now, so I’m still lukewarm about this list of chunks for my gallery.

Tomorrow, I will have a day off and I’ll be concentrating on how to connect the footage that I’ve filmed with theories and ideas. I plan to do some research about Queer film studies as well as feminism/political things.

As of right now, I’m confident that I will complete this task the way I want to.

The thing with me is that I’m not particularly good at public speaking so I feel that I will struggle with the presentation. I know what I’m going to say and what not, I just need the theories/ideas/research to back up my footages.

Here is a preview of what my project #3 looks like.

I realised that I will need to delete a fair number of videos from my Flickr account. I’ve uploaded more than 100 videos, this is something I knew I was doing last week. After reshooting the shots for my videos, I’ll edit it and replace it with some of the previous videos that I uploaded into my account.

In reference to the ‘On The Difficulty of Being An ANT: An Interlude In The Form Of A Dialog’ article that Adrian gave out in Week 4:

What my thoughts were as I read this particular article:

• Utter confusion – what is this?
• You mean the insect ‘ants’?
• Oh not the insect, something else… Oh, my bad…
• ANT Theory? Hmm… That is interesting. I thought the insect ants had a theory for a second there.
• It was horrible to read
• I’ll admit that I struggled reading this article, but at least I tried
• Structured creatively: not my cup of tea

I would of sworn Adrian wanted to test our patience with this article…

I am more than willing to admit that I struggled immensely when I read this article. I disliked it instantly when Adrian handing it out to me as I briefly scanned from page to page. This article was an alien to me. Why was it structured this way: in a conversation? Honestly, I’ve only read half of the article, it pained me too much to go on.

At first, the article reminded me of a film script.

The article follows the conversation between a professor and a student as they discuss what the ANT theory is. This role-playing confused me during the first couple of pages however, when I got used to reading the article in the format that it was in, I realised how much sense the article made. Nonetheless, after reading the article, I was still confused at what I’ve just read, it just didn’t click, but at the same time it did? Weird.

Some quotes in the reading that interested me:

• ‘Because it’s not a tool, or rather because tools are never ‘mere’ tools ready to be applied: they always modify the goals you had in mind. That’s what ‘actor’ means. Actor Network allows you to produce some effects that you would not have obtained by some other social theory’ (Professor pp. 143). The Professor attempts to explain what the ANT is to the student.
• ‘It depends entirely on what you yourself allow your actors (or rather, your actants) to do. Being connected, being interconnected, or being heterogeneous is not enough. It all depends on the sort of action that is flowing from one to the other, hence the words ‘net’ and ‘work’. Really, we should say ‘worknet’ instead of ‘network’. It’s the work, and the movement, and the flow, and the changes that should be stressed. But now we are stuck with ‘network’ and everyone things we mean the World Wide Wed or something like that’ (Professor pp. 143).
• ‘With Actor-Network you may describe something that doesn’t at all look like a network – an individual state of mind, a piece of machinery, a fictional character; conversely, you may describe a network – subways, sewages, telephones, – which is not all drawn in an ‘Actor-Network’ way. You are simply confusing the object with the method. ANT is a method, and mostly a negative one at that, it says nothing about the shape of what is being described with it!’ (Professor pp. 142).
• ‘But that’s exactly what ‘interpretive’ sociologies argue? No?’ (Student pp. 144).
• ‘Oh no, not at all. They would say that human desires, human meanings, human intentions, etc., introduce some ‘interpretive flexibility’ into a world of inflexible objects, of ‘pure causal relations’, of ‘strictly material connections’ (Professor pp. 144).
• ‘But I am always limited to my situated viewpoint, to my perspective, to my own subjectivity? (Student pp. 145).
• ‘Of course you are! But what makes you think that ‘having a viewpoint’ means ‘being limited’ or especially ‘subjective’? When you travel abroad and you follow the sign ‘Belvedere 1.5km’, Panorama’, ‘Belle vista’, when you finally reach the breath-taking site, in what way is this proof of your ‘subjective limits’? It’s the thing itself, the valley, the peaks, the roads, that offer you this grasp, this handle, this take’ (Professor pp. 145).

I wished this was a proper article… It would make more sense to me.

On the weekend, Adrian sent me an email in regards to an article – Queering the Documentary Form in Isaac Juliens Films – so I’m able to get started on the more theoretical project ahead. I think I should begin to look into queer theories, wait, is there such thing as queer film theories?

In Wednesdays studio, we were all paired up and we were to watch each other’s 10o videos that made up our project #3. After, we were to evaluate on our classmates work-in-progress as part of a class discussion.

Adrian gave me the following advice for my project:

• Right now, you are seeing it from your point of view: don’t
• See it from another point of view:
  • Look at it from a queer point of view
• What is the queer lounge? What are the qualities of this space? What makes the lounge a lounge? A ceiling, walls, carpet, floor, windows, light switch, corners, etc.?
• Queer theories – do some research
• Bring in queerness to the things you capture
• Don’t just point and shoot
• Make the video clips you capture “queer”: spice it up with some queer stuff – film magazines, zines, posters, brochures.
• What is the queer lounge about? It’s about people hanging out, a place to study, a place to make friends, a place to eat, a safe place, a place to relax and rest.
• What does the queer lounge highlight?
• Right now, you are being gentle and sensible with your videos, go apply some queer politics in the videos – feminism, hetreonormativity, some gender-neutral toilets campaigns posters.

The summary in my head when Adrian gave me his advice for my project :

• Make your videos gay, make it gay, gay, gay, gggaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Or queer as he puts it.
• Spice up your videos with some gayness 😉 – you know it! A little shot of HIV and STI resources will be quite naughty.
• Feminism – something to explore? Hmm…. Interesting, I’ve always wanted to study womens’ study…
• Queer theories? I don’t know any… Maybe I should look that up… Awkward that I’m the Queer Officer and don’t know about queer theories, how embarrassing…
• Gender-neutral toilets posters? But I’ve already filmed it?
• See it/film it from another point of view: gay it up? A newbie: a queer student that’s new to the queer lounge? Maybe…
• Film the queer lounge, not the things in it, exactly what the queer lounge is, ceilings, lights, walls, windows, etc. Stop trying to be so fancy by filming what’s in the queer lounge, go back to basics and think humbly: what is the queer lounge made of?

What I will be doing next:

I will be following the advice of Adrian, some, but not all.

I thought that I would have finished filming my 100 videos and call it a wrap – I’ve actually filmed more than 100, it’s more like 126 videos to be exact, all edited down to 5 seconds too. I will be reshooting some shots and/or replacing the shots with the other videos that I’ve uploaded into my Flickr account. I’ll be filming early in the morning on Wednesday this week and hopefully, I’ll get a chance to edit it during the day when I have my breaks in between my classes.

As I informed everyone in the first studio of the year, I am one of the Queer Officers for the Queer Department for the RMIT Student Union. My role as a student representative entails that I represent, support, advocate and empower my collective and collective members.

My idea for the Project Three: A list of 100 concerns from the point of view of… assessment is to film short videos of the RMIT Student Union’s Queer Department’s Queer Lounge that is located in the RMIT city campus in Building 8, Level 3.

In the Friday studio, I brainstormed some ideas for my idea as Adrian talked, a bit rude I know but I had this massive surge of inspiration all of a sudden! I drew up nine storyboards. I don’t have the ability to draw like Leonardo but I tried my best to communicate what I would like to film.

Over the weekend, I brainstormed some more and came up with these:

These are the constraint for my video clips:

• Film for 5 seconds
• Film 2 of each “thing” (flexible)
• Film only parts of the objects, not whole
• No persons is to be in the Queer Lounge during the duration of filming
• Poetic and abstract
• Colours and bright – rainbow

I’ve decided to film the following:

RUSU Area 7 things:

1. Door to Queer Lounge hallway
2. RUSU toilets – male and female (with the gender-neutral toilets poster)
3. Hallway to Queer Lounge
4. Walls along the hallway
5. Film a walking towards the Queer Lounge shot of you walking, film feet – handheld shot
6. Queer Lounge door handle
7. Queer Lounge door

Resource Table – 2 things:

1. Resources – brochures, business cards
2. Resources – gay men and women

Kitchen – 14 things:

1. Sink
2. Hot water/cold water
3. Tap water
4. Detergent
5. Fridge
6. Food
7. Cups
8. Plates
9. Cutlery
10. Coffee/tea
11. Bin
12. Microwave
13. The cocoa pressing thing with the plastic cups
14. Bread press

Study Area – 4 things:

1. Table
2. Chairs
3. Power cords
4. Magazines on the table

Whiteboard – 3 things:

1. Whiteboard
2. Whiteboard markers
3. RUSU Queer Department Calender

Queer Lounge Wall – 5 things:

1. Rules and regulations posters
2. Collective members artworks
3. Walls near the TV
4. The rainbow flag
5. The rainbow canvas hung on the wall near the study area.

Games/Board Games – 2 things:

1. X-box/PSP games
2. Board games

Bookshelf – self help resources – 6 things:

1. Books – gay, lesbian, coming out, trans*, asexual
2. DVD’s – queer films
3. Resources – brochures, business cards
4. Resources – gay men and women
5. Umbrellas
6. Mirrors

Crafternoon Cupboard – 6 things:

1. Art supplies – acrylic paint, paint brushes, paint trays
2. Paper – coloured paper, plain white A3 paper
3. Costumes – hat, scarf, clothes
4. Make up – nail polish, face paint?
5. Paintings created in the crafternoon
6. Origami

Lounge Area – 4 things:

1. Couch – the green couch, the grey couch and the RUSU black and purple couch.
2. Beanbags
3. Cushions
4. VB couch logo

TV Area – 7 things:

1. TV
2. TV remote
3. Stereo system
4. Stereo system remote
5. Posters
6. Windows behind the TV
7. The blinds behind the TV

I plan to film my 100 video clips tomorrow morning before my 11:30am lecture, if I don’t film all 100 clips, I’ll film it on Wednesday.

Right now, I’m very confident about this assessment. Hopefully, I’ll do better than my last assessment.