Month: July 2017

🔮

INTENTION

I was drawn to this studio as I believe that, especially moving forward in the digital age, creating immersive media (installations, spaces, or films), is more achievable and perhaps more important than it has ever been. Creating something that can envelop a person within an experience completely is an awesome task. As someone who aspires to create documentaries for a living, I hope to use the lessons I reap from this studio to enhance my films and create immersive documentaries that captivate their audience. Learning different techniques of immersion through editing, sound, movement, colour, and more, will enhance my ability to do this. Through exploring different types of immersion I furthermore hope to expand my practice and add to my repertoire of skills. I enjoy learning about and experiencing immersive art installations, and have some experience working to create such spaces, and would like to explore this further, while making any future work focussed upon my field of documentary, enabling me to explore other forms of documentary outside film. In terms of technical skills, I would like to make the most out of being in a studio with digital media students and learn more about sound, and audio editing, as I am lacking in this area and a higher awareness and level of proficiency in audio would elevate my films. In terms of media outputs for this studio, I would love to make another documentary film for my portfolio, however I am not sure what form this would take. So far I have been greatly inspired by the experimental documentary film Koyaanisqatsi, which was shown in class as an example of an immersive documentary film. I would like to learn more about other immersive documentary styles and techniques in order to apply these lessons to my own films, and create documentaries that visually and intellectually move beyond just sharing information, and truly engage the audience in an experience.

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.

‼️

IMMERSION

Immersion can be experience on physiological, emotional and intellectual levels.

Immersion often involves a journey:

• film
• literature
• ikea
• music
• sport
• rides
• VR & video games
• Youtube channel (& suggestions)
• our lives (narrativisation)

Immersion uses rewards to focus attention – sounds, points etc

Can combine goal based rewards with a journey – give meaning behind engagement

employ other senses to add value / percieved quality – unconsciously adding to the experience – eg influence through baking scent in new house

• sound
• light / texture
• scent
• movement
• cheerleaders, mascots, hot dogs & beer at sports

This monopolises attentionthrough bullying & seduction:

• strength of logic (pattern, form)
• intrigue (dreams, surreality)
• force (rides)
• stimulating competitive drive
• dynamic range / contrastive valence
• addiction

The Brain assesses streams of data for meaning and significance – you can coerce the audience to project importance / meaning onto the media – without having to actually have or convey meaning. Many immersive experiences draw on our evolutionary priming to trick us into particular states – emotion, attention.

 

Definitions of Immersion – Deep engagement (sensorial engulfment) with as stimulus

Often requires suspension of disbelief.

 

THREE MODES OF LISTENING

CAUSAL – listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source)

SEMANTIC – listening to a code or language to interpret a message

REDUCED – listening that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and meaning – pioneered in France

Shift from semantic to reduced modes of listening – repeating a phrase again and again and again – once semantic meaning has been extracted, other things such as pattens, pitch, melody and rhythm are noticed – the paralinguistic codes of language begin to be noticed.

VISION

Same applies to vision as well as sound – film, theatre, video games.

Immersive film – the space between the eye and the screen (the void) falls away.

 

Holl Reading 

Immersion – trance like state

• Cinema is connected to the nervous system – the filmmaker can exploit this connection
• the gaze unconscouslt moves in the pictures and the shots of he photographic surface
• movements are conveyed as moments of motion assembled in the field of vision
• experimental filmmakers liberated the body from popular discourse

 

Early 50 second documentary like films 

Tom Gunning – we should approach film today as they did when it was first created – a disregard for cinematic tradition

 

EMBODIED SUBJECTIVITY 

Perspective

• a way for the audience’s perspective to be aligned with a character in the film – your perspective, reactions, physical intellectual – are aligned with what’s on screen
• BORDERS – being made aware of the distance between you and what is being viewed – does it draw you in further or separate you out?
• CAMERA MOVEMENT – the way the content of the frame is re-oriented by the camera’s movement

 

Subjectivity & situation – the situation in which you’re experiencing the film etc will effect the experience.

 

Immersion only works when everything works together.