So you think you know what (a) narrative is? That klusterflop of a sentence is precisely the reason for this blog post.

After Seth’s lecture on non-narrative and the way in which non-narratives are organised and interpreted, I have come to the conclusion that there are essentially three distinctly different ways people actually understand narrative to be. And my theory is that this completely comes down to your own personal philosophical understanding of the universe (more later).

Philosophical Idea Numero Uno: The Narrative as Plot Understanding

The first way in which people understand Narrative is just straight up anything with a story, at all. I will give you an example of what this sounds like… “Oh did you watch Captain America (you know, the second one) in the cinema?” she inquired, “Yes Debra!” Phillis replied, “It was just completely devoid of narrative substance.” “What a shame,” Debra said, “I kind of hoped you were one of those people who’s really hip and cool and can be entertained by the artistry of a 50 minute continuous zoom in.”

Here, our characters Debra and Phillis are having a conversation about Plot, or potentially, Story, and people kind of turned that idea into story. I know in Year 12, I had this kind of understanding, if you’re studying the narrative of something you’re studying it’s story. If you have a book and it’s a narrative, it’s a story, even if it doesn’t have a narrator. “But all books have a narrator!” I hear you cry… yes okay Debra, I’m getting to that.

Philosophical Idea Numero Duo: The Narrative is the collection of things Understanding

This is a really good one if you’re one of the people in the world that has a compulsive need to taxonomize everything. So here you go, narrative is when a thing presents you anything. Narrative is the way in which information is communicated, narrated. In a film, this is when the Director is trying to show you that life is transient so he slaps in 14 consecutive shots of dying flowers. That’s some narrative right there. BOOM! The idea that life is transient has now been narrated to you through the narrative, there’s a narrative, there you go, TADAAAAA!

But wait! Then this blog is a narrative, I am presenting this information to you, trying to get you to think, so then what is non-narrative. How could anything be Non-narrative?!?!

Existential crisis here we come.

Philosophical Idea Numero Tre: The Narrative is all a lie Understanding

“So Debra,” Phillis said, “What is narrative substance?” She thought long and hard. She looked at the ceiling for an answer, then back to the deep purple curtains, she imagined running her fingers along all the cracks in the walls and noted that they, in a sort of subtle, yet beautiful way, represented her flawed understanding of narrative. Composing herself, she stated, “The hero’s journey”. “Codswallop!” shouted Phillis, “You know as well as I do that narrative is just a farce and that the hero’s journey is just trodden tripe screamed from the rooftops of buildings in Burbank”

Here lies the third Philosophical understanding, that narrative is in fact a lie. The acceptance that everything is narrative and therefore, nothing is. Since all art is narrating something, even if it’s a drunk man in a room spitting paint on a canvas, there is a acceptance that narrative is just nothing and everything all wrapped into one, impossible to categorise, impossible to understand, as diverse as the universe itself, impossible to understand and define.

At what point does anything become a narrative? Who decides? No One? Everyone? Beyond all the academic definitions… What actually is a narrative? Is it something that can have an ‘a’ in front of it at all? Is it a singular thing or a constantly evolving force that cannot be stopped no matter how many Debras the world may have?

Today we just got placed in groups for Project Brief 4. One of the issues with this is that I’ve spent all this time sussing out who the strong people in the class are and then just to have no say in the matter is kind of annoying because how do I know this is gonna be any good… I don’t. When you embark on a project with a group of people, you always try to collaborate with the kind of people that understand your thought process and the way you work and the people who can support you. I have no guarantees anyone has my back at all and my life is a little topsy turvy at the moment with family stuff. It’s pretty hard knowing whether or not it will all turn out okay.

I like my group though, I know I will have to help quite substantially with the editing of both essays but I feel good about that at the moment. As long as we can all do our part it will be fine. It could be a little difficult for me to come in to university to meet up with my group because I live so much further from the CBD than both Rachel and Jasmine do.

I sent them an example of a video essay that I love, by the RocketJump Film School. RocketJump is a company that began with weekly YouTube content and now they are a semi-professional studio producing feature-length content for Netflix and streaming services. They have been around since the beginning of YouTube, in the form of Freddie Wong’s YouTube channel Freddiew. One of the first weekly short film producers on YouTube. The video entitled “Why CG sucks (but it doesn’t)” has 6 million videos because of its extremely controversial subject matter.

For careers, collaboration is important. When I made my short film recently, collaboration was a huge, massive part of what took place over the months leading up to and during production, however one of the things about your career is that everyone handles themselves with professionalism. They are hired, there is an interview process. I feel like at University, this wall, the kind of filter, doesn’t exist and you could end up with anyone in your group. This presents a problem for me as an only child, seriously, it’s hard work.

In Rachel’s lecture she said that everyone has a different style of collaboration. My style of collaboration is getting ideas, making a definite plan that we all understand and dividing sections of it up, not so much just all in collaboration. I need a piece of the action I can take total responsibility for, end-to-end. Mostly this is just because I can get these moments with intense focus and I can’t share those. My best work is done alone because I can’t get everyone to ride these creative focus waves that I have with me.

Rachel listed the following things as the most important for collaborating in group project settings:

– Consistency

– Respect

– Support

– Responsibility

– Equitability

I think the most important of these is responsibility. In my experience when someone feels like they have no ownership, they won’t buy in. There doesn’t necessarily have to be anything in it for them other than the fact that some of it is theirs, and this is one of the reasons group assignments are so hard because it’s hard to say, this part of the assignment is yours when it’s so important that it be a team effort.

Can someone tell me what non-narrative is? Click here for a totally inconclusive discussion

Okay so here comes the academia. Prepare thyself:

Audiences have a temporal framework that they use to put things together. Imagine this as a tower of lego bricks on the ground and then the media work chucks you a new brick and you gotta find it’s friends and stick it in there. Eventually you’re gonna have a really big tower but you only have as many bricks as the producer gives you. Sometimes you’ve got a linear or non-linear sequence of events. Narratives and non-narratives alike can have these things. So they are not necessarily related. But they could be. Imagine if someone took lego bricks that didn’t fit together and then threw them at you and you tried to connect them up but couldn’t. Then here you are with a non-narrative work. Is documentary non-narrative? Does it depend on the documentary?

“A narrative is typically: Cause and effect that brings about an end for the narrative.” Cause and Effect is usually sited as the most important element of narrative structure, however that completely discounts all the other elements like point of view, structuring of time and more.

“Non Narrative fits within these categories: Abstract, Categorical, Rhetorical and Association” Let’s have a look at an example of Abstract work, Ballet Mechanique, An experiment in editing things in a completely nonsensical fashion, as far as cause and effect, this is absolutely devoid of narrative. And honestly, it’s creepy to watch. Seth showed us a categorical work by a guy named Jonathon Harris, he used dispersed shots of five second length approximately every minute of a day and uploaded it to the web with some fancy algorithms. Similarly, the Gap teeth women documentary is another categorical piece of non-narrative. Rhetorical non-narrative, I can really only think of Grizzly Man it’s a documentary that leaves me actually more confused about the world than I was going in. It asks so many questions and answers none. Lastly association, this one I don’t quite get.

Non-narrative is a growing form and many believe it is due to a desensitisation to story. I disagree. I don’t think it’s possible for us as a human race to get sick of story. I think it’s simply just a lack of story. A feeling when you go to the cinema and they serve you up a spectacle of explosions and implied meaning and don’t give you anything remotely interesting or well written.

JORDYN: a creative portrait by Amber Ryder

PB3: JORDYN – a creative portrait

For this video I was given the black hat and though I really like the way the interview works as a personal portrait I need to respond to the negatives of the work.

I think from a focus (narrative) perspective there seems to be a lack of controlling idea. The audio was very disjointed which Amber says was because she didn’t know how to control the levels in editing. The audio was a little disjointed and often lines were cut off. Unfortunately, this also highlighted the lack of singular vision.

Born to Dance by Samantha Phelps

Project Brief Three: Video Portrait

For this video I had the Red Hat. My initial feelings was how beautiful the video was and how well it flowed. The music was a really effective addition to the video and the found footage fit perfectly like a puzzle it really all works. It did feel like there is a lot of dialogue and very quick.

I do feel like the end of the piece is a bit sudden how it shifts from talking about dance to talking about how people are worthy of dance, it became very inspirational very quickly.

Interview with Wendy Milne by Hannah Starkins

Project Brief 3

Yellow Hat: I really love the subject, she really seems like such a lovely person. I love the way Hannah brought her home and photo books and videos to the screen, it really feels like we were invited into her home. The setting is very intimate and despite the lack of music you absolutely nailed that homely feeling.

Allegiance by Emma Knaus

Allegiance

Green Hat:

I really liked the shots that Emma chose, I think they really complemented the style of the video. I still think the training montage could have been taken out seeing as though the video is plenty long enough and the training explanation seems very monotonous and really doesn’t contribute to the controlling idea. The music was great and overall the video was a success.

This is my final project brief three, an interview with Asher Johnson, head of the non-profit, Act Three. Asher is an extremely dedicated man and it really shows in the final edited project.

The video is entitled “A New Kind of Theatre” and it explores the idea of humanitarian theatre and the effect theatre performance has on students in a high school context.

Positive Reflection:

I started the project relatively simply, I had conducted a few interviews before and had a fairly strong understanding of where the video was headed from the outset. For this reason, I didn’t create a shotlist or storyboard as I knew I would only be using a few key angles from the recorded interview and mixing in B-roll of specific key moments I could find from others who had been on trips who were happy to share their footage with the internet. Once I began cutting the footage together, I noticed how fantastic the mood worked. Each answer seemed to fit even better than I expected which is absolutely a testament to Asher’s charisma. I asked only a few questions and he was able to very quickly latch onto the key ideas I was trying to draw out and talked for a long time and knowing him this was not surprising. The interview went for nearly forty-five minutes but I ended up with some fantastic content. The process of finding music was long and painful because it was hard to find something that matched the ambient/non-culturally specific feel I wanted for the soundtrack, in the end the YouTube Audio Library was incredibly helpful and I found it had the best music of any Creative Commons website.

Questions:

“When did you personally first realise that bringing theatre to disadvantaged communities was something you wanted to do?”

“What kind of experience do the students get out of the trips as a whole?”

“Where would you like to take the organisation and the trips in the future?”

and “What effect does performing in a theatrical environment have on young teens and do you think that the impact changes them for life?”

Negative Reflection:

Looking back on the interview, though I do feel that it is a great video with a well constructed idea, the video feels more like an advertisement than a portrait and this was frustrating, as I think the problem resided in my questions. I really felt that Asher’s dream was important in capturing who he is, though the interview is very extrinsic and doesn’t really look at Asher under the surface on a personal level. I think in many ways, the actual interview was extremely successful but it doesn’t, to me, feel like it nails the brief because it lacks the depth of a real video portrait. I did try in my interview to encourage Asher to share more about why he came to Australia and his specific family reasons, without getting into detail, I think a lot of that is very private and I didn’t feel there was a comfortable way to approach the subject, though, I wish I had have found a way in hindsight because it would have added a dynamic to the video I would have liked to see.

The following is mostly satirical (emphasis on the mostly):

EDIT: Upon actually completing PB4, I can tell you that it is quite honestly an extremely difficult task and would be at least 400% easier alone. Because of this I propose a new part of the collaborative contract that says, “should the student be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a substantial breakdown in communications has occurred, the student can elect to just do the whole damn thing alone”

Here comes Project Brief 4, the single most difficult project brief imaginable, not because the brief is hard but because of the sheer number of documents that need to be completed including (but certainly not limited in any way by or to) The Brief itself, topics, collaborative contract, audio essay template, video essay template, annotated bibliography, collaborative troubleshooting document, individual SWOT analysis (seriously that’s a real thing), and many, MANY more. This assignment looks too hard even from the outset, I’ll be honest. I thought I could just churn out an audio essay but apparently group work needs a huge amount of Red Tape. I mean, fair enough, what if everyone does absolutely nothing, then what? What will be do? Well thank goodness we have a collaborative contract. BOOM!

I’ve never really been in a group that hasn’t pulled their weight, honestly. All my groups have been pretty good. To those people who are yet to let me down. Please don’t. Much Love.