Author Archives: Bradley Dixon

Media 1, Readings

Flow

I really responded to the reading on Group Flow this week. 1

When I was younger I worked in my spare time as a freelance web designer, building websites and doing design work for local bands and musicians. It was in doing this work that I first experienced “flow” or being in The Zone, as I better knew it. On occasion I would get so into the work I was doing that I would work all through the night and into the next morning, well past sunrise. This happened multiple times, and I’ve never in my life been so productive as during those all-night sessions fuelled by music and terrible junk food.

One of the best articles I’ve read about The Zone is “A Precious Hour” by Rands, an engineer and artist who has worked all through the technology industry. As someone who is easily distracted and expert at procrastinating, I really jive with the idea that The Zone should always be a destination you’re striving to get to. I can get so much more work done in one hour in The Zone than I could in a whole day in what Rands calls the Faux-Zone, which gives you all the positive chemical feedback of productivity but without the actual productivity.

I’ve already discovered that I can’t get any study done at home – I need to travel into the city to base myself in the library or another quiet study space if I want to get anything done. Just being in a distraction-free environment goes a long way to getting me to The Zone.

(Incidentally, Rands has a few other fantastic articles including one about the psychology of being an introvert, and the importance of having a cave. (Note: this is not the same as a “man cave”, which is a concept I detest.))

But in terms of group work, the rules that govern flow are a lot different. With disparate voices, opinions and desires all forced to coexist, there needs to be a more rigid structure supporting the group to collaborate in a productive, pleasant way. Sawyer (2007) dictates ten conditions that should be met for group flow to be achieved:

  1. The group’s goals need to be aligned and recorded
  2. Group members need to practice close listening
  3. Complete concentration
  4. All members should feel in control, heard by the group
  5. Blending egos is of utmost importance, lest people feel overwhelmed or crowded out of decision making
  6. Participation should be equal amongst all members
  7. Familiarity
  8. Communication
  9. Moving it forward, always building on ideas with progression in mind
  10. Accepting the potential for failure
  1. Sawyer, K. (2007), Group Genius: The creative power of collaboration, New York: Basic Books, pp. 39-57. ↩
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Assessments, Media 1, Workshops

PB3 critical feedback

In today’s Workshop we watched each other’s PB3 films, and it was really great to see how excellent most of them were. In PB2 there were a lot of common themes/shots/ideas across films (including mine), but I think as we’ve become more confident with our skills we’re all starting to creatively branch out a little more.

I’m going to do a little critical reflection exercise for the people sitting at my table – Isobel, Rosie, Riah and Hannah. I’ve decided to use two of De Bono’s thinking hats – the yellow hat (positivity) and black hat (negativity) – to frame my feedback in a constructive way. For the most part I’ve really had to try hard to find things to criticise for the black hat. On the whole everyone’s films are fantastic, and they all make mine look boring in comparison.

Isobel – “There’s No One Like You”

Yellow hat:

  • The opening/establishing shots are really nice, with the camera focused on a small detail and everything else blurred. These shots combine well to ease into the interview.
  • The layering and compilation of B-roll footage is fantastic – probably the best of all the videos we saw today. I particularly liked the transition from footage of the subject performing in The Rocky Horror Picture Show into an original shot of her pointing herself out on the poster. So good.
  • This film shows the importance of having a subject who can talk at length and lead a conversation. I’ve interviewed actors in the past and there are some who are very comfortable reciting lines but couldn’t have a natural conversation on camera to save themselves, but the subject of this film has some really interesting and compelling things to say and knows how to speak in complete sentences. A really good choice of interviewee.

Black hat:

  • Even though I love the big colourful patchwork chair the subject is sitting in, I feel like it might be a little too noticeable and overwhelms the subject in some of the wider shots.
  • The answer about Rod Taylor comes out of nowhere and isn’t completely explained. From context I think the audience can piece together that she’s talking about her favourite actor to work with, but that could be made clearer.
  • This is a bit of a nit-pick, but there’s a television on in the background of some shots which is slightly distracting.

Rosie – “Escapism to the Country: The togetherness in isolation”

Yellow hat:

  • The shots of travelling are great – combined with the music bed they really evoke the feeling of taking a long trip out to the country.
  • I really like the found footage explaining the golden triangle, and it’s integrated very well into the surrounding parts.
  • The moments of humour are genuinely surprising and funny. I particularly like the visual framing of the “toxic gas” shot, which emphasises the sign by shooting it from two distances. The joke probably wouldn’t have worked if it was shot differently.
  • Ending on the best moment of the video, “finding that one thing”, is brilliant and really ties the whole piece together.

Black hat:

  • The subject speaks very quietly – this is obviously something that might be hard to control, especially if he’s naturally a quiet speaker, but perhaps some coaching/direction to speak loudly would have resulted in better quality audio (the hiss is quite apparent in some sections).
  • On a minor technical point, most of the found footage is shown very small in the centre of the frame. If this was scaled to fill the screen I think it would have been easier to see.
  • This isn’t even really a criticism, but I loved the shots of the landscape taken at sunset. I wish there was more of it.

Riah – “Finding Passion with Phoebe Rose”

Yellow hat:

  • I really like that this film has a subject matter to explore (keeping passions alive), rather than functioning as a more general portrait. I feel like I was able to get to know the subject just as well this way, and it gave the film a more concrete direction.
  • Found footage is integrated exceptionally well – the music video, the photos, the screen test, and the footage playing on the iPhone are all perfectly timed to support the voiceover narration.
  • The French accordion music that comes in when the subject starts talking about learning French is fantastic.
  • The credits, which highlight the photo of Phoebe and Riah, is a great idea executed beautifully.

Black hat:

  • Is that footage from Queen Live at Wembley really Creative Commons?
  • The music overwhelms the audio and could probably stand to be lowered a few decibels.
  • The transition into the music video could have been cleaner, maybe by having the audio fade up well before cutting to the footage.

Hannah – “Conor Grace: A Portrait”

Yellow hat:

  • The opening credits are really nice. I’d like to learn how to make titles like that.
  • Found footage is beautiful, particularly the tracking shot of the rower at sunrise.
  • Having a rower for a subject leads to some really fantastic on-location action footage. This is another great choice of interviewee.
  • The shot where the rower has to dodge a swan is surprisingly hilarious.

Black hat:

  • The audio levels could be adjusted a little – it’s very loud, and the music occasionally overwhelms the interviewee.
  • Beautiful found footage is great, but it highlights how ordinary the footage from the Sony MC50 looks in comparison.
  • Some of the editing transitions are a little abrupt and jarring.
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Lectorials, Media 1

In Seth Keen’s Lectorial presentation this week he mentioned that narrative films are generally governed by temporal relations, but in non-narrative film the governing force is often spatial. That is, rather than following a cause-and-effect procession, the various elements of an experimental film can work together to create a “space” in the audience’s mind.

A couple of years ago I read a reddit AMA with some of the crew that work on David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. Attenborough’s films aren’t strictly non-narrative, because they have such prominent narration and they’re generally constructed as a narrative film with characters, settings, etc., but the material they shoot could easily be compiled into an observational documentary in the style of Frederick Wiseman if they so choose.

Anyway, I’m a huge Attenborough fan so I read the entire AMA with glee, but one thing in particular stuck out to me: I discovered that in Attenborough’s films (and most nature documentaries) the sound is recorded entirely separately from the video. So when you see amazing video of a bird imitating human noises, chances are it’s actually a bit of a cheat and they’ve just layered audio of one bird over footage of a different bird.

I’d never really given this a conscious thought before but it makes sense in hindsight, because unless you have an incredibly sensitive directional microphone attached to each camera there’s no way you can record the sound of, say, a lion from 300m away and have it sound as crystal clear as it does in the finished product. I guess you could consider it a kind of foley, in a way… where the foley artist is an animal.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the result is a spatial relationship between all the pieces of material (audio and video), which is put together into a whole by the audience in their minds. This is another example of closure, which was discussed early in the semester.

One of the main things I’m learning in Media 1 so far is that so much of the work in making a text coherent is actually done by the audience. Very strange.

Cheating spatial relations

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Media 1, Workshops

(Not) noticing

I can safely say that noticing isn’t one of my strong suits. Unless I make a deliberate effort, I tend to get caught up in my own thoughts and can often let the world completely pass me by. I like to think it’s just that my brain is extremely efficient at deciding whether information is useful or irrelevant from moment to moment, so I only concentrate on whatever cognitive task is currently most important to me. This is fantastic in some contexts (on the train, for example), but it did lead to a slight fail situation in this week’s Workshop.

Louise ran a quick exercise where she asked everyone to turn around and write down what we thought she was wearing, from memory. Some people were bang on, but I could not remember a single thing. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I literally couldn’t remember a single thing about her clothes.

So that definitely wasn’t the best vote of confidence for my awareness skills. But it was useful to know that about myself, so I can work on it in future.

The funny thing is, when I’m watching a movie or television show I can notice the most seemingly insignificant details and recall them long after watching. The difference is that when I’m watching something I’m in a noticing frame of mind, so I make a conscious effort to take note of things and can commit them to memory easily.

So this week I’m going to give myself a little exercise to start noticing more. Any time I walk into a room I’m going to try to notice how many lights are on, what the temperature is, and how many people are on their phones.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB3: Eraserhead

Behold, my finished video for Project Brief 3.

I decided to call it Eraserhead, both as a reference to collector culture and as an ironic nod to one of the most disturbing films of all time — and possibly the film least like mine in all of cinema history.

The film is an interview with my brother, Gavin, who has held on to his small, crappy collection of erasers for 30 years despite their total lack of usefulness. I’m really interested in the idea of nostalgia as one of the biggest mediators of human experience/behaviour, and my brother’s collection is a direct manifestation of his attachment to childhood objects.

Aesthetically, I decided to place Gavin against a plain white background and shoot him with high contrast lighting and exposure. I hoped that this would visually separate him from “real life”, to reinforce the idea that his collection is a bit weird and abnormal, and also to give the interview a slightly clinical feeling. I first saw this visual style in the films of Errol Morris, my favourite documentarian, and I tried to replicate his aesthetic as best I could using a home-made lighting rig against a wall in my living room. I was pleasantly surprised at how close to my vision it ended up being. In a studio environment with a professional lighting set-up it would be quite easy to improve it even further.

Another aspect of my film that I’m happy with is the audio, and specifically how it is constructed. I made heavy use of J-cuts after first learning about them in our week three Workshops, and they really help to tie everything together into a cohesive whole. Each sentence flows into the next and it feels like a single piece of dialogue even though there are dozens of cuts in the audio track.

It was a real struggle to find footage online that I could incorporate into my project. Even when I could think of suitable types of footage that I could use to illustrate what Gavin was saying, I would search online and more often than not I would come back empty handed. I had a very specific idea of the kind of footage I wanted to incorporate (vintage black and white educational films) because it would tie into my theme of nostalgia, but it was actually impossible to find such footage in most circumstances, particularly the shot of a child crying. I ended up having to “grunge-ify” some recent footage so that it would fit the rest of the piece. Next time I’m planning a video project that will incorporate found footage, I think I’ll try to source it before I finalise my vision for the project, because it really was the hardest part of the whole exercise.

But I think the biggest weakness of the film is that it was difficult to shape Gavin’s interview answers into a narrative that adequately gets the film’s point across. I think audiences will likely watch my film and then afterwards think, “so what?”. I am really interested in making documentary portraits, and this was a useful experiment for my first time, but in the future I think it will be valuable to ensure my subject has an interesting story to tell that doesn’t need to be shaped too much (or at all).

On the other hand, I really like films where the “point” is either ambiguous or subjective, and it’s up to the audience to do the work to understand it, so that could be true of Eraserhead too. I guess I’ll find out when it’s presented to my classmates.

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Narrative and story in a poetic short film with no dialogue

The presence of Michael Dudok de Wit in the 2016 Cannes film festival announcement prompted me to re-watch his 2000 film Father and Daughter, which won an Oscar in 2001 for Best Animated Short Film. You should definitely watch it if you have a spare 10 minutes:

It’s a beautiful film. The amount of story and feeling Dudok de Wit is able to express without dialogue, just through movement, music and sound effects, is really incredible.

It got me thinking about this week’s readings, and I realised that Father and Daughter has all the major elements that a cohesive film should have. There’s a three-act structure, a protagonist and an antagonist, and the success of the film relies on its ability to evoke empathy in its audience (which is does very well, at least in my case).

The protagonist is the daughter, as the whole story is told from her point of view narratively and emotionally. She undergoes the most change/development, as she grows from a little girl to an old woman, and has a conscious desire (for her father to return).

The antagonist is the father. This is interesting because the father is actually barely in the film at all, and he’s not an enemy in the traditional sense, but his character’s desires/behaviour lie in opposition to the daughter.

Act I sets up the characters (father, daughter) and the setting. Depending on how you read the film the inciting incident could be the birth of the daughter, or it could be the start of a war. There is a first-act turning point when the father gets into a boat and rows away, never to return. The film leaves it intentionally ambiguous, but this could be read literally (he abandoned the daughter) or metaphorically (rowing away could be a symbol for death, or for going off to war, or various other potential explanations).

In Act II we watch as the daughter goes through her life, growing older little by little, revisiting the many places she and her father visited on their bikes when she was younger. We see her go through her entire life, wondering about her father and the loss in her life.

Finally, in Act III we see the daughter, now an elderly woman herself, literally follow in her father’s footsteps as she steps out from the beach and finds his abandoned, decaying rowboat. Again, depending on your reading of the film the climax and resolution could actually mean different things, but they’re certainly present at the end of the film.

So it goes to show that even a poetic animated film with no dialogue can be read according to the principles of narrative and story laid out by McKee and Rabiger.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Cannes program highlights

The official line-up for the Cannes Film Festival was announced a few days ago, and as expected it’s a hell of a collection of films.

Every year the Cannes announcement is exciting for two reasons: one, as the world’s most high-profile festival, many filmmakers premiere their work at Cannes and it’s fun to get a look at what some of my favourite directors are up to; and two, the Melbourne International Film Festival draws a lot of its program directly from Cannes, so in some ways it’s a very early MIFF pre-announcement.

I’ve been to MIFF every year since around 2009 (seeing between 30 and 50 films across the three weeks of the festival), and I plan to continue that for as long as I live in Melbourne, so these are (hopefully) some of the films I’ll be watching in August:

  • It’s Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan, Canada) – Dolan is a 27-year-old Canadian director who can only be described as a wunderkind. He’s made six films prior to this (the first when he was just 20), and at least two of them are modern masterpieces. It’s Only the End of the World sees him working with two of my favourite French actors, Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel.
  • The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, South Korea) – Park’s first feature film since he made the jump to Hollywood with Stoker (2013). He returned to his home country to make this period film set in South Korea and Japan of the 1930s, which seems like it might be a little out of his usual wheelhouse.
  • After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan) – I’ve been on a huge Koreeda kick for the past few weeks. He makes amazing small-scale family dramas that aren’t flashy on the surface, but underneath are just endless caves of emotion and humanity. They don’t call him the reincarnation of Ozu for nothing.
  • Baccalaureat (Cristian Mungiu, Romania) – Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is probably in my top 20 films of the 21st century so far, and his follow up Beyond the Hills is also incredible. The only synopsis I’ve found for Baccalaureat so far is quite vague (“a family drama about parenting set in a small Romanian town where everybody knows everybody”), but the beauty of Mungiu’s films are that they’re not usually about what you think they’re about.
  • The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit, Netherlands) – Dudok de Wit won an Oscar in 2001 for his short film Father and Daughter, in my opinion one of the most soulful and beautiful animated shorts of all time. The Red Turtle is his first feature film, a dialogue-free story about a man trying to escape a desert island. If that doesn’t sound like it could sustain a feature-length film’s running time, you haven’t seen what Dudok de Wit can do without dialogue.

Those are my most anticipated picks – if these five films make it to MIFF in August I’ll be a very happy camper.

 

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Cinema Studies

Editing and Enemy of the State

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.

If mise-en-scène concerns what’s in the shot, and cinematography is how the shot is captured, editing dictates the relationship between shots. By editing, a director joins two shots together to steer the audience’s perception and experience in a particular way. There are a number of ways a director or editor can join shots together: a simple cut (instantaneous change from one shot to another); a fade in to or out of black; a dissolve (briefly superimposing the end of one shot to the beginning of another); or a wipe (one shot replaces another by means of a boundary line moving across the screen). By deploying these techniques, a director controls the relationship between the two shots in terms of time, space, rhythm and graphic qualities.

In Enemy of the State, Tony Scott uses editing in a number of precisely controlled and kinetic ways to evoke mood, drive the narrative and create contrasts between characters and settings. As just one example, the rhythm of cutting is often ramped up to heighten the sense of tension and paranoia felt by characters during chase or fight sequences, and the same techniques are used to depict the high-tech surveillance equipment used by the CIA (the capability of the CIA to quickly locate Robert Dean is integral to the plot of the film).

Cross-cutting is often used to show the simultaneous action of characters being surveilled (usually Robert Dean) alongside the people doing the surveilling. This cross-cutting invites comparison of the two sets of characters, and emphasises the power relationship between the two — the CIA knows much more about Dean than he knows about them.

One particular example of this is a scene in which Dean and his wife are driving through a tunnel, unaware that at that moment CIA agents are ransacking and vandalising his house to cover the installation of recording equipment. The shots of Dean and his wife are mostly medium shots of the two conversing in their car, well-lit by overhead street lighting, with few cuts to different angles/perspectives other than the occasional close up to one of the characters while they talk. When it cross-cuts to the CIA agents ransacking Dean’s house, the editing changes drastically to emphasise graphic contrasts (the setting in Dean’s home is much darker and shot with higher contrast, low-key lighting), rhythmic contrasts (shot length becomes much shorter as the agents violently trash the environment), temporal contrasts (the scene condenses time by jumping forward through actions), and spatial contrasts (depth is shortened by extensive use of close ups and camera movement).

These techniques (governed by an approach to editing known as continuity editing) are working constantly through the film to affect form and create meaning.

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Experiments, Media 1

Experiments with slo-mo

Over the Easter weekend I stayed in Mt Beauty with a group of friends, and on the trip there I decided to play around with my iPhone’s slow-motion video function, which I’ve never really used before.

The result is pretty interesting; even with simple composition and no accompanying music the videos seem to take on an epic quality, which seems to be an inherent attribute of slow-motion footage (no doubt culturally conditioned from watching so many films that use this technique).

I’m not sure if I’ll ever use this technique in my course work (it does look a touch contrived), but it’s fun to experiment with.

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