Lectorials, Media 1

Copyright

I found today’s presentation on copyright to be extremely interesting and valuable – the rules of copyright seem so vague and constantly changing that it was great to hear from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. The most surprising thing I learned from the presentation was that there’s actually a lot more infringement going on than I would have guessed, but most instances of infringement go unchallenged in court. It’s something that we, as media makers, need to be constantly vigilant about.

The example of GIFs in Facebook and on Tumblr got brought up, which is especially interesting because people would use such GIFs on social networking platforms billions of times a day, every single day, and yet Facebook isn’t constantly being served with takedown notices about peoples’ Parks and Recreation GIFs. But since every single rights holder would need to individually challenge Facebook’s legal right to publish those GIFs, at the same time, for any real action to be taken, it will probably never end up in court. I’m glad I’ll be able to post the Tom Haverford “baller time” GIF with impunity into the future.

I don’t usually do this, but since I think the copyright lecture will be relevant to me and my work well into the future, I’m going to basically just copy my notes from today’s class into this blog post, for future reference:

  • Copyright is automatic
  • No requirement to add (c) symbol
  • No registration requirement
  • Ideas are NOT protected by copyright
  • Facts are NOT protected by copyright

Copyright protects material form or expression of an idea (degree of skill and labour required to create), not the idea itself.

Ideas can, however, be confidential. To mark your ownership of an idea, express it in some physical form and then mark your work with a statement: “The information in this document is confidential and must not be used to without first obtaining written consent.”

Potential exceptions to copyright being automatically owned by the work’s creator:

  • Employer ownership
  • Contract or license (can be non-exclusive)
  • Assignment of rights

Moral rights apply to all copyright works, but can be waived:

  1. Right of attribution
  2. Right of false attribution
  3. Right of integrity (deals with honour and reputation – e.g. if someone remixes your work in a way that harms your reputation)

In Australia, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, but different countries have different terms. Factors influencing duration:

  • published/unpublished or made public (even unpublished works are copyright)
  • published anonymously / pseudonymously
  • film made before 1st May 1969

Copyright cannot be renewed in Australia, because there has never been the requirement to register a work for copyright.

Exceptions (when a license is not needed):

  • Fair dealing
    • student research and study (only applies while studying)
    • research or study
    • criticism or review
    • reporting the news
    • parody and satire
    • (public use is not OK)
  • Education
  • Libraries / archives
  • Cultural institutions and museums

For infringement to be considered the following could have been breached:

  • Rights of ownership
  • Substantial part of work (quality not necessarily quantity)
  • Moral rights
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Media 1, Thoughts

How to Become Great at Just About Anything

The latest episode of the Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “How to Become Great at Just About Anything“, and it’s all about the concept of concerted practice that we tackled in the first couple of weeks of Media 1. There are some great interviewees including Malcolm Gladwell and psychologist/sociologist Anders Ericsson, who has done some prominent work in the field of expertise and development.

It adds some important context around the concept of the “10,000 hour rule”, including that just practice by itself is not enough – one must also have a number of other advantages too (talent, opportunity, support, etc.). Good things to keep in mind!

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Cinema Studies

Sound and Vivre sa vie

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.


Conventionally, sound is used to support or reinforce the visual and narrative elements of a film. In Vivre sa vie (1962), director Jean-Luc Godard plays with the conventions of sound just as he and other French New Wave practitioners often experimented with accepted cinematography and editing techniques.

The perceptual properties of sound (volume, pitch and timbre) as well as the dimensions of sound mixing and sound editing (rhythm, space, perspective and time) are all manipulated in calculated ways so that the sound track actively engages the audience, rather than remaining perceptually invisible as sound tracks often do.

As just one example, under the opening titles we see Nana (Anna Karina) shot in close-up with an orchestral theme that abruptly stops after a few seconds, with the rest of the shot continuing in silence. Silence, or a close approximation to it, occurs in odd or unconventional places throughout the film. By drawing such prominent attention to elements like dynamic volume and nondiegetic music and sound, Godard foregrounds the sound track’s unreality and further provokes his audience to question the rules and limits of cinematic form.

In a film thematically concerned with performativity and the parameters of cinema, featuring a number of nondiegetic elements that draw attention to the fact that Vivre sa vie is a piece of art, manipulation of sound in this way has a significant impact on the experience of the film.

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Media 1, Workshops

The elements of a podcast

In our Workshop this week we spent some time listening to the “Sleep” episode of Radiolab, a science/discovery podcast produced by WNYC Studios, and noted down some of the elements that make up narrative audio:

  • Music
  • Narration
  • Interviews / conversations
  • Sound effects
  • Atmosphere / sync sounds
  • Archival recordings
  • Vox pops

Apart from archival recordings and vox pops, the Radiolab episode used every single one of these elements — and in fact, often several were in use simultaneously.

Personally, I’ve tried to listen to Radiolab in the past (because the subject matter interests me), but in general I find their style far too busy and overly constructed to comfortably listen to. Compared to a show like This American Life or Planet Money, which are relatively unadorned and mostly let subjects/interviewees speak in full sentences, Radiolab barely goes a second without using some kind of audio edit, either by the host chiming in to lead the narrative, or an inserted sound effect, music, etc. This cacophony of sounds overwhelms my ears and I lose track of the narrative thread, which is a cardinal sin for documentary podcasts like Radiolab.

This episode of Planet Money, which aired this week, seems by comparison much easier to follow:

It still uses all the same elements as Radiolab (plus vox pops), but they are layered in a far more spacious way so they don’t conflict with one another.

A narrative documentary podcast is one format my group is considering for the audio essay in Project Brief 4, so seeing and dissecting how the professionals do it will help immensely.

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Cinema Studies

A close formal reading of Zodiac

In his 2007 film Zodiac, David Fincher precisely controls the visual aspects of film language to drive story action, develop characterisation and convey meaning. A formal analysis of a single shot, which occurs at timecode 02:19:04 on the Director’s Cut Blu-ray version of the film, reveals the contribution of lighting, colour, focus and staging to the overall experience of the shot and the meaning it conveys. In the scene, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) visits Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer) after receiving an anonymous tip that a former workmate of Vaughn’s may be the Zodiac killer, with handwriting evidence linking the workmate to the Zodiac’s letters. During a conversation in Vaughn’s kitchen, which immediately precedes the shot being analysed in this essay, Graysmith learns that the handwriting sample actually came from Vaughn and not the workmate, implying that Vaughn himself may be the killer.

In the shot that follows, by meticulously controlling the visual properties of the frame in the context of the scene and the film as a whole, Fincher suddenly and immediately evokes the mood and atmosphere of a thriller. After over one hour without seeing a murder on screen, the audience is manipulated by a combination of cinematography and mise-en-scène to believe that the Zodiac killer may spring back into activity by striking against the film’s main character.

Taken in isolation, the most immediately identifiable characteristic of the shot is its extremely dark, low contrast lighting and slightly yellow hue. The colour yellow has a centrally important meaning in the visual style of Zodiac, and this meaning changes in the context of various scenes and time periods throughout the film. In early scenes in the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom, yellow (along with similar colours orange and brown) are warm visual signifiers of the 1960s and 1970s, the retro colour palette helping the film establish its setting and year. By the time the film arrives at the scene set in Vaughn’s house, which occurs in 1979, yellow has been stripped of its nostalgic properties and is now more strongly connotative of bruising and decay, as the toll of investigating the Zodiac killer begins to destroy the lives of those investigating him. By grading this scene with a dark yellow tint, Fincher further illustrates the damaging frustration and obsession that has gripped Graysmith while also drawing visual parallels to the murder scene that opens the film, which is similarly depicted in shadowy yellow tones.

In terms of staging, the shot is deliberately composed to convey a change in the power relationship between the two characters. Before Graysmith realises that Vaughn might be dangerous, they are shot in a relatively standard manner and roughly on equal terms — medium shots follow the dialogue from one character to the other as they discuss the handwriting evidence in Vaughn’s kitchen. But in contrast to the earlier shot, after his realisation Graysmith is placed in the foreground to the far right of screen and shot in close-up, taking up roughly fifty per cent of the frame. Behind him, to the left of the frame, Vaughn stands deep in the background over Graysmith’s shoulder. The shot is photographed with a shallow depth of field to keep Graysmith perfectly sharp while Vaughn is almost completely out of focus, his dark brown and grey costume blending in with the dark background. Graysmith is clearly the most visible subject of the shot, but Vaughn looms over it in such a way that he controls the action and demands the audience’s attention. This shot would likely have been photographed with a long focal length through a telephoto lens, which in addition to a shallow focal plane also has the effect of visually compressing the depth of the composition and making it appear to the audience as if Vaughn is mere centimetres behind Graysmith, when he’s actually metres away.

The combined result of all these visual choices is that Vaughn looks as though he is towering over Graysmith’s shoulder, watching over him like a hunter stalking its prey. This heightens the sense of imminent danger and also plays into the genre associations the audience is being manipulated to make. The shot lingers on Graysmith’s face and eyes in close-up as they dart from side to side, emphasising his fear and paranoia as he starts to put together what he’s just learned, realising that he’s stumbled into danger and trying to figure a way out. His hair and make-up is styled in such a way that a mixture of sweat and rain glistens on his forehead and facial features, visually separating him from the darker surrounding of the frame and emphasising that he is foreign to this environment, an interlocutor who is no longer in control of what happens to him.

Approximately three seconds into the shot, Vaughn indicates that he wants them both to go downstairs and turns on the basement light, which throws a flood of diegetic yellow light into the background of the scene. Previously the shot had been lit primarily from above, which gave each character’s face sunken features and a death-like quality. The basement light hits Vaughn entirely on the left-hand side of his face as it streams out of the basement from the extreme left of screen, without producing any significant change in the lighting on Graysmith’s face. The right-hand side of Vaughn’s face plunges even further into shadow, distorting his features and making him appear even more obscured and menacing in the background. This reinforces the character’s mystery, as neither Graysmith nor the audience can yet tell what his true intentions are. The light from the basement also creates a vertical line of shadow that bisects the frame between the two characters, enclosing each in a small, tight square of space. This foreshadows Graysmith’s confinement in the remainder of the scene, as he finds himself locked into a potentially dangerous situation without any obvious way out.

These visual signifiers rely on the audience’s familiarity with the thriller genre and some of its associated tropes to be effective — particularly the idea that basements are dangerous places with no escape, that villains are generally lit with dramatic shadows, and that breaking into a sweat is associated with fear. At nine seconds long the shot is the longest in the whole scene, and the spacious shot duration allows the dark mood and negative associations to settle over the frame slowly, giving the audience a sinking feeling to go along with Graysmith’s. Had Fincher cut away at any point during the shot it could have undercut the moment of emotion and empathy that slowly builds as Graysmith realises his predicament. By looking directly at Graysmith’s eyes, shot from a level angle, head-on direction and in close-up, the audience is directed to experience the scene from his perspective, and left there for several seconds of agony.

In a film that is generally concerned with power, control and unfulfilled obsessions, with a main character that systematically pieces together a case from disparate and conflicting sources, it’s the first time Graysmith feels like he’s not completely in control. Due to precise manipulation of cinematography and mise-en-scène, it’s also the first time in over an hour that the audience feels the same way.

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Media 1, Readings

Non-narrative cinema

Since I’m doing a Cinema Studies contextual stream I’ve previously blogged about non-narrative form and experimental cinema. Doing this week’s reading1 has been handy to consolidate the forms of non-narrative cinema:

  • Categorical form: Enumerates subject matter and organises it into categories and subcategories. Examples: The Fog of War, Tokyo Olympiad, At Berkeley, The Clock.
  • Rhetorical form: An attempt to persuade the audience to adopt a certain position. Examples: The Hunting Ground, The Invisible War, Bowling for Columbine.
  • Abstract form: Manipulates shapes, colours and lines in experimental ways. Examples: Stan Brakhage, Len Lye.
  • Associational form: Poetic juxtaposition of mismatched elements to create associations in the audience’s minds. Examples: Baraka, Samsara, La Jetée.
  1. Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. (1997), Film art: An introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Last night I watched a great little short documentary by Jon Ronson on the archive of boxes Stanley Kubrick left behind after this death. The boxes contain vast amounts of research for his films (both completed films and those that never made it off the ground), threatening crank letters, odd memos from Kubrick to his staff, and much more.

It’s a fascinating insight into the level of minute detail Kubrick obsessed with, which definitely shows through in his films. I think above all a producer/director needs to be concerned with detail.

Cinema Studies

Narrative and Mystery Road

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.


Narrative form is a framework in which a series of events is arranged in time and space, governed by the effects of causality. Narrative films may or may not be presented in chronological story order, the plot duration may or may not match the story duration (usually not), and the space may be real or imagined, but just by operating in such a way that causes and effects occur in some kind of temporal order, in some kind of defined space, means that a film has a narrative.

The plot of Mystery Road is a tiny keyhole through which a sprawling story is viewed. The story stretches back years in the past, across many locations involving hundreds of characters, but the plot is restricted to Jay’s experience investigating a single crime in a relatively small number of locations. So while the story duration is several years, the plot duration is mere days, and the screen duration is just over two hours.

The story information is meted out as Jay discovers it (the narration is subjective), involving the audience in the processes and procedures of detective work as he uncovers the real causes and motivations that lie behind the crime. The story space is quite vast, involving cities, towns and other locations across Australia, but the plot space is restricted only to the locations Jay visits in investigating the crime. Interestingly, the screen space could actually be considered larger than the plot space, because there are a number of gorgeous extreme long shots of vast outback locations that stretch far further than the spaces in which characters interact.

Causality in Mystery Road, as is often the case in thrillers and crime films, is meticulously controlled. Causes turn into effects, which spark more causes, and the plot continues along a narrow thread of story information. The climax of the film resolves the major chains of cause and effect, but there are also significant events that happen off screen, or are presumed to have occurred before or after the plot sequence (most notably the inciting murder).

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Assessments, Media 1, Workshops

PB4: SWOT analysis

Today we were given Project Brief 4, which is a collaborative portrait of a “media idea”. I’m in a group with Emily and Katrina, and from our first discussion in the Workshop today I can tell I was pretty lucky with the random assignment of group mates because they are both totally switched on. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can achieve.

As part of the group process we’ve been asked to complete a SWOT analysis on ourselves, so here is mine.

SWOT analysis

Strengths: I’m glad we were assigned the Texts & Narrative topic, because I feel like I have a strong working knowledge of media texts (cinema, music, literature, television) and, in particular, the history of film.

Weaknesses: I’m not a super creative person when working alone. I respond best to group brainstorming exercises and feeding off other peoples’ ideas. I also tend to take over if I feel like no one is taking the lead and if I feel strongly about something.

Opportunities: I’d really like to use this project to genuinely collaborate with other people, just to see what the process is like. I’ve seen what I can do if I’m working on my own, so I’m really keen to put our heads together and come up with something that honestly reflects the entire group, rather than just collecting individual contributions and smushing them together.

Threats: I can’t think of any threats in particular. I have a pretty flexible schedule and am happy to travel for meetings and the like, so I hope I’ll be a good group mate logistically.

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