I’m having a little difficulty really placing this blog in my life. I’m not really sure what to find appropriate content to put up here. If this should be a place where I document only things from uni and or related to it, or just everything. I think thats why I find myself struggling to post things up. I keep judging myself thinking that content that isn’t related to the course isn’t worthy of being posted here.

No I didn’t misspell anything, that really is the title of our new Korsakow film. This was a collaborative project made by our awesomely Asian team comprised of

myself Ajeet Singh
the humorous Azim Iskandar
the brilliant cameraman Zijing Yang
and the charismatic Anh Vu

Who all play staring roles in this little project. Hope you have fun watching it.

Along with our collaboratively written accompanying essay on what its all about and why we did what we did and why it turned out the way it did.

There are many ways that can help us to understand what a hypervideo like the kind Korsakow provides us can do. A simple way would be the way in which we might browse a single webpage on the internet and navigate through the various links that it provides. These are usually labelled to give us an indication of what and where they link us to. What this means for a K-film is that it is a viewing experience unlike any normal linear narrative film as it allows the audience to actively engage with the film and to some degree create or derive their own meaning from it. As for the title of our film, we initially named it as ‘The Feeling of Being” however as our cameraman and editor saved the folder under the more utilitarian name “Body Part” we jokingly put the two together to form the name that we thought was humorously in line with the content of the film itself and decided that it actually worked and so we stuck with it. In order to describe our film  better it’s important to discuss a little on the process of creation behind it.

The way we make meaning in a film is more often than not from the editing that combines various clips together, and with a standard narrative this editing process is done before hand and in an order suited to the filmmaker. The complete film does not deviate from its set path and that is what makes it a linear narrative.Using Korsakow with its complex and seemingly random connections, it seemed like an interesting approach that could be taken to portray and explore the human body and its various verities. When we took to writing and elaborating further on the types of clips we wanted to capture, there were various things that we had to consider as the human body encompassed a very large field of possible observation, and 60 clips would probably not be able to do it full justice. Another concern we faced was whether or not or to what extent we would include intimate human interactions with each other and whether this was something we would be comfortable with getting footage of. Whilst this would have proven to been a much more compelling piece, the general consensus was to stick to a more family friendly piece. In our very drafting of the idea, we wanted to show how we used our body parts in everyday life, especially in showing love and affection to people we love for instance kissing and touching. Our body parts are an important and pivotal way for us to interact with the world and people around us and we use them and various fascinating ways.

It’s difficult to really consider the way a narrative functions within something like a K-film as a narrative is defined as a sequence of events that tries to tell us a bigger story, and since with a K-film the narrative is different on every viewing, it could distort as well as change the story that the audience takes away from it every single time. It’s almost like a story generator. However the nature of our film, and another one of the things that K-films can do, is create a greater sense of a theme or emotion rather than a linear narrative. As a K-film can have no real ending and the audience is only given thumbnails from which to analyse and decide where to go next, the possible narratives are immense and would take unreasonable amounts of time for any one person to successfully attempt to view all the various forms or orders it could manifest into.

One of the other things we concluded on earlier in the planning and shooting stages was to either have a narrator romantically speaking in the background over the whole K-film about the human body, or to have a mini-narrative within each clip. However as we accumulated our first set of clips before being presented to our class, we noticed the humorous nature of our banter and behavior that was caught in the filming process whilst filming and in our first prototype we realised that this made it quite an enjoyable experience as the user is exploring through the various clips. We filmed a number spontaneous and impromptu clips that we felt were necessary on moulding our K-film into what it is we wished to express.We formed a table of content with a strategic plan of what to shoot, and to get roughly equal parts of each category of the body we had set up which were the ears, mouth, eyes, nose and skin. When it came to the subsequent shooting sessions we found that in order to suit our new direction we had to reform all our ideas to better suit this light hearted and humorous take on things and what resulted was a very organic set of clips that were a mix between shots that we had planned and shots that we came up with impromptu. The captivating commentaries and behavior we made whilst filming were incorporated to add to this “raw” filming trait that we had picked up in the process of filming. It also makes the viewing experience of this non-linear narrative more varied and enjoyable.

We only used 4 subjects to capture our footage, and at first we thought of getting more but we decided to stick to the 4 to maintain that sense of exploration and being able to traverse a range of emotive expressions rather than schizophrenically bouncing off random emotions from random individuals. Not all clips conveyed a deeper emotional agenda but all were supposed to give off a certain mood, this was emphasised particularly in the depth of our extreme close ups and with the post film use of black and white and film grain to give everything a deep intrinsically raw emotiveness. The k-film were just a series of clips of people in extreme close up. We aimed to go through the human body by starting up with the head and working downwards so the film always starts out with the eyes, however due to the evolving nature of our film this plan didn’t really stick for long as our K-film turned into a clip about how humans communicate with each other and express themselves.

Within the film itself initially we can see that it is completely insane and has no real connection with itself apart from the same four people who may not all necessarily even show up on some viewings and appears to be just a series of clips of them rambling about and complaining about trying to make a K-film. In a way it turns into a documentation of the 4 subjects, with each viewing we get a better understanding of their demeanours, behaviors and attitudes which are the actual observable patterns.

We chose the interface based on how it presented our clips and we were striving for a very simplistic look. we felt as if the thumbnails had more than enough information to give the audience a better sense of which direction they want to take the K-film. We were contemplating on having descriptive text alongside the clips to put some context into what they were about but that would have distorted and interrupted the flow of the film design we have carefully cultured. The end result is a single viewing clip on the left hand side of the page with three smaller thumbnails all neatly arranged on the right with frozen thumbnails of the clips they depict. We decided to have them as still images because we didn’t want the viewer to catch a preview of the following clips, as it creates a greater sense of discovery.

 What made this viewing particularly interesting was how it turned out to be very meta in that we all made it clearly obvious we were being filmed for the purpose of making a K-film and used that as a major part of the finished product. As K-films are a relatively new phenomenon and there is no real ‘correct’ way to use it, this original attempt at creating something that turned into something more impromptu and experimental yielded some pretty entertaining results. And even though we appeared to have somewhat deviated from our original course of action, our end result brought us back to our somewhat core meaning of human interactions with each other and the world around them.

 

Bibliography:

(Sawhney et. al. 1996, p. 8)
Sawhney, N, Balcom, D & Smith, I 1996, ‘HyperCafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo’, in Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, Hypertext ’96 (New York, NY, USA: ACM), pp. 1-10.

(Miles 2008)
Miles, A 2008, ‘Softvideography: Digital Video as Postliterate Practice.’ Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 10-21.

 

Technology changes much of the dynamics of our world, it evolves pretty much like any other aspect of life, and adapts and changes according to the times, so just when things seem just about set in stone, someone comes along with a giant fuckin bulldozer and shatters it all to pieces to build something new in its place. Its funny when you see that this has been one of the more consistent things in life, that when change actually does come everyone just loses their shit. Probably because there are many

So in Mondays lecture a cute little debate sprung up after Adrian mentioned that our lives are not stories, and someone in class begged to differ.

Stories need a narrator and without one there is no one to tell the story, and this was a strongly emphasised point. The way I see it though, the characters in a story aren’t aware of the presence of a narrator, so I don’t know, it just seemed a little speculative to say that there is no narrator our lives simply because we can’t observe one, but I suppose it’s not exactly the sanest thing to suggest that there is something there that isn’t, and there are accounts in stories where characters may question the presence of such a controlling force. Maybe our entire existence is being held together by some grand narrator that we’ll never know, maybe it isn’t, maybe we’ll never know. Its hard to avoid sounding as though I’m talking about a God type existence narrating us, and although I’m not excluding it as an option as sometimes narrators are described as having a Godlike presence or role in a story, just bear in mind that there are various other types of narration.

My waterproof phone.. got water in it.

Reading about narratives and stories was one of the reasons I took up a course in media, I was fascinated with the art of storytelling, and the media is all about telling people stories to engage and captivate them – and in today’s world – to motive them to buy buy buy! I took up a diploma in advertising in hopes to learn how to manipulate the minds of people and have them do my bidding, but over time I found that it wasn’t actually that difficult for a motivated individual or group to easily mislead and misdirect or have some form of control over masses of people, all you needed to do was tell them a convincing enough story and they’d fall into place relatively easily.

Don’t give yourselves to these machine men! Give yourself to democracy instead!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK2WJd5bXFg

Oh dear, I think I failed to see the difference.

Obviously this isn’t the case all the time, and in the events where control is being lost a war tends to break out. I mean who can blame them, you find that your family, friends and general public are living at the cost of the benefit of a few, it can be pretty infuriating.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before I lost track of why I found stories and narratives interesting at all, they just became tools used purely for the benefit of a few people. I forgot the mysticism of stories, and how captivating they can be, how a good story teller could fully immerse you in an imaginary world and how it made me want to create my own worlds. Having to dissect stories and look into them so analytically like I did in Cinema Studies did me no favours, it only just made them more predictable and almost repulsive.

 

In our tutorial for class I ended up bringing to question what a situation Bowfinger the movie would be considered as; if you don’t already know it the film Bowfinger is about a movie director who attempts to make a film with a star who doesn’t know he’s in it, and apparently is based on 1927 Russian film maker covertly shot footage of the vacationing Mary Pickford, and fashioned an entire film around the footage, creating the illusion that Pickford was actually starring in this Russian film <Link to Article> My question was, does this kind of thing count as a documentary or a film? When does a film stop being a film and start being a documentary and vice versa? Then someone in class brought up how in the lecture we talked about taxonomies and classifications of things and we discussed how its not quite so straightforward to categorize documentaries like that and that it was futile to bother with definitions, as definitions are easily disputed, which I found funny because it kind of defeats the purpose of the definition of definition. But I suppose thats debatable – or not? before I start going in cir—– Aaaaaaanyway the point was not to pick the style you intend to create with and cater to fit those categories, rather, decide what you want your story to do and then figure out what the tools you have can do to achieve it. This made me wonder why we have the categories at all then, just when we think we have it all figured out, something comes along and tears it all to pieces and we have to start building new systems to understand them all over again. Is it futile or absolutely necessary, or does it not matter either way and we should know them all whilst knowing they can’t fulfil the function they were created for? I’ll tell you this though, it makes me confused and want to laugh at the same time.

I missed out on week 2 but I’ll have em up here soon, I’m not so sure how to go about posting these, maybe I’ll keep editing this particular post and adding to it instead of creating a new post every week for 3 videos that people outside of this subject just wont understand.

Anyway this is the Light and Dark post, I’m missing a third video for some reason it didn’t post up on vine but I’ll fix that later.

https://vine.co/v/MhJ3bamOpZ5

https://vine.co/v/MhJ3VJMlVhn

Week 6

https://vine.co/v/M5ZA5xtlLuE