Tag Archives: readings

Storytelling

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“Everything is story, story is everything.”

This weeks reading: The Substance of Story focuses heavily on how writers/storytellers use protagonists cause an audience reaction. Although I found the reading to be extremely interesting and helpful it began to make me wonder about if you could tell a story without using a protagonist.

Audience want to recognise a shared humanity in their movie characters, as long as your paper clip character, has some eyes and a strong desire to fix his problems a bond is formed with him.  So what happens if you take away character and focus on subjects? Is the story about the tree falling in the forest a story without a person there to duck and weave a branch? Can we as creatives tell stories using subjects rather than characters?

An example that sprung to my mind was Stan Brakhage experimental film: The Dante Quartet, a short silent film which was created by painting images directly onto the film. There are no characters only text and movement of colour divided into four parts: Hell Itself, Hell Spit Flexion, Purgation and existence is song. 

For me the spilt into four different parts tell a story of a journey through hell, and the way the paint moves faster or colours are repeated show what each of these stages are like. This feels like a narrative without a protagonist however it’s easy to say that the film maker is the protagonist or that it’s simply not a narrative at all.

This question is something I might want to look into exploring through the continuation of my course.

You can watch The Dante Quartet here

Textual Analyses

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Source

In class we did a textual analyses exercise with this advertisement:

Denotation (literal meaning) : people going about their day at a local train station

Connotation (cultural or 2nd order meaning) : urban jungle, (lion is in the certain of the photo, the photo has a very urban look about it), adventure (train station with no name and lion), pride (also a symbol of the lion), skin heads (working class)  real experience (the photo is shot to be candid rather than posed it feels more truthful) phantoms (something scary and exciting)

Codes: Isn’t a place to go for luxury but rather adventure, This is a place to go for the working class man as an escape, people looking for a thrill rather than to sit poolside.

I was also able to come up with a lot of these analyses, because this image was shown in contrast to another advertisement which showed a father and son playing by the pool. It was from comparing the two images I was able to draw a lot of the adventure vs luxury, get away from the urban grind vs the urban lifestyle comparisons. 

Group Genius

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When reading Keith Sawyers, “Group Genius” it never occurred to me that within work and play there is a state of or feeling called the “flow.” I have certainly experienced this feeling but I never knew it was a state that could be achieved as suggested by Sawyers in his work. To achieve this flow there are four simple principles you and your environment must uphold such as; your skill must be equal to your environment or that you are free to fully concentrate on the task. However when it comes to group flow it’s suggested that there are 10 conditions that groups must follow to achieve this flow. One that practically stood out to me was the “Close Listening or Deep Listening” condition. For myself I find that listening is something I really need to work on, when working with my interviewee I often found myself to eager to ask the next question rather than listen to what she had to say, it wasn’t till I stopped myself from being so ready to talk and actually sat and listened to what she had to say I found that it was very easy to get lost in the task and what she had to say.
I feel like the ten conditions are good qualities to uphold when entering group work, however some of them seem hard to obtain through current university collaboration.
I am also curious to find out through further reading, how to deal with situations where the “creative genius” might not fit into constraints and how to work around that.

The Illustrated Auschwitz

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Last week in cinema studies I was able to experience an Australian student film called ‘The Illustrated Auschwitz.” The film itself is a documentary, how ever it differs from other holocaust documentaries as rather using facts and figures, it shows obscure images (such as short clips from the ‘Wizard of Oz’) to the story of a holocaust survivor Zsuzsi Weinstock.

At first the images, may present themselves as odd, or lead you to believe they might subtract from the seriousness of the story. However it’s the combination of Weinstocks emotional story and images that hint at whats going on that forces the viewer to imagine whats happening. Like mentioned in this weeks reading, “to kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousands deaths” you can’t help but imagine the worst.

For example a scene that really affected me was the use of found footage (‘Wizard of Oz’) in combination with the story being told. The film marker uses the line; “There’s no place like home” and trims it to say “There’s no place,” as Weinstock speaks about knowing that she would return the ruins. She then goes on to say about seeing the Wizard of Oz and thinking to herself, that maybe she to would be able to return home and everyone would be there waiting for her and that it was a hope she kept with her for her entire journey home. The last spoken words of the film is again from the Wizard of Oz and it’s Dorothy saying “I don’t ever want to go home”. For me this only made me think of a young girl afraid that when she finally arrives the hope she carried with her would finally die out.

Like the reading suggests the imagination is a powerful thing, and is taken advantage of by many creative mediums. Through this course I think it’s important to recognise when to add less so that the audience can experience more.

View The Illustrated Auschwitz here

 

Blood in the Gutter

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Some thoughts on the reading this week:

In an English class a teacher talks about ambiguity it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the word. He explains the ending of ‘Blade Runner’ as ambiguous, and praises it. He dismisses the ending of the Lord of The Rings, telling us, it leaves nothing up to the imagination. At first I shrugged the comment off, like maybe he really didn’t like ‘Lord of The Rings’ but after a while it started to make sense. Ambiguity when used properly is a great story telling technique. I learnt that in year ten english, however it never occurred to me until this weeks reading that comics implore a similar ambiguity between the panels.

During the week, while reading comics I’ve become painfully aware of ‘closure’ and just how much my imagination comes into play between the panels. For example when reading, one panel showed a boy climbing over a fence, while the next showed him standing on the ground. Without even realising it, I had imagined the whole fence climbing scene in my head.

Audiences’ Imaginations are important in any medium. When it comes to our second project brief, allowing the viewer to work to connect the ideas we are trying to convey about our self will help with presenting an abstract piece.

Ethics

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When it comes to the ethics of consent there’s always an issue of what’s the researchers right to know vs the right of the subject’s privacy (Donovan, 2012, p.346).  When researching toxicity in the game League of Legends, this was a big issue as I was worried that telling players that I was researching them would cause them to act differently which it did most of the time.
In media I was told to always get consent before filming someone. The solution to people acting unnatural; is just let the camera run for longer as they would soon forget that it was even there. When trying this with League of Legends I often found I didn’t have any control when it came to how long the games would run, so I was unable to wait for players to forget I was there. I resulted to deception, by telling the players I was observing them after the game, in the end.

Another ethical problem I encountered, was my pre-existing ethical stance. Through playing the game for many years before my research I was already biased. I already believed League of Legends was a toxic game, because I had experienced abuse and players intentionally throwing the game because of rage first hand. This bias meant I had to be careful in compiling my research, so I didn’t disregard anything that proved that League of Legends wasn’t as toxic as I believed, or toxic at all.

I think it’s always tricky when we try to work around something we love, because when we are expected to give the absolute truth about the subject it’s always hard not to let bias get in the way. I way to avoid this of course is to always be ready to step out of your comfort zone, and tackle something maybe you don’t know everything about.

Donovan, K, 2012. The ethical stance and its representation in the expressive techniques of documentary filming: a case study of Tagged. New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 10, No 3, 344-361.

Anita Sarkeesian

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During the week I was lucky enough to attend Anita Sarkeesian’s presentation “The F-Word”. In her talk, Sarkeesian took us through the level of abuse she had gone through over the past three years during her critical work in games.

It was hard to listen to, and when I was discussing it with a friend she noted that Sarkeesian had talked about the harassment in the way someone would talk about their scars, or tell you’ve they’ve lost their dog.
I had only seen this tone as professionalism, it never occurred to me to pay closer attention to her tone. That she had adopted a certain way of speaking about the awful things that have happened to her.

I was always aware how much people could people give away about themselves through tone and gestures, but it was never anything I made the effort to intentionally notice. After my friend had brought up her tone it lead me to think about how careful Sarkeesian has to be in her talks as not to say anything that could be misconstrued or make anyone feel uncomfortable.

This noticing is defiantly something I want to make a habit on in the future.