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the end

Integrated media- Korsakow Film
FEAR AND HORROR

Georgina Pendock
Imogen Hanrahan
Georgia Grant
Mia Campion Curtis

“A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality”
-Alfred Hitchcock

Our Korsakow film, is an abstract piece, experimentally exhibiting the raw emotion of ‘Fear’. In our K film, we intend to strip down the concept of ‘fear’, and use our interface to project its main conceptual components. We have used quiet raw, graphic footage and archival clips in order to extract the pure emotion of ‘fear’ out of the viewer as they delve and interact with the interface. This is a “choose your own adventure, non-linear horror film. We ask the question, how long will it take for the audience to overcome their fear?

Whilst trying to decipher the true elements that sculpt the essence of fear, we had to delve into our own personal experiences to grasp a true understanding of the raw definition. After much deliberation, we came up with three structural component ‘clouds’ that we felt categorized the different types experiences associated with fear concisely; Supernatural Fear, unlikely feasible fear and everyday fear. Although we categorized three different concepts, our K film compounds the clips all together by ordering them by certain associations.

The footage that was compiled and edited in traditionally horror edit tropes were categorized under a cloud of ‘supernatural fear’. All these clips were possessed by a supernormal, melodramatic or gory film quality. This cloud therefore exists to serve the most non-naturalistic qualities and more stylized out of the three clouds. This is because contents of the clip contained supernatural elements and/or so sensationalized that the type of fear evoked from the viewer is stemmed from an irrational part of the human imagination.

There are clips of mystical monsters roaring, melodramatic horror torture scenes (eg: a horror dentist trip), supernatural imagery and abstract shapes, lighting & soundscapes that are not necessarily logical but stimulates fear. These subscribed to horror filmic elements that are created to illicit fear and suspense in the viewer. The clips under this cloud were founded archived footage from films of public domain off the Internet, due to the supernormal contents being difficult to film because of their unrealistic nature. Old horror films that were deliberately edited into shorter clips included are The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Horror Hotel (1960), Horror Express (1972). There is also archived footage including “original footage” of Big Foot.

Some of the clips had the aspect ratio slowed down to give a stop-motion effect as the dialogue carried over the top, some had the original dialogue removed and sound effects added and some were edited so abstractly that only snippets of the clips were shown and acted like a strobe light as it cut back and forth to black. This was done deliberately so that it would provoke the audience into feeling scared and paralyzed by suspense.

The cloud category of ‘unlikely but feasible fear’ contains mostly archival clips incorporating content that were realistic, but very unlikely to occur in everyday life. Much like the ‘supernatural’ cloud, the contents on screen possess a type of horror, but unlike the supernatural the clips are perpetuating things that have actually taken place on earth and have been demonstrated to us via media platforms in Australia or transnationally. The types of clips include a video of an Atomic Bomb exploding with accompanying suspenseful music, Barren Army wasteland, A human being dragged to be executed with crowds of violet people, a gun being fired in a public area and a driver accidentally driving into a large engulfing fire. These clips all stem from the part of the human imagination that feed off information that is given to us through platforms such as media, books, and even politics.

The last category is the ‘everyday’ fear. This clouds clips consists of mostly filmed clips and some archival that project the irrational phobic parts of the human imagination that embed their illogical fears in our everyday psyche. These types of fears however irrational are more likely to confront us than those of the other categories. These types of fears might be considered not as ‘horrific’ to some, however other viewers will interact on a personal level with the stimulus due to their own individual phobias that permeate their lives. These clips include a clip of a bleeding scab, a clip of somebody injecting a needle, a claustrophobic clip of a small space filled with lots of people accompanied by uneasy chilling music, A clip of people hanging of buildings that a very high up and a stalker following a young lady home. All these clips were easily accessible to film as the contents were inspired by our group member’s fears & phobias that are embedded into their everyday life.

The eerie non-diegetic soundtrack runs over the entire film. It consists of white noise, thunder, screams, whispers, creepy girls singing and other loud noises. It is a traditional horror soundtrack, which allows the audience to feel as though they are inside a horror movie. The audience can move through their own non-linear horror film. The consistent horror music keeps the audience in suspense through the whole film.

All of these clips have the idea of fear and horror in common. Each clips is either original footage we shot ourselves or founded footage that has been edited in an artistic way to convey horror. An example of one of the associations would be the edited footage from The Little Shop of Horrors at the dentist when there are 2 men screaming at the dentist continuously. The clip keeps replaying, with the pummeling sound of the screams over and over again. This clip can be associated with other clips with a “man” for instance, so the audience might then click on the thumbnail of the woman running a man over with her car in the country. Then he screams. Even though driving and being at the dentist have nothing in common, that abstract association allows the audience to identify with the male character for instance and feel frightened.

Some other keywords are simply car, fire, inside, outside, supernatural, train, woman, zombie, medical, plant, hood, gun, shadow and more. The broad keywords mean that the audience participant will experience fear in a broad sense. One minute they’re scared about a zombie and then all of a sudden the participant will remember that they hate getting needles. In order to endure in our Korsakow film, the audience participants must overcome their fears, and discover that all their fears are the alike, as they will have the same effect on them.

Addressing Bjørn Sørenssen’s article on Alexandre Atruc’s theories on digital media, we wanted to give horror films a new aesthetic, in a new simple design where the audience can interpret the horror film their own way by participating. Horror films rely on the visuals, and Korsakow allows us to produce an avant-garde expression of visual and audible experience for our audience.

Our film consists of smaller SNUs, small montages within a non-linear narrative. As Bordwell and Thompson define narrative, we have “unconnected events” that take place within our film, such as the clip of the woman searching under her bed, and often “abstract entities” such as the dark, shadowy clip which represents being scared of the dark. Our film has no sense in “temporal dimensions” as there is no sense of time conveyed as the clips are shot during the day and night with no intention of creating time. However our film does satisfy one of Bordwell and Thompson’s criteria as part of the “formal and pragmatic dimensions”. Although there is no “casual chains that lead to closure” each clip is meaningful and relatable as they represent everyday fears and are “meaningful” if that participant has certain phobias (like scared of needles).

The interface layout is consistent through the whole K-film as we want the audience to focus more on the content instead of configuring around changeable layouts. There is a grey smog background with medium sized SNU screen and smaller preview thumbnails. This layout is predictable and easy to function, decorative but not too distracting. Although all the clips are frightening, they match the background, as they are basically all darkly lit and ominous just like the background. The theme of horror is consistent through the content and the interface.

This overall theme of fear and horror challenges the audience to push themselves to their limits by overcoming all their fears in order to continue to participate in it. The scary, eerie soundtrack serves as a purpose to sustain the horror feel. The clips are all abstractly linked together in a way to blur the lines between what is real fear and what is supernatural. The artistic way that the clips are sometimes edited gives an even more abstract idea of horror by following filmic techniques rather than blatant content. Although some clips are more realistic than others, the fear is the same.

Bjørn Sørenssen, 2008, Digital video and Alexandre Atruc’s camera-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized?, Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1, pp 47-59

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, 2013, Film Art: An Introduction, McGraw-Hill, pp6-9

hello esé

Kitchen Stories (2012)

Makers: Sebastian Tan, Liviana Andrian, and Nuraidah Binte Mohamad Taip.

“Food, cooking, eating. Arranged by colour. A narration of recipes which becomes ambient in relation to the footage. This year quite a few projects where a continuous sound track has been used to solve the problem of how to identify connections between parts, though here it is sound and the use of colour. I like that it mixes languages. This is work from students from three different countries and so they were encouraged to use their own recipes but also to narrate the recipes using their own languages. It is about food and cooking and cultures. The backing music, no. A more complex soundtrck mixing kitchen and restaurant sounds would have worked much better.

I begin in yellow, then move through to red, orange, back to red.”

For this analysis of past students’ work of Korsakow films, the work “Kitchen Stories” will become my subject. The intention of a Korsakow film is to provide its audiences the chance to create narratives based on the interaction between short video sequences and patterns. “Kitchen Stories” is introduced by its authors as being a “narration of recipes”, that serves to complement the ambient footage. As a piece constructed by three students of differing nationalities, the audience is informed that the narration with be conducted in each student’s native language, assumedly as reference to the diverse culture of food.

“Kitchen Stories” begins with a warmly toned title page with a food porn-like sequence of shots of popcorn in a red bowl, paired with a quote lying near the bottom of the page – “To eat is to live, to live is to eat”, which is then repeated in both Japanese and Indonesian. This provides the viewer with a fairly clear idea that the authors are following through with their intended exploration of different artichokes for different folks. Moving past the title sequence takes the audience to a similarly coloured page where the main video sequence is set to the left and accompanied by four static thumbnails of differing sizes and placement on its right. From the information supplied by the authors of “Kitchen Stories”, the untidy arrangement of the thumbnails could perhaps be excused by the film’s aim to represent differences across cultures.

As the audience progresses through the film, the messy arrangement appears to be consistent, a certain patterning in its own right. Another pattern that becomes apparent almost immediately is the colour relationship patterning. As the film begins with bright yellow popcorn as its main subject, the adjacent thumbnails are similarly coloured and seem to continue the yellow pattern for a fair while. This pattern is interrupted by a splash of red in a thumbnail depicting gummy worms, which prompts the audience to consider other patterns such as shape, texture, and food type. This is the first example of noticeable differences after the tri-language quote from the titles, and is the first step away from being a relatively basic and whimsical piece on food. For instance, the red and yellow worms lead to four panels of which two are new; the relationship exposed between these new thumbnails is of food type and colour. What also becomes apparent is the previous pattern and relationship the worms were following; each click through the interface reveals more complexity in the film’s past and future. This could perhaps be likened to viewing a film more than once in order to understand it at another level.
The title page ft. WordArtthe title page ft. WordArt

The interfacing within “Kitchen Stories” does work, even if the layout seems a little scattered at first. Because of the basic patterning of colour-coded food, the audience can almost predict an outcome very quickly; in reference to the red and yellow worms again, a viewer can expect that selecting a thumbnail also containing a red food item will produce similarly coloured foods in the next sequence. However, by following this pattern of colour, the audience is restricted in its choices of narrative as they are not being challenged to choose another pathway; triumphantly speeding through the colourful thumbnails masks the option to explore texture and food type until completing a fairly lengthy showcase of yellow, orange and red. Because of this easy monotony, “Kitchen Stories” falls a little flat in this area.

In terms of content, the audience is really not provided with much. The authors’ aim is assumedly to promote an exploration of food and culture; both the connotations and denotations of the K-Film’s introduction suggest so. The various patterns within the work, once fully realised, offer more depth to the footage than first expected; even so, the videos do not seem selected to represent the multicultural world of food as much as selected to conform to an idea of a warm colour palette. Pasta, gummy worms and onion rings may be universal but in this day and age, they don’t belong in an international kitchen.
how did I get worms AGAIN !!?how did I get worms AGAIN !!?
Upon a first viewing of “Kitchen Stories”, the content, interface and patterns do seem to move well together in a simple ambient piece about food, but with analysis to a level likely far further than the authors originally intended, the film falls short of the mark. There is very little meaning that the audience can derive from too many treks through the piece other than that at least three student households within Melbourne are lacking in iron, but not in Vitamin C.