Category Archives: Integrated Media 1

Week 05: Troubleshooting

This week I finally got involved with the Korsakow software and we had our first play around with it in class. I had a very steep learning curve this week, as I am one of those media students who knows next to nothing about file extensions, compressions, etc. Ironically, I actually enjoyed learning as much as I could about this, mostly from the help of Ren and Imogen, who I sit on a table with and who have both studied media at TAFE.

I was introduced to MPEG streamclip, and have been learning how to use this to compress my files (which are HUGE thanks to filming on a DSLR). I also found myself returning to Adrian’s Korsakow tips and tricks post on the IM1 blog for help. He also has a post here about what Korsakow is and what it can do.

A big realisation I had was that Korsakow is purely authoring software, and does not allow for any post-production.  It is for building, and joining things together and making relations between the individual assets.

Another tip we got in the lab was that it is most easy to try and use a descriptive name for the video and thumbnail files as this is what is displayed in the project window, and makes for easy building/SNUifying. Adrian has a good post on Korsakow workflow here.

I’ve been building up my Korsakow vocabulary and have decided to make a glossary of sorts which I will add to over the coming weeks. So far it stands as:

  • Fragments – the individual clips
  • Previews – the ‘click here’ options on the interface
  • Timeline – shows the length of the fragment with a playhead below the clip
  • Viewing window – the clip you view when you select it by clicking
  • Stage – the entire space you are viewing the K-film on
  • SNU – smallest narrative units (the fragments)
  • Keywords – Ins describe the SNU, outs describe what it’s looking for (using Boolean logic)
  • Interface – the design of where the previews, viewing window, etc. sit on the screen
  • Lives – you can set how many times you see a clip before it dies.
  • Assets – your media files
  • POCs (points of contact) – in-POCs and out-POCs, defined here.
  • Background sound – a clip which can play for the entire duration of the k-film

We must remember: Korsakow doesn’t save automatically. SAVE SAVE SAVE. 

We have to manage our files extremely well. You have to keep your media assets in the same place for the life of your project. You must nominate an exports file and only ever do exports to web.

I also found out that when you load a K-film in a browser, you are presented with the option to ‘continue’ or ‘restart’. So, if you are viewing for a second time, you can go back to where you left it. However, the whole idea of a non-linear piece is to have no ‘start’ and ‘end’, isn’t it?

Keywords are a really important part of Korsakow, because they will ultimately be what keeps an audience with your work. You want them to find relations, but not too obviously. They operate as if you are building a jigsaw puzzle. So before you decide them, think about what patterns you are trying to create and what relationships you want to make.

Week 08: Reflections

Constraints, constraints, constraints. The magical word of the semester.

What we discussed this week was about how formal constraints actually allow creativity. In fact, creativity can’t happen without constraints. For example, in music, there are only certain notes that you can use. And if you decide to write a pop song, there’s a structure you follow.

Image via flickr

Image via flickr

As young media professionals, we need to stop waiting for inspiration, or the lightbulb moment, and just make. We need to realise that we do have things to say and things to make if we can learn to stop, look, listen and notice the world around us. We must release ourselves from thinking we can only do this if we impose our will upon the world. We are so caught up in epistophelia – the obsession with explaining – that we take away all of the magic, poetry, mystery and responsibility as a maker. There’s nothing left. Our work will be didactic and dull if we think each clip has to explain itself. The clips don’t actually matter in themselves, but they matter by virtue of the relations which are formed. This is where meaning happens. Then, we are composing something.

We then spoke about the ‘essay film’, and how these too can be documentaries. Essays are filtered through the thoughts and subjectivity of the person making it – they are not trying to look at the world objectively (or if they are, they’re already failing). Essay films, therefore, invite conversation and dialogue. They invite the viewer to join the filmmaker as they think through and explore something.

Once again, it was drilled into us that our interpretation of a text has no relationship to what the author intended. Context can never be preserved – we read films/television/paintings/books differently over the years as our own experience and worldview changes with our environments. Intent does not survive anything – it’s the easiest thing to break. That’s why we have satire and parody.

We finished by discussing the fact that expression and exploration are tangental and multi-linear in nature. We think that linearity comes first and that multi-linearity is a new thing. It’s actually the other way round: ideas aggregate around each other and always have. This is the way we experience the world, through webs of association. Whereas linearity imposes order, hierarchy, priority. This helped me to clear up a few things which I was wondering about last week. 

(Image via flickr)

 

Week 07: Linear, non-linear, and multi-linear

It’s taken me quite some time to get my head around the concepts of linear vs. non-linear narratives (and non-narratives) throughout the IM1 course. And then there’s multi-linear works, which play off the way that our world is developing to become more and more entangled.
This is very foreign to my way of thinking, and it’s something I want to be able to understand, I just think it might take some grappling with.
Some things that I need to start thinking about are:
  • Chronology
  • Hierarchy
  • Primal order
  • Causality
  • Immersion
  • Memory
  • Flashbacks/flashforwards

What about Godard’s famous quote: “I agree that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order.” It reminds me of the Latin term in medias res – which translates to ‘in the midst of things’ – which refers to the act of starting in the middle rather than the beginning.

I think Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) is a good starting point for me to think of non-linear film. Or even the more modern Inception (2010) or Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004).

However, I’m not sure that there are any popularised versions of a multi-linear work that I can as easily relate to. Obviously, I have the exposure I’ve had to K-films and interactive documentaries in IM1 so far, but I wonder how it would translate in a more ‘mainstream’ media society.

I asked a few friends of mine, what does multilinear mean to you? Some of the things they said were:

I think it means when many story lines are all going on at the same time.

Another agreed with the above, but went on to say:

I think it’s also when those multiple stories intersect and interact with each other finally. Like in Love Actually or something.

I think that this way of thinking may be too time-based, and instead, how we should conceive of multi-linearity is more akin to ‘multi-tasking’. Essentially, it’s asking the brain to keep track of a few things at once, and possibly retain the information in case you need it later on to help make connections and relations. What do you reckon?

(Image via flickr)

Week 07: FOMO

I’ve been wanting to write this post on my IM1 blog for a little while. It’s going to be all about FOMO – the fear of missing out.

I don’t know if this is a trait I have always had, but I am a bit of a ‘completionist‘. I always have to experience and (attempt to) understand everything I encounter – whether this be crossing the road, where I have to be 100% entirely certain that I’ve accounted for all moving cars, objects, etc, or reading a novel, where I must have read every sentence in every paragraph on every page (yes, even the boring acknowledgements at the end). If I open a news article or (god forbid) a long-form piece, you can bet it won’t be exited until I’ve read everything on the page.

I recently got really into the world of audiobooks through the Amazon website audible.com. I would use these books as a tool to help me get to sleep when I was battling a particularly insomniac-like few months. But what would inevitably happen would be that I would leave a chapter on to play whilst I fell asleep, then wake up in the morning and have to listen to the entire chapter again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

What concerns me about Korsakow is that every time you view a K-film, you could have a different experience or a different trajectory. I know that this is one of the wonderful features of the software, which teaches us to think of media consumption in a new, fragmented way. But almost every time I’ve watched a K-film so far, I’m overwhelmingly concerned with the content that I might miss.

Because K-films are database-driven, there can be many relationships with many fragments because of the way they are pulled from the database. But they can also be independent and self-sufficient. The way you can build these ‘structures’ can vary immensely.

Sometimes I will see a preview that immediately grabs my attention and I know I want to view it, but if I decide to click another preview instead, it can take a very long time for the clip to resurface again (due to the key wording nature of Korsakow). Or, depending on how the author has set up the SNUs, it may ‘die’ and never reappear – denying me the option to ever experience and (attempt to) understand it, as I inherently do.

Something I picked up on early in the course is that interactive media, and K-films in particular, are designed to be grazed on. They are structured in a way that the user can leave and return as many times as they may want, and consume the content of a work in vastly different ways from the way we consume traditional media.

I’m not too sure if I’m ready to embrace this new method of viewing entirely yet. I’m all for it, but I might need to make some adjustments first.

(Image via shameonjade)

Week 07: Ceci N’est Pas Embres

In our lab last week, we took a brief look at Matt Soar’s K-film and discussed the following:

  • The opening SNU is all about animation, roads, setting of location. It is leading us somewhere.
  • Soar has deliberately chosen to establish a scene/the arrival.
  • The work is complex in terms of the multiple fragments presented because Soar has invested a lot of post-production in each individual clip.
  • There are sequences with animation added to them, some which use a kind of stop-motion with still photographs.
  • There is a lot of diversity/idiosyncrasy.
  • The main interface is seasonal, showing time of year and location. However, the K-film uses multiple interfaces.
  • This presents an almost bricolage effect, connecting the interface and the patterns that arise in the film – using images over the top of each other, interfaces which change shape and structures, and animation over real life footage.
  • Seth told us that the work is representative  of Soar’s previous careers (working in construction, design, advertising and animation). Therefore, the piece explores this creative processes at the time, making it an incredibly interesting self-reflexive piece.

You can find Soar’s film here.

Adrian also pointed us in the direction of this interview with Matt Soar. I really like reading about his response to issues such as “the edge spaces between, and around, established media” which he is currently interesting in. I also liked hearing him talk about his creative process (and how this intercepts with the commercialised world).

He also raised a really interesting point about how you display interactive works to large audiences (such as at a film festival where both himself and Florian Thalhofer have displayed their K-films), when they are traditionally created for audiences of one.

Week 07: Reflections

We got to talking about lists again this week. It was said that lists achieve much more when we think of them as something that aren’t ‘literary’ in a sense. Lists aren’t narratives. Think of micro-blogging, or sites like Twitter and Flickr as being list-building devices.

Bogost mentions the phrase ‘the tyranny of representation’ in last week’s readings. Adrian discussed why representation can be tyrannical by saying the act of narrating is actually an act of arrogance on our half.  You can only ever say a little bit about what you’re trying to represent. Narrating, by nature, includes and excludes (in a similar fashion to my discussion about the politics of definitions), however lists are vastly different because they don’t reduce things into meaning. They just simply are.

We talked quickly about why a company such as google hasn’t bought Korsakow (in conjunction with YouTube/online developments in video). Adrian pretty quickly dismissed this question, but touched briefly upon the fact that Korsakow is very different as software to something like YouTube – nothing in YouTube is about rethinking what video is/does, and in this sense it is ‘old media’ because they focus more on audiences and advertising. As an avid YouTube watcher myself, I reckon this is not necessarily true because there are communities of content creators who have incredibly creative takes on what they can achieve through their video medium. For example, one of my favourite YouTubers KickThePJ who studied digital film at university in England and is doing some really fascinating things regarding video content.

Another point which really struck home with me is how multi-linear our day to day activities actually are. When you think of the way we navigate the internet, we often have many tabs open, steam music, check the news, and reply to emails all at the same time. However, there’s no real mainstream idea who what multilinear means. We’re on the cusp of an enormous media change; the media landscape is so different to anything that’s ever been. But we’re still in the middle of the change, we don’t yet know what direction or form those changes are going to take. Twitter, Instagram and Vine are helping to popularise fragmented modes of media. The way we seem to be heading, as our media use becomes more and more niche, is towards creating building systems which do interesting things with these fragments we produce day in and day out.

(Image via flickr)