before we start (this kind of counts as starting) i must say i was extremely impressed with the one take film “betrayal” we watched in class, because i was kind of annoyed and weirded out by the excessive and prolonged amount of screaming at the start, but to then to see the big reveal of it being a footy thing, about that kind of “betrayal”, it was pretty damn good.

one take shots/films i feel tend to become so impressive because they are really marvels in cinema, for the coordination, its like seeing a film set at it’s highest synergy, where everyone is meticulously plotting and planning to really make this shot work.

Victoria, as a recent one shot film was extremely impressive in this sense because it seemed like such a wide ranging amount of space, was amassed throughout Berlin, while being able to work out how to make everything work out so well? must have been some real rampant behind the scenes whatsapp or something.

our one take shot was “loosely (more ‘tightly’) inspired” by the 5 dollar note shot we were shown in class, where it was a flyer being tossed around. it all ended up working pretty well in the end, thought it was filmed pretty well and didn’t take to many takes, by the latter half of the takes made we were already coordinating pretty well, at least the paper plane was flying real nice

i feel a little uneasy about the thought that yeah, i may not have any privacy at all, and the words i’m currently typing could perhaps be being tracked by some unknown third party, at the very least the government is tracking that at this point in time i am typing these words out on the internet in the way they are tracking my metadata, but like i’m pretty actively aware of this fact, and this smart technology kind of popped up rather late in my life

by that i mean the generation that was immediately born into the accessibility of this technology, playing kids games on a tablet at an early age, using social media at an age younger than they’re supposed to (like “technically” facebook starts at 13) is also being immediately born into this lack of privacy without anyway of understanding what exactly they’re doing before it’s far too late

like something that comes starkly into mind occured the other day when i was hanging out with some extended family and my cousin in year 7 was showing off how she was using this app where should could see the location of her parents and her cousins (and vice-versa) by simply providing reciprocal permission to track her phones location and their phones location, and this baffled me. because it extended this lack of privacy to be provided in family, where her mum can just on the fly track where her daughter is, which just kind of seems like something that is at the very least peculiar.

This interview lectorial just had me thinking of interviews, especially in pop culture, specifically how most interviews these days can frustrate celebrities so much due to the monotonous nature of them all. It kind of frustrates me too, to say have some interest in following an actor/actress or musician, to the extent where I’d want to watch some interviews in which they are the interviewee, and for all the questions and answers to be on average exactly the same as all the other ones.

And yeah, started thinking about the marginally innovative interviews I’d been watching recently, generally seeming to have a unique point of difference that allowed for that to be the underlying focus over the questions that are asked (which is what the production company’s are hoping travel the most)

The first that comes to mind is “Hot Ones”, which is just a 20 minute long video with a FPOI (Famous Person of Interest), and they’re just being interviewed whilst consuming progressively more spicy chicken wings, with progressively more spicy hot sauce. Throughout the video there are cryptic mentions or allusions to the crux of the content that is meant to be taken, like Charlie Day here is being interviewed to promote his new film, pretty sure it’s the one with The Rock and it’s about two teachers about to fight each other?? Great stuff.

The second is Nardwuar, who is just another one that falls into the list of all-time greatest interviewers, and his niche lies in the fact that he does such extensive research (probably stalking) of the subject that he is able to supply them with cryptic gifts throughout the video as cues for these completely random life moments of theirs, it generally seems to elicit such great responses, lots of suprise from the interviewee, and it’s really just great to watch

Between two ferns?

This weeks lecture and readings were all cannon fodder to really think about the nature of interviews, and how in a way the interviewer and the relevant parties usually have all of the power, in the way that they are the ones that ask the questions, and in that sense in their decision of how many open questions or closed questions they choose to ask, there is really not much the interviewee can do to alter the scenario without risking losing face.

They also are on top of the choice of setting, or at the very least the party that chooses the setting has quite a powerful choice, since it can sometimes be geared to elicit some sort of response. Like for instance some thing I thought about when prompted by the setting was the Stephen Dank interview on Channel 7 a few years back during the Essendon Drug Saga where it seemed like the room was dimly lit, on top of being rather heated up, leading to a sweaty looking Dank, to simply, through the setting alone paint him has a nervous and obviously guilty man (that said I don’t want to talk about it…)

I struggle to think of many scenarios where the interviewer is even in view, like apart from the candid interview master Louis Theroux, where it is pretty true that his “pressure and reactions” are integral to the exchange, so much so it’s almost unfathomable to picture Louis not in the frame when he is getting so much out of his subjects.

He would almost be the pinnacle of “mastering the interviewing process”, and I can’t even pin it in my mind to any one thing he employs in his interviewing.

I quite enjoyed the production exercise in this weeks tute, but feel like every week I kind of wish we maybe knew what we were going to be doing before the tutorial began, so like it was upon us to preemptively pool together ideas and be expected to have like a bit of grounding for what we were meant to do, because I feel like the ones i’ve taken part in, in the last two weeks have been like ideas that struggle a little on the basis of their being so quick to the draw, to an extent slightly frantically deciding what to do.

That said I’ve been more or less a fan of the ideas, like this week for the no cut filming we attempted to do a little bit where a person drops their myki and then a guy tries to get it back to him, a fairly convoluted idea people for semi frustrated with when we were running out of time and kind of annoyed with the shots being used (sorry guys)

I think it kind of worked out still though, but I’m intrigued to see it next week. 

Otherwise progress with the interview video is progressing, definitely glad I asked Brian something in passing about some shots as I didn’t realise we were pretty instructed to do a “proper interview” style because I was trying at the time to make the most of my situation cos my friend Cal was pretty clued into the F1, but I think now I have some pretty cohesive footage, and also didn’t know that we could also use found footage and I’m pretty excited about that.

I feel like I’ve been watching more movies than I ever have as of recently, like when I wasn’t studying in the city it felt like a bit of a stretch to venture out to Nova on my days off, but now that I go to RMIT even though I’m not at uni it feels fine? Maybe because I’m making the trek to the city on more of a regular basis it feels fine to do as much? 

Anyway on Monday we went to Nova with the goal in mind of seeing Toni Erdmann, but because it was in the tiny cinema it had already sold out, but my buddies and I had a one track mind for at least watching a film, so we looked at the options, and A Man Called Ove was what we decided on. Swedish, darkish comedy? Another foreign language film dark comedy? Why not.

It was really good in any sense, but it was about a curmudgeon who had just lost his wife and a recurring thing in the film was that he was trying to end his life, and each sense in which he attempts to do so he is distracted by the goings of the world around him. It was a pretty interesting well rounded movie though and I felt like it covered all the bases you would kind of want, like to get a back story into why he became like this, and it was sweet.

It was interesting because this week headspace made that press release concerning the new Netflix original show 13 Reasons Why, and that was intriguing because I’d seen it pop up, I read what it was about, and maybe watched approximately 13 minutes before I stopped, for the same underlying reasons that Headspace feels it was so problematic. Which I guess seems weird cos I’ve just talked about how much I liked A Man Called Ove, but my reasoning here is that in a way Ove’s attempts exist, but he always seems to want to deal with what is still happening, and the resolution of the film itself ends on a relatively lighter note considering the basis of the film. Definitely preferable to 13 Reasons Why, wherein we’re supposed to just follow these 13 episodes detailing a side of a prerecorded tape that places the blame on a particular person in Rachel’s life that she feels is responsible for her decision to end her life, and I feel like it just opens a really unnecessary can of worms for the viewers, to consider whether they were to blame, and potentially garner those thoughts themselves.

That said I think it’s really important that it’s kind of directly through the existence of the show that theres a relatively high brow level of discussion regarding suicide, in that through the shows kind of missing the mark, important relevant parties have felt it necessary to mark these press releases. I just hope it’s enough to outweigh the pretty detrimental nature of the show itself though.

Editing this footage from last weeks Tutorial I was intrigued in the sense that I felt like it really accentuated the things I needed to improve in my filmmaking, in like colour grading and certain things, but I recently acquired Creative Cloud meaning it was my first dabbling into the latest version of Premiere Pro which is pretty good