Here is our K-film 6 Degrees of Separation made by myself, Karl and Jie.
The link to the film is here
And you can find our essay below
Integrated Media – 1.
Tutor: Hannah Braiser
Group: Axel Debenham-Lendon, Jie Shi, Karl Walker.
K-Film Title: 6 Degrees of Separation.
For our main group project we all decided that we were most interested in people and their interactions with the world around them. To try and bring this theme forward we decided on creating a K-film centred on portraits, inspired by the website “Humans of New York,” and we would ask people questions after we had taken their portraits. We started with two questions: “What is your dream?” And “what piece of advice would you give to someone?” This was done to give more of an insight into the values and aspirations of the person in the portrait. After presenting numerous prototypes we decided upon narrowing the questions down to each subjects answer that was most meaningful to us. We related our works to the writing by Dovey and Rose on Documentary and Data Montage as we in essence were trying to create a study (documentary) of life by assembling data in a montage form that enables the viewer to engage with the film on multiple levels. We decided to call our film “6 Degrees of Separation” in reference to the theory that all people are interconnected by 6 associations/interactions. This heavily influenced the patterns created in the work as we wanted to establish the possible relationships between these people and how they co-exist together in various spaces.
The patterns in our film work via two methods, firstly the visual relations of place within the background of the clips and secondly through the thematic meaning within the responses of the subjects. The film is separated into three different landscapes within which the viewer navigates through and between. These different locations were separated into the park, city and night environments. By connecting the subjects through the aesthetic associations, rather than by mood or thematic patterns, we are aiming to prompt the audience to create their own mood or thematic connections. By grouping them in locations we allow the viewer to connect to the subjects spatially whilst also creating their own relations of contrast and juxtaposition through the responses of the subjects. The viewer is then left to connect the people explicitly through their spatial relations and implicitly through the values and ideas of their answers. By using these connections we are effectively creating a spatial montage which Manovich says represents “a logic of addition and co-existence.”(Dovey & Rose, 2012)
We used this to reinforce The overarching theme of the film as we attempted to symbolize the co-existence of different peoples and their values. Other visual patterns include the facial responses, most of which consist of natural stares, however some offer more emotive responses with laughs, smiles and slightly uncomfortable looks. Although these facial linkages were un-directed or premeditated they still reveal another possible level of emotive connection between the subjects. The lives of the clips also create a distinct pattern, the majority of clips within each cloud only possess one life and so they die upon viewing. Four clips however act as corridor and linkage clips between the clouds but possess a lower smaller narrative unit (SNU) priority meaning they are less likely to appear in each cloud until all the other clips are dead. This creates a slow death effect for the film as it ends with the viewer repeating through the last four corridor clips. Three of the corridor clips connect with two clouds as well as the other corridor clips e.g. one clip will connect to both the park and the night whilst others connect to night and city etc. There is one central clip that connects to every cloud as well as each corridor clip. This creates a unique structure and pattern of relations that can vary from viewing, as the film will ‘die’ in slightly different patterns. This is designed to give the film a re-watchable quality inviting the viewer to contemplate and perhaps allow a slightly different interpretation each time they view the film.
The interface consists of a large SNU viewer with three preview thumbnails sitting on the SNU’s right hand side. It also features a text box under the main SNU viewer displaying the subject’s responses with the graphic logo sitting by the right of the text. The logo also holds its own graphic symbolism to the film as it is a visual representation of connections in the form of an interlinked 6 sided shape in reference to the theory and namesake of the film ‘6 Degrees of Separation’. The layout of the interface uses a grid frame and draws from similarities with other large video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo which display the next video or in this case the thumbnails on the right hand side of the main video. By drawing on these established conventions the interface aims to give the user a comfortable and familiar interface.
The style of the interface is minimal as it consists of almost no graphical background or details apart from the logo and credits. This also synergizes with the layout by emphasizing focus of the content to the audience whilst leaving the logo as a reminder to the audience for the overarching concept of the film. Ideally the logo would have also served to a hyperlink to an ‘about’ page, however due to software limitation we were unable to add that feature. The layout also groups the SNU with the thumbnails creating a close spatial relationship between the clips and reinforcing one of the film’s central themes of the interconnected relationships between individuals in the different spaces. The interface also utilizes different aesthetic relations between the clips as the thumbnails are displayed as black and white small stills whilst the main SNU is displayed in a larger scale in colour and looping motion. These distinctions separate the SNU viewer visually from the preview thumbnails by creating a visual contrast, which is aimed to engage the viewer by withholding visual information prompting them to continue clicking to obtain further details. The visual contrasts also create an immediate hierarchy as the main SNU viewer takes visual priority with the audience. The last key piece of information that is withheld from the audience until the audience selects the chosen clip is the text, that is, the key element in revealing the thematic relations between each clip. The predominate font of the interface is ‘Georgia’ which provides a neutral serif style and also contrasts with the black of the background. The text is associated with the main SNU viewer through its positioning underneath the video on the layout yet it also possesses a lesser priority to the main SNU. It ranks lower on the hierarchy as it is both smaller in size and adheres to the black and white contrast similar to the previews.
The layout and style of the interface remain consistent over the length of the project with the exception of the opening credits. This consistency is aimed to encourage the audience to create their own connections and interpretations as to when the film’s patterns of location change. This change then also pushes the audience to actively engage with the project in finding the changes, as the visual separation of locations can at times be quite subtle.
We have constructed our content from the idea of portraits, which was influenced by the works of Humans of New York and also by the Kuleshov Experiment. Both cases are where images of humans may be read or interpreted in relation to their surrounds. We wanted to create a similar effect to this with the subject staring straight into the lens so as to give the viewer a more attached perspective to the piece. We shot all our footage on DSLR’s so as to give ourselves a shallow depth of field style and to have the opportunity to have all footage shot from a tripod. We chose to go with tripod-mounted shots as we believed that it would focus the audience on the subject more and not the camera movement. By using this technique we were trying to achieve still-moving life: still as in stationary but moving as it is a moving video image where the subjects will move slightly within the frame. This is to achieve a study of life that we are not privy to in our everyday lives. Looking into the eyes of someone is very personal, something we would not go around doing to anyone on the street, so the use of composition of the subject is quite challenging at the same time as being engaging because eye-to-eye contact is usually reserved for people who know each other. We positioned the subject off-center of the frame to allow the viewer to also take in context or detail of the environment in which we encountered the subjects. Although the shallow depth of field gave focus to the subject by dedicating a portion of the frame we were attempting to draw attention to the locations and setting. The looping effect was also relevant to this feature as it aims to allow the viewers focus to drift to other features within the frame such as the background or any noticeable facial qualities. We decided that we would strip all sound from our video content as we believed that there would be too many variables to encounter as well as being very time consuming for us to manage logistically. E.g. sound gear, stripping existing audio and pairing with new audio. In the end it was decided that we should use an “atmos track” of nature/city throughout the whole film. This works well with the piece by enabling the subject to be created in the environment in which they are found with minimal input from the audio track. This is to further elicit the audience to imagine themselves as the subject and not as the viewer.
In the reading cited earlier by Dovey and Rose they discuss how, “Fifty years ago, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin filmed French people answering the question, “Are you happy?” in what became an early sequence in the seminal documentary, Chronique d’un Ete. This is akin to our process when constructing our film. We wanted to gain further insight for ourselves and the viewer into the lives of other people. The questions asked were simple; what is your dream? And what’s your best piece of advice? This we planned to juxtaposition just below the video. Inspired by the Internet page Humans of New York in which the creator talks with the subjects that he has photographed and uses quotes from their conversation as text below his photos.
We felt that the question “Are You Happy?” wouldn’t work effectively in today’s social environment as people are much more cautious of people they don’t know. We thought that two questions would work well together in providing a backup for each. If one question fell flat, then perhaps the second question might elicit a better answer and viewer enagement. While in production we all came across some really interesting people who were eager to help out. One person was a girl in her late 20’s who was working as an intern in a psychology practice told one of us that “You have to be able to relax from whatever you do in life” “How do you relax from what you do at the moment?” she awnsered: “I’ve just taken up Pole dancing classes, its great fun and an amazing workout!” Before going up and engaging with this person and asking for their portrait there was no sign at all that she was into pole dancing, which is an instance of why we found our topic very enjoyable as giving an insight into the life of others.
We believe that we effectively constructed our film K-film as a data montage documentary by combining people and places in such a way as to elicit the audience’s engagement their own connections. This was done in relation to the idea of the Kuleshov Effect and the writings of Dovey and Rose who state there can be, “a third meaning produced through juxtaposition.”(Dovey & Rose, 2012) In this project we have added to this third meaning by placing text at the bottom of our film for each portrait so as to give the viewer a better insight into the life of that person. Our pattern was constructed so as to link peoples’ environments which could be a link between the people. Black and white thumbnails on the interface were used to attract the attention of the viewer on the main video and to focus them to the people and not what is going on around them. We feel that our use of an “atmos” track helped to link the subjects further and our overall theme of relationships between people.
Reference list
Dovey, J. and Rose, M. (2012) Were happy and we know it : Docu- mentary: Data: Montage. Studies in Documentary Film, 6 (2). pp. 159-173.