Author Archives: Bradley Dixon

Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Life casting

In our Workshop this week the subject of David Boltanski came up; specifically, the agreement he made with David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art to broadcast his entire life into the gallery until his death.

It’s an amazing story, and has just made it even more clear to me that I need to find my way to MONA sooner rather than later, but it also reminded me of a weird relic of 90s culture that has always fascinated me: life casting.

Back before people streamed their every thought to YouTube, back even before reliable internet video really existed at all, there was a small, strange subculture of people who recorded every detail of their lives and placed it online for the world to see. The most prominent practitioner of life casting was JenniCam (Jennifer Ringley), an American who began broadcasting her life in 1996, at the age of 19, by placing cameras throughout her college dorm room. She continued the practice for almost a decade.

The compulsion to live your entire life in public is something I just cannot understand, no matter how much I try. I didn’t even appear in my own “creative self-portrait” video for Project Brief 2, that’s how little I want to be on camera. But there are others who are so secure and comfortable with themselves and what they’re doing that they give strangers unmediated, unrestricted access to it via internet video. It’s crazy to me, but it’ll probably continue to grow and become normalised over the next decade or so and I’ll be even less in the mainstream.

If you’re interested in the topic, JenniCam and Jennifer Ringley was the subject of an episode of the Reply All podcast – it’s a great episode and definitely recommended.

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Assessments, Media 1, Workshops

Narrative structure in PB3

  1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ (Robert McKee) of your portrait?
    Nostalgic attachment to objects has an influence on our lives far greater than its practical use. People will go to ridiculous lengths to keep and maintain connections to their childhood/former self even if to other people the value may not be immediately apparent. My subject has a small, crappy collection of erasers that he’s kept for over 30 years (through marriages, divorce, moving house multiple times, having children, etc.) and will keep for the rest of his life, purely because of his nostalgic connection to them.
  2. How is your portrait film structured?
    My portrait is structured around an interview with the subject, using voiceover narration to allow the subject to speak about his collection, what it means to him and why he still has it in his possession. While the audio of the interview continues for the entire duration of the video, the subject’s words are supported and reinforced by cut-away shots to B-roll and found footage.
  3. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee?
    I hope the audience perceives the interviewee as a bit weird or strange to begin with, but as the video continues I hope to spark a feeling of empathy as the audience recognises the same nostalgia in their own lives.
  4. How is your portrait being narrated?
    The only voice heard in my video is the subject’s interview answers as he reflects on his experience. I chose to do this to give the video the feeling of an uninterrupted series of thoughts from the subject, as if he is reflecting on his own history and what it means to him. Because the audio from the interview needs to be cut and pasted together to form coherent thoughts, the structure of the video necessitates cut-away shots to mask edits in the audio.
  5. What role will ‘found footage’ play in your portrait?
    Found footage will be used as reinforcement at certain key points, to illustrate what the subject is speaking about or to create associative connections. I’ve chosen to use vintage footage wherever possible to reinforce the theme of nostalgia.
  6. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point?
    Not in the traditional narrative sense, but I hope that the audience’s realisation of empathy for the subject will be an emotional turning point.
  7. When does this turning point occur in your portrait and why?
    I hope the (gradual) turning point will occur towards the end of the video when my interviewee is explicitly talking about nostalgia and how there is inherent value in still having something you’ve kept for a long time. I’ve structured it this way to allow the audience to come to realise this idea naturally first, and then the subject will emphasis the point in his own words.
  8. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum?
    Through chronological storytelling, by diving straight into the story and evoking curiosity, and then further explaining and building context.
  9. Where will your portrait’s dramatic tension come from?
    Dramatic tension will be built upon the strangeness/uselessness of my subject’s hobby – the audience will wonder why he has such a collection, why he’s kept it so long and, most importantly, why I’ve made a film about it.
  10. Does the portrait have a climax and/or resolution?
    There is a small resolution to the film when my subject accepts and defends the uselessness of his hobby – which is, ultimately, what my film is about.
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Media 1, Readings

“The protagonist must be empathetic (whether or not he is sympathetic).”

— Robert McKee (1997) 1

I think there is no better embodiment of this principal (that you don’t have to like a character for their characterisation to be successful) than David Brent.

  1. McKee, Robert, (1997), ‘The substance of story’ in Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154 ↩

Empathy and cringe comedy

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Media 1, Readings

Three-act structure

Michael Rabiger (2009)1, a professor and academic specialising in documentary studies, gives a helpful and succinct summary of the three-act narrative structure:

  • ACT I: establishes the setup (characters, relationships, situations and the dominant problem faced by the central character/s
  • ACT II: escalates the complications in relationships as the central character struggles with obstacles
  • ACT III: intensifies the situation to a point of climax or confrontation, which the central character then resolves, often in a climactic way that is emotionally satisfying

The name given to this collection of changes and developments is the dramatic or story arc, and each individual moment of change is called a beat.

I still struggle with the idea that rigid structures like three-act narrative are necessarily good. My natural inclination is to suspect that such formulaic progressions are used not just as vague guides but as templates that actually hinder the development of interesting or new stories. Indeed, some of my filmmaker friends seem entirely wedded to the idea that particular story beats must occur at certain points in their script.

But basically all of the films it’s possible to see in mainstream cinemas today, even those I would consider “unconventional”, are still governed by three-act structure even if the structure is not immediately identifiable. The only films that truly eschew traditional structures like these are the genuinely experimental films of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker and Maya Deren.

  1. Michael Rabiger, 2009, Directing the Documentary, 5th Edition (Focus Press) pp.283-291 ↩
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Lectorials, Media 1

Elements of story and narrative

In today’s Lectorial we learned the basic building blocks that every story (be it cinema, theatre, literature, etc.) must be built upon.

Narrative, broadly, can be thought of as an intrinsic value of all humanity, a way that we make sense of our surroundings and communicate across cultures through universal experience. When talking specifically about media, narrative has a short list of key elements:

Each of these elements serves a particular purpose in building a narrative. First, a story needs to have an inciting incident and a controlling idea – a point, something that the author is trying to say. Every element of the story must work to prove or demonstrate this controlling idea in some way. Typically this is achieved by challenging it, because there are very ideas that are self-evidently “true” when it comes to creative media, and those that may exist vary across audiences/cultures.

Then characters must populate the narrative – two character types are of particular importance to building narrative: the protagonist/s and antagonist/s. The protagonist is usually the character who drives the action, the one from whose perspective the film is told, or the character who changes the most over the progression of the story. The antagonist, or antagonists, need not be the protagonist’s literal enemy, but their wishes generally lie in opposition to the protagonist.

Once the story is set up and the characters have been introduced, the progression of the story is achieved by use of conflict. Robert McKee (1997) 1 offers three levels of conflict that occur in a story, depicted as concentric circles around the protagonist in order of proximity:

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These elements always operate within the genre of the work, which include wider assumptions and conventions that the audience holds from being previously exposed to works in that genre. For example, the conflict may take two very different forms depending on whether the work is a psychological horror film or a romantic opera.

Though these definitions and guidelines seem quite rigid and inflexible, they seem broad enough that they would encompass the vast majority of many and varied texts in existence (though they are not without their detractors).

  1. McKee, Robert, (1997), ‘The substance of story’ in Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154 ↩
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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Everything is a text

For certain types of media, textual analysis seems quite natural and obvious. Attempting to find meaning in visual art, cinema, music, television, etc. (where there is an author and they are trying to elicit some kind of meaningful response from an audience) is a relatively normal thing to do and is generally an inherent part of understanding that piece of media.

But I’ve begun to realise that almost any form of communication can be read as a text. Building on our exercise in Week 1 in which we surveyed the visible media at the State Library, practically every part of our environment can be analysed in this way, including things as small and seemingly insignificant as directional and traffic signage.

Why is a stop sign red, and why is it octagonal? What meanings are connoted by these aesthetic properties? Why do the directional signs at Emporium use a sans serif typeface and monochrome colour scheme? Answering these questions can explain how society functions on a deeper level. Even an entire city as a whole could be analysed in this methodical way — what are the semiotic signs and codes that can be identified within it, and what part do they play in forming meaning?

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Do you see what I see?

I picked up on an interesting point from this week’s reading Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis, that depending on the culture to which the interpreter of a text belongs, a text can mean very, very different things. It reminded me of a fascinating BBC Horizon programme I watched online about five years ago, in which researchers performed experiments and found that people from the Himba tribe in Namibia could not identify the blue square in the right half of this diagram:

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The researchers discovered that Himba, who culturally and linguistically treat blue and green as the same colour (with just one umbrella word that describes both), but have hundreds of words to describe individual shades of green, actually see the blue square as being visually indistinguishable from the green. And the opposite was also true – Himba were able to positively identify two different shades of green in the left half of the diagram that, to westerners, were seen as a single hue (spoiler: it’s the same position as the blue square).

Unfortunately the documentary I saw is no longer available online, but the next best thing is the xkcd colo(u)r survey, in which web comic artist and former NASA engineer Randall Monroe surveyed over 200,000 people and asked them to name colours. The differences in results from men and women is really interesting – although it must be remembered that the data set for this particular study is incredibly small and skewed (not just to people of the western world, but specifically to people who read xkcd) – and backs up the idea that what I see may not match what you see.

The results of both these studies prove that even something as seemingly universal as the interpretation of colour can vary widely between cultures. The differences would get wider and wider as you move further up into high-level cultural differences – making it a wonder we’re able to function as a global society with common thoughts and interpretations at all.

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Cinema Studies

Cinematography and Zodiac

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.

Last week we learned that mise-en-scène refers to “what’s in the frame”. Cinematography, by contrast, is how the scene is captured by the camera. It is the act of photographing what’s in the frame.

There are several elements that cinematographers must consider when shooting, from light characteristics (contrast and exposure), speed of the camera, perspective (focal length and depth of field), framing (angle, distance, masking and camera position), movement (panning, tilting and tracking), and duration. Special effects are also a subset of cinematography, because effects control what ends up in the photographic frame.

David Fincher and cinematographer Harris Savides exercise precise control over the cinematography in Zodiac, showing as much meticulous attention to detail as the serial killer that is the object of Robert Graysmith’s obsession.

At surface level, Zodiac’s most obvious visual attribute is its strong yellow-green hue, achieved through costume and set design but also prominently through exposure and colour grading. This nostalgic colour pallet helps sell the film’s period setting (1960s and 1970s), but it also gives the entire film the feeling of decaying flesh, which links in with the film’s themes of death and unfulfilled obsession.

Power dynamics are also communicated through staging and mise-en-scène, as well as the cinematography techniques of focus and depth of field. In the scene where Arthur Leigh Allen is interviewed by the three detectives, the relative position of each character places him in a power relationship with the other characters in the scene. By focusing (or not focusing) on objects that have lead the detectives to suspect Allen of being the Zodiac, Fincher steers his audience to look for all the circumstantial evidence that points to the same conclusion.

Zodiac also uses framing in interesting ways. For example, in the scene set at Bob Vaughn’s house immediately after Graysmith discovers that one of the most important pieces of handwriting evidence actually belongs to Vaughn, the next shot shows Graysmith centred in frame using a medium shot that accentuates the hallway walls on either side of him, isolating him at the centre of the frame almost literally inside a tunnel as his realisation comes into focus. It’s the only shot in the film that so obviously isolates a character in this way, and it helps to set up the danger of the next thrilling scene where Graysmith follows Vaughn down into the basement, unsure of whether he might be the Zodiac or not.

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Textual analysis, artistic intent and feminist film theory

In discussing textual analysis this week, and in particular the idea that interpretation is dependent upon (and dictated by) context, I started thinking about artistic intent and how big or small an influence it has on the interpretation of a work.

One of the major shifts in the discourse of cinema occurred in line with the development of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, when feminist film theory became an active area of study based on the idea that the cinema of the early 20th century reflected the place of women in wider society, and that cinema is a tool used by a patriarchal society to reinforce the idea of a natural difference between sexes (and the inferences that can be drawn from this idea, that women should possess certain qualities, act in certain ways, etc.). This topic is explored in Molly Haskell’s 1973 book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, and the paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey (published in 1975), and has continued to develop in the decades since.

The filmmakers discussed by Haskell, Mulvey and others were presumably not consciously striving to make a comment on the place of women in society, or perpetuate damaging stereotypes, but post hoc interpretation took those films and analysed them as artefacts in the context of wider society at the time they were made. Artistic intent was irrelevant; the signs and signifiers of the texts themselves were the things deemed important and worthy of study.

Feminist film theory shows that texts can be analysed and found to hold certain qualities or attributes that the creator may not have intended, even long after the work was created. People are still analysing Italian renaissance art and interpreting what it reflects of 15th and 16th century society, and scholars in the 24th century will probably be doing the same for art being created right now.

It’s a slightly scary idea that your work could be analysed by others decades or centuries after its creation and found to hold qualities or attributes that you never intended — but, then again, that’s one of the beautiful things about discourse: it shifts and changes as much as art itself does. The fact that there can never be any one “correct” interpretation of a text is central to the ongoing conversation of cultural criticism.

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