Monthly Archives: March 2019

Park Rhythm – Creating A Film in the Edit

Something I’m relatively familiar with after a rather haphazard production process for my shot film last year, taking a bunch of footage and trying to piece together a film in post can produce some brilliance in some instances, but it can also be (as in this particular instance) a painful and difficult process. I really struggled to find a narrative that could drive the piece forward, and to find good reasons to cut. I didn’t want to just cut for the sake of it, I wanted my edit to have some form of purpose if I was going to try and emulate Frederick Wiseman.

After a few failed attempts at creating some semblance of a coherent timeline in premier, I decided to employ a technique I used frequently last semester in my non-narrative film-making taken from Los, one of James Benning’s films. I just picked a number (5 seconds) and cut every shot at that moment. This isn’t how I was going to have my final edit, but I thought maybe some kind of interesting cutting rhythm might come out of it. I started to sense a sort of two-and-fro with the swings and the card game and so I settled upon those two things being the main parts of the piece. The film starts out with just 5 second cuts on the pieces creating a steady, monotonous rhythm (something perhaps felt throughout a lazy day at the park). Then when the card games start playing and the boy on the swing starts moving, I started cutting whenever someone either a)shifted their gaze (as if to cut to whatever they were looking towards) or b) whenever something either entered or exited the frame. I felt that this created a sense of being at the park, looking around at the other people and things, always being drawn to something moving.

For the audio, I tried to keep a lot of the swing and child sounds throughout the piece to tie it together, the audio cuts a lot less than the visuals do, with a lot of the swings audio being consistent throughout the short film. This was partly because a lot of the captured audio was unusable, but I think it gave it a bit of a through-line, which is important when a film’s narrative is being created through visual cuts, rather than an actual plot line.

 

W2: A COLLECTION OF LIKE OBJECTS – “Vintage Bikes”

This week we explored the photography style of Martin Parr, who’s photography is full of bright and vivid photos that often delves into the relationship humanity has with technology. For this experiment, we took one of his more recent photography books, a collection of shots of remote Scottish post boxes, and used a similar approach to photograph a collection of like subjects.We decided to settle on bicycles as our single theme tying this collation together. Further limiting the scope, I elected to just include photos of vintage and/or retro style bikes.

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                   

 

This collection of photos displays a variety of vintage bicycles juxtaposed with the concrete footpaths, steel seats and busy streets of the Melbourne CBD. This prevalence of old school cycles reflects the current trend of disregarding modern, engineering and design to favour more simple, traditional styles. Perhaps this nostalgic trend is because of a want of a simpler time.

 

This photo is probably the most extreme example of this idea of the vintage, retro style infiltrating modern Melbourne. The hand written, painted sign, the calling out to the Melbourne public to consider the words of Jesus and the Christian faith, the old bronze statues in the foreground of businessmen, the milk crate on the bike. All of which comes from a time long gone, thrown into the current day, busy streets of the Melbourne CBD.

F is for Fake Reflection

Can a forgery be art? Thats something that I came out of this film wondering. Is the art or the artist more important? It seems, in the eyes of the collectors, that the value of the artwork comes from who drew it, rather than what the artwork says or is. When explaining the problem with a forgery, pure aesthetics cannot be considered. The mere existence of forgeries existing that have fooled art critics/experts reveals that the aesthetic value of the painting is not what brings the value of a forgery down. Any critic who holds the opinion that forgeries are somehow inferior pieces of aesthetic work are exposed to hold an absurd opinion every time a fake piece of art slips through critique and makes it into a collection or a museum or a gallery.

So if not the aesthetic value, what is so wrong about a forgery?

Last year, The Etienne Terrus museam in Southern France was discovered to have 60% of its collection as forgeries after an art historian was asked to rearrange the exhibits. That the many townsfolk and tourists alike were fooled by these forgeries was labelled a disaster by town officials and museum officials. But was the beauty, inspiration, awe and excitement that these paintings awakened in people somehow lesser because of the artist? I would imagine that, had those paintings been actually done by Terrus, the reaction to them would have been identical. Its certainly a talent, one that is trainable, to be able to paint in so many different styles so believably.  Perhaps these forgeries are an artistic discipline in their own right. It just remains to be seen whether any of these forgeries will ever become famous enough to garner monetary value in their own right as fakes, rather than pretending to be painted by someone else.

What do I want from Real to Reel?

I think, first of all, the most important thing is hands on. A few of my studios have been very minimal in terms of actual filmmaking, and the project brief from this studio seemed to indicate that there would be a lot more actual filmmaking for the assignments. The news that we would have a filmmaking/photography/podcast etc task every week to work on in the studios on top of the film assessments was music to my ears obviously, thats the kind of thing I was hoping for out of this studio. I’d also like to perhaps bring my outside corporate filmmaking experience into the studio for the photography weeks. This sort of realistic, biographical photography that we explored in week 1 coincides well with my experience in the marketing film industry because these sorts of shoots would definitely be at home in that world. The podcasting elements are interesting as well, I’m very limited in terms of experience in producing any kind of audio outside of music, but the medium itself is something that I sink a lot of time into, and have always thought about perhaps producing/creating my own podcast.

But my passion, and what I want to explore most throughout this studio, is creative filmmaking in all shapes and forms.

 

In terms of a tangible goal, I’d like to get to the end of the semester with a film that I’m happy to put into my portfolio and use to advertise myself as a filmmaker. There has been a significant lack of that in this course, last semester being the first time that my studio was actual completely focused on filmmaking and produced two pieces of work that are welcome additions to my folio.

W1 : Eve Arnold Inspired Mini-Essay – “Girls”

When I saw these three girls laughing their heads off I knew that they’d make great subject for this Eve Arnold inspired photo essay. The girl on the right was very tentative about having their photo taken, but the other two were completely unphased by the shots. Especially the girl in the middle, who wasn’t camera shy in the slightest. Their conversation eludes my memory, but the three of them continued to share an honestly impressive amount of laughter throughout the time it took to take the photos.

The girl on the left drew my attention, she was somewhat separated from the other 2. They were laying back, leaning on each other while this girl sat with her legs and a bag between herself and the conversation. All three girls seemed to be great friends, through the conversation I never got the feel that any two girls were closer with each other than the third, but her body language somewhat distanced herself from the ongoing laughter.

This shot is the only real evidence of any nerves in the shoot. Outwardly, she seemed absolutely unconcerned by the presence of the camera lens. Her hand however nervously played with her lighter throughout the shoot after she lit another cigarette. She went through two in the 5 or 10 minutes that we were shooting. Her bracelet caught my eye too “It Girl” is strangely apt considering she was the girl that immediately stood out to me, among three girls that themselves stood out to me on the steps of The State Library.