Category Archives: Integrated Media 1

Week 06: Troubleshooting

This week I had to learn about making thumbnails for my sketch film. Seth has a post of a few ways to do this here, but after trying a few methods I decided to just screenshot as this is easier for me to do.

I also had to learn about FTP clients and uploading our sketch film. This was a very new topic for me and I was very nervous to do it. However, following these instructions I actually found it surprisingly easy.

The rest of my ‘troubleshooting’ this week has mostly been around the film essays we wrote for last week. We had to address the content, interface, and pattern of a past student K-film project. I chose to write about ‘Eulogy to Suburbia‘ and you can find my post here.

I had to make my statements clear, make my content easy and efficient to read, and stick to the word limit (which is always a struggle of mine).

I started by thinking about what pattern is and what I wanted to talk about in the film essay. Pattern is all about the relationships which are created through recurring themes/categories/sub-cagetories/keywords/repetition.

I had to stay mindful of the difference between content (the parts and their existence within a structure) and form (which is a little closer to pattern, and all about how it’s structured).

When analysing the content, I had to think about subject matter/what it’s about. What did I notice? Are there ‘groups’ of clips that keep appearing together?

For the interface, I had to look at what was being presented to me and think about how and why it has been designed that way. Are there multiple interfaces? Does the interface change shape and structure? This post on the IM1 blog really helped me to think about the thought processes that go into designing an interface, and what to look for.

Week 06: Reflections

Well, it seems like we’re all very much stuck on this conception of narrative which I know I certainly am having difficulty getting my head around (even after writing this post on narrative here). A lot of the questions in today’s symposium were surrounding narrative and how we should think about it. What I gathered from the discussion is that the idea of what constitutes a narrative is still evolving. We shouldn’t be reductive and say ‘only x and y’ are narratives because it can make us miss a lot of things. However, Adrian seemed to disagree with this and reiterate that everything other than cause-and-effect is a series of random events. He stated that narrative infers – the events are not accidental and it is all related. He said to think that we can ‘narrate’ our own lives is an anthropomorphic vision that occurs when we see ourselves as storytelling machines. We can narrate afterwards, but otherwise it’s just cause-and-effect.

Next, we moved on to talk about interpretation and whether a filmmaker should try and control their audience’s interpretation of a work. Seth doesn’t like being told what to think and prefers the open structure. I agreed with what someone said about how it’s nice to be surprised, as opposed to constantly having your expectations met (this relates to the post I wrote on expectations here). Adrian pointed out that in language, everything only makes sense because of its relationship to everything else. When you look in a dictionary, a definition can only ever be described by other words. Things only meet something by virtue of the network of other things it finds itself in. So, therefore, as Ryan notes, “we can never be sure that sender and received have the same story in mind” because there is always a mismatch. Filmmakers cannot control interpretation: they have never been able to and they never will be able to. Adrian says that stories are a dance; meaning is a dance. I get the impression that Adrian likes to dance, in this sense.

We went on to talk more specifically about Korsakow and how it uses/rejects narrative. Adrian posed us the question – is Korsakow the right place to be telling a story?  Ryan says her sixth criteria for identifying narrative is the notion of closure, but this isn’t necessarily possible in K-films because there’s not really an ending (unless you use an end SNU, which is somewhat counterproductive to the software). Adrian thinks that the viewer should find their own sense of closure/an end to a work by deciding if they want to leave it there, or leave and come back (which is why Korsakow has the interesting feature of the continue option when you open a K-film). K-films are not disposable, one-off works. They’re designed to be grazed at. For Adrian, closure is mechanical. It’s the last page. The last frame. The closing credits. He used the example of fan-fction as a way to show us that it’s not up to the author to decide where the end it. People will decide it for themselves. Story is not medium specific, but the telling of it is. And it’s the telling of a story that matters, not the story itself. It think that’s why I love the above photo so much.

(Image via flickr)

Film Essay: ‘Eulogy to Suburbia’

Eulogy to Suburbia, 2012.

CONTENT

Eulogy to Suburbia is an observational K-film which explores the minutiae of domestic life in the suburbs. The film is composed of many fragments displaying residential homes, streets, roads, parks and skies. All of the clips are thematically similar, with no sharp contrasts, yet each clip invites us to look upon a scene with fresh eyes.

Most clips are shot as brief single takes, from the same angle (with the exception of a handful). There is not a lot of movement in the frame of each of these fragments. Where movement is focused upon, it is usually through the action of cars, or wind through tree-lined streets. The fragments present as visually congruent, with the film-makers clearly making an authorial decision to build coherence throughout the K-film.

What I found interesting, in concurrence with Aston & Gaudenzi’s interest in the fundamental human need to try to make sense of the world, was that due to a complete lack of humans in all of the clips, the K-film seems to invite personification of the houses and cars themselves, essentially becoming ‘characters’ within the K-film’s diegesis (2012, p.129; see also Bordwell & Thompson, 2013, p.76). However, I continually had to remind myself that this work is a non-narrative, multilinear artefact which has no cause and effect, nor any sense of temporality.

The overall feel of the K-film breeds a sense of ‘familiar anonymity’ that is encapsulated by suburbia. The content comes across as intimate, but also holds a certain sense of unease which I believe is caused by the mildly voyeuristic nature of the content.

PATTERN

On first viewing, the initial fragments seem to suggest a pattern between light. Many individual clips focus on the expanse of sky above residential spaces, and the previews often group together clips with an aesthetically similar skyscape. This use of natural light could be to imply the warmth of communities which are often embedded in suburbia.

Eulogy to Suburbia - Light

 

 Colour similarity becomes more and more apparent as you begin to negotiate your way through the relations of the film. The fragments are matched according to the predominate colour which appears in the clip.

Sound is a less obvious pattern within this K-film. The majority of the clips contain incidental background noise of engines, car horns, birds, and even the wind. I believe an important comment can be found here between the bleed of industrial life into natural spaces. We are presented with a ‘rhythm’ of suburban life, where urban noises harmonise with Mother Nature’s own soundtrack.

 

INTERFACE

Eulogy to Suburbia - Start SNU

The interface is built of one viewing window, and five connected preview windows positioned below. This interface is consistent throughout the whole K-film, creating visual solidarity.

The K-film begins with a start SNU introducing the four film-makers accompanied by the sound of birds in the background. The viewer is then offered a beginning point, however these five previews are not set, and change with each viewing.

I found that the deeper you get into the K-film, the five available previews start to have less commonality. However, some seem to appear more often, indicating a higher SNU rating. Some fragments have multiple lives and will continue reappearing as your delve further into the K-film. None of the clips are set on a loop, so a still screen appears at the end of each clip with the previews still positioned underneath.

CONNECTIONS

On the website of their K-film, the authors concede “our project attempts to represent suburbia, not in a negative or positive light, but the way we see it, just the way it is”. I believe that Eulogy to Suburbia is an experimental film in that it is a “poetic reveri[e] which [tells] no story” (Bordwell & Thompson, 2013, p.355). It simply invites observation and new ways of looking at things, without authorial judgement or criticism. This is similar to Serra’s invitation in his film Railroad Turnbridge which asks us to “notice and enjoy the slowly changing pictorial qualities of line, shape, tonalities, and movement” instead of finding ‘meaning’ or looking for deeper qualities (Bordwell & Thompson, 2013, p.356). However, if this is to be taken as true it is interesting to note that the K-film has been titled ‘Eulogy‘ to Suburbia, suggesting that suburbia has in fact died.

The film is neither abstract nor associational, as there is a clear thematic linkage and the audience expects the fragments to be placed in succession with each other. Rather, it aligns more closely with Sobchack’s (1999) conception of a “memory box”, which collects and preserves selected memories. However, she also claims that “human memory and it’s re-collections don’t compute so neatly,” which could be considered a downfall of this particular K-film. The K-film works well as an artefact which can be grazed at, as the viewer may learn to appreciate the scenes more closely with each return viewing.

I think that the K-film’s strongest element is the consistency of its interface. This choice perfectly complements the patterns and relationships that are created within the content of the film: that of the ‘everyday’ repetition of suburbia, which stays steadfast and unchanging. However, as Ryan (2006) reminds us, “we can never be sure that sender and receiver have the same story in mind.”

REFERENCES 

Aston, J. and Gaudenzi, S. (2012) ‘Interactive documentary: setting the field’, Studies in Documentary Film, 6: 2, pp. 125–139.
Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (2013) Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Ryan, M. (2006) Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sobchack, V. (1999) “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime.” Mille 34. Fall.

 

Week 05: Type:Rider

Type:Rider is a really intriguing artefact, and I was hesitant to write about it for IM1 seeing as it’s not necessarily an interactive documentary or anything of the sort – it’s a video game. However, the reason why I think it’s significant to our learnings is that it uses the interactive form to give documentary-style information about the history of typography. I’ve been looking at a few K-films, but haven’t quite got the knack of writing about them yet (which I will need to do for the film essay). I decided to write about Type:Rider in order to get a bit more understanding of the umbrella form of i-docs before moving on to focus more specifically on K-films for the remainder of the course.

My first impression of Type:Rider is that you can tell a lot of attention has been paid to the interface – it is very ‘designed’ and aesthetically beautiful. The game requires you to use the keyboard arrows to navigate your character (a colon, of the punctuation kind…) through an obstacle course of letters and glyphs in order to unlock the page of information about a typeface before levelling up to the next typeface. The goal is to collect an entire alphabet of floating letters, whilst avoiding pitfalls and barriers.

Screen Shot 2014-05-22 at 5.40.12 pm

I loved that I was actually using my whole hand to utilise more of the keyboard space instead of just clicking a mouse (which you do in Korsakow). It didn’t quite feel like I was learning because I was gaming at the same time, which I think is a very effective (and sneaky) psychology behind interactive education.

The music is very ‘designed’ as well, developing with the gameplay. Each time you progress to the next level/typeface, the music adds a layer to itself, mirroring the ‘progress’ which the content is showing.

At first I thought there was a good amount of text to keep the audience interested, but it quickly became boring to scroll through (I couldn’t figure out if this was because I wasn’t engaged with the content, or because the scroll function was very slow and I couldn’t read at the pace I wanted to).

There was a great element of adventure and excitedness in Type:Rider, which really drove the content. I really liked that I found myself paying so much more attention to the actual letter forms that I would normally, due to the fact that the lines and circles of each letter were actually becoming the things you needed to utilise and/or avoid in order to progress to the next level.

It is very clever how they designers have incorporated things into the interface of the game – for example, in the level when you are learning about moveable type and the letter press system, a big printing-press machine appears and tries to crush you, which you quickly need to avoid.

The difficulty with a medium such as this is that games cause frustration. A format like this can mean that viewers might not necessarily stay as long as you want them to if they get stuck on a particular part of the game (which is exactly what happened to me!). I’m going to need to keep this in mind when creating the final Korsakow project, and be mindful of our audience with every authorial decision we make.

Week 05: Narrative

Last week in IM1, a lot of our discussions circled around the concept of narrative, after the Ryan reading. Before tackling this topic myself, I had to get a clear understanding of what narrative means.

This post was very helpful for me when delineating the difference between narratives and stories. What it says is that stories are event units, and narratives are a system of stories (made up of event units). The example it gave was the Christian figure of Jesus – the immaculate conception is a story, which is a piece of the narrative of Jesus Christ. To visualise this, it’s like the story of the virgin Mary is the section of bricks in the photo above which can be removed and replaced, whereas the larger area of blue bricks is the narrative.

In the symposium, Adrian said that:

Narrative is where story pauses to describe something in a scene.

For example, if we were reading a novel and a character reaches for a gun to shoot an intruder in the house, but the author stops to describe the gun to you, readers understand that the story pauses for description (instead of asking, ‘hold on, in the time it took to describe the gun, wouldn’t he have been shot?).

Stories are teleological, they are defined by the ending. A story can only make sense because of an end. The events of a story are all orientated towards the end. Therefore, it is important to remember that nothing in a story is accidental, everything is set up to go towards the ending. So our lives are not stories, because they haven’t yet ended. 

The IM1 course asks us to consider non-narrative (which I have never encountered before). At first I wondered if a non-narrative was just a lack of narrative, but then I realised the mistake was thinking about it as a narrative from the beginning.

In the labs, we looked at a few examples:

‘Man with a Movie Camera’ (1929)

Seth asked us, is it telling a story? It doesn’t have cause and effect. There is no driving character whose actions we can follow. It is abstract. The music holds the relations together. It is structured together by a chronological order of day into night (almost like a ‘day in the life of’ kind of format). Therefore, we decided that it was an associational non-narrative, where the video had direct/literal relationships with each other as they were kinetically stitched together.

‘Ballet Mecanique’ (1924)

We classed this film as an abstract non-narrative. It flashes through many quickly pieced together clips of a variety of objects and imagery. They are very diverse and difficult to quickly catalogue, although there is an overriding sense of ‘man verse machine’ in the content. The movement is constant and rapid, which adds to the experimental/abstract nature of the film.

Baraka (1992)

This non-narrative explores themes through a kaleidoscopic compilation of nature, humans and technology. The clips are often associational, and use time lapse and slow motion to hint towards the differences between nature and technology. The piece comes across as a whole video collage of non-narrative fragments, which employs rhetoric to create an argument through juxtaposition of opposing relationships (between nature and technology).

I think it is supremely important to keep in mind what Ryan said in the reading:

We can never really be sure that sender and receiver have the same story in mind.

Adrian wrote up some good summaries of his thoughts on narrative here and here.

(Image via flickr)

Week 05: Ontography

Last week’s Bogost reading was so damn beautiful I think I read it about five times. His discussion of lists was so well written and inspiring. It was one of those texts that articulates so many feelings that you’ve had for years but never knew how to communicate. I love coming across those.

I pulled out the quotes from the reading which struck me the most.

Lists, however, divide, or leave divided, the things they include. They offer only the relationship of accumulation…Lists refuse the connecting powers of language, in favor of a sequence of disconnected elements.

They [turn] the flowing legato of a literary account into the jarring staccato of real being.

Lists remind us that no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members neverthe­ less remain utterly isolated, mutual aliens.

I was fascinated by his use of the word ‘ontography’, which I’d never heard before. I performed a quick google search, which led me to a few definitional pages. Amongst them was this definition: A description of beings, their nature and essence. The cataloguing of being. 

I stumbled upon Bogost’s blog and found a post where he was discussing ‘exploded views’ as one example of ontography. He speaks about Todd McLellan’s book ‘Things come apart’, where he dismantles and captures elements of an everyday object (see the chain saw above).

I decided to try and capture this type of cataloguing, instead focusing on the materials required to make a cup of tea.

photo 3

From Bogost’s book ‘Alien Phenomonology’ comes the quote:

Ontography involves the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering description or clarification of any kind.

One object is simultaneously a part of another object and an independent object in its own right.

Bogost uses the word ontography as a term for composing works that help illuminate the existence and relationships between objects.

If I want to look further into this concept, this RMIT honours student’s blog has some great writing on ontography and object-oriented ontography (OOO).