For Assignment 4, we have been asked to acquire and discuss two pieces of visual media to research and discuss how it will help and influence our final audio-visual Assignment 4 product. A piece that inspired me is ‘MIDTOWN’ by Max Schleser. Max Schleser is an experimental and abstract filmmaker who is known for experimenting with smartphone cameras to create short film clips. Recently he has been lecturing at Swinburne University. The piece that was most inspiring and intriguing to me was the previously mentioned ‘MIDTOWN’, which is linked below.

This short film is, to my knowledge, is shot in midtown New York City, on a primitive smartphone at night. The project opens to a shot of an LED American flag, with cars driving past it. Schleser then cuts between the footage he captured of that flag, disorientating the viewer and distorting the image. We then cut to various other shots of the iconic central LED central of NYC, with shots overlapping each other to distort the image and change aspects of it. For example, a shot of the iconic line of LED ad boards in that central area of New York City was overlapped with another shot of the line, but with different ads, changing the image slightly.

This film as somewhat influenced what I want to produce for my audio-visual aspect of Assignment 4. I’ve always been interested in producing an Instagram for the project. as that’s something I’m personally interested in. However, the idea of looping, overlapping and cutting between shots of a single area in a disjointed and connected way is something I now want to produce for that Instagram. Short, 15 second videos of a space, spliced in a disorientating way. I’ve been looking through his other works to find any other inspirational aspects of his filmmaking. This is just an idea though, anything could change.

Schleser, M., 2013. Midtown. https://www.schleser.nz/video/short-films/midtown/

The term I settled on during the early stages of this project was encountering. However, throughout the production of my Assignment 3, I’ve always felt the piece was created with both encountering and lingering in mind, as they both go hand in hand with my idea for the media product, the struggle and battle between nature and industry. Throughout the audio-visual component of the assignment, I focused on showing the encounters between nature and industry, and how they affected each other within their own world. Rust played a big part in showing the contrast of the themes visually, as well as their effect on each other.

The start of the film is very nature heavy, this was done to show how our world once began, dominating man-made structures. As the short abstract piece progresses, industry starts to play a more prominent feature in the world, with more roads and metal objects being present. Towards the end of the film, industry takes over, both narratively and visually, and the film takes on a more urban city style. The final shot of the finished edit is the progression of nature and industry, literally. The final shot is framed with nature in the foreground, being the trees and leaves, what I have called industry in the middle, which is the electricity posts, which are a mixture of both industry and nature, as the posts themselves are made of wood. Finally, in the background is the Melbourne city, with helicopters flying across skyscrapers and industry and urbanisation at its peak. This ‘future’ my narrative has predicted matches the aesthetics and style of the music choice present throughout a majority of the piece. The repetitive, urban-industrial beat fades out however in the final shot, and is drowned out audibly by the diegetic sounds of the shot itself. Once the song fades out, the soundscape of the piece is engulfed by the constant re-emerging sounds of cars revving their engines as they pass and the high pitched chirps of the birds. These sounds replace the repetitive beat of the song ‘Beautiful Guurls” by Ricky Eat Acid, and create their own repetitive rhythm throughout the last minute of the piece, reflective of the repetitive rhythms of a person living in an urbanised area, going to work, etc.

Furthermore, while the diegetic sound drowns out the music track, the shot itself doesn’t follow the precisely timed rhythm previously established in the previous 2 minutes of the film. This long, drawn-out shot lingers for the rest of the film’s duration and is intended to make audiences feel uncomfortable and uneasy, as what has been previously expected to happen has been completely tossed on its head, similar to how the world was when landscapes were industrialised.

Overall, I’m proud of the process and outcome I achieved through this Assignment 3 task. Writing reflective posts twice a week was a big help in having records and keeping track of what I wanted to make for the assignment, as well as flesh out my ever-expanding ideas and thoughts about the audio-visual aspect of the task.

http://drive.google.com/open?id=1BIhCBbV1_m7sobKCmAZr3YAHAMcmbqSX

Today I went out and shot the rest of the footage needed to complete my last couple edits of the audio-visual aspect of Assignment 3. A key takeaway from the pitch feedback I received in Monday’s class was that my final shot needs to end with a bang and be a culmination of all aspects of my work, video and audio included. The panel members suggested that maybe I should go more urban and fully industrial, something that was present in my recipe originally but that I ended up skipping over as an aesthetical choice. I decided to meet the idea halfway, and film more urban areas of the suburb and partly the city. I walked around my neighbourhood, more around the housing complexes and apartment blocks, filming aspects of the world I had not yet portrayed in the previous edits of my Assignment 3, things that were more industrial than nature. Some of these include washing lines, trucks and graffiti, the latter of which can be seen as a raw file with the link below.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RyRXVJOpbVFgmJLUL3Z02aedjA8qVVY3

The above shot to me was a great example of an urban aspect of a suburb, as graffiti is often called urban street art. The bland, yellow and brown/marrone of the walls the graffiti is tagged onto is very dull and lifeless, and while the whole film is quite desaturated, this will be more noticeably so in the final edit, to contrast between the nature heavy sections of the film. Furthermore, the sounds of cars zooming by are more present in both this shot and the other shots taken today, which is another way in which the industrial and urban sections of the film will contrast.

Overall, I really like these final shots I gathered. While I want to save the very final shot for the first full viewing of the assignment, I am especially proud of how it turned out. I spent an hour walking around my neighbourhood looking for the perfect angle for it. Let’s hope it was worth it!

Today was the pitch session for our Assignment 3 for Seeing the Unseen V2. I was picked randomly to go second, which I was happy about, as it allowed me to get it out of the way and done and relax and observe for the rest of the class. At this time, my piece is 80 percent finished, as I need to clean up the cuts and transitions, as well as figure out how to finish the piece within the narrative.

Through the feedback given by the three panel members, the main points I came away with was to really think about and plan your final shot, as it will have a lot of impact on the viewer and wrap up the narrative. Furthermore, the panel reiterated the need to perfectly time the cuts between shots.

Probably the most important piece of feedback was the ideas of how I could end the film within the narrative, by having the final shots focus on the overpowering presence industry now has over nature in more densely populated city areas, such as the CBD and Sydney Road’s dense shopfront areas. From these suggestions, I’ve decided that I am going to let the song naturally fade out like it does normally, rather than loop the intense sections and abruptly cut it out. To me, this is symbolic of the ever-lacking presence of nature within the urban environments, and the everpresent industrial feel of both these final shots, and the song as a whole. This to me is the idea of nature dying, and losing the battle to industry that has been portrayed throughout the start and middle of the film, especially the starting shot, which is of an overgrown water pipe, rusted and swallowed by nature. This can be seen in the screengrab below.

Here is a link to the draft shown in class in my pitch today as well.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1T6-TI8xe9ii1AAv5Er4USp7UfcksgOHJ

In class today, we chose an allocated timeslot and came into class for 30 minutes to present our work to Hannah and a small focus group. I came in at 10:30 am and showed my piece to a few peers and the tutor. Before I got feedback, I knew I needed to obtain more shots to fill up the timeline of the piece, as well as to perfectly time the transitions between the shots.

Some of the feedback I got was to really think about the order of the shots within the timeline, as well as again, the timing and pace of the piece. My original first shot was a close up of a rusted screw in a playground. The shot started still, but a child started to climb up and around the surface that the tripod was placed on. Thinking about this idea of pace, I moved that shot closer to the buildup in the song, using this camera shake to symbolically show the buildup of the piece and the song.

Furthermore, thinking about the exact order of the shots got me thinking about the nonfictional narrative that can be seen throughout the film, without the use of dialogue. The rusted objects and overgrown environments suggest to the viewer that this is a world that has been overrun by the clash of nature and industry and their everlasting battle to claim their environments. This has gotten me thinking about how I can portray that idea of a desolate landscape even more so visually, maybe with a manipulation of the tempo, looping and distorting audio, and colour, desaturating the landscape.

At this point during the production stage, I am having trouble communicating with the artist of the track. I have spoken to them, and they have seen my messages, but they are yet to respond. Heres hoping they get back to me before week 8!

When I was starting to film shots for Assignment 3 last week / this week, I began to notice that when I was out on the field, looking for moments when nature encounters industry and vice versa, that I was focusing more on specific things than others. That I was building a repetitious gallery of shots. They are not literally the same shots, but they each follow a similar theme or shot style.

For example, when going out to film on the suburban streets of my neighbourhood, I began noticing a fair amount of rusting objects, whether they be taps, bolts or polls. I started thinking about how rust is a perfect example of an encounter between nature and industry, as nature is corroding industry and taking back its place in the space. Furthermore, this shots of rust were all extreme close-ups, with the subject of the shot generally taking up the right side of the frame. While examining these shots and grouping them in the editing process, I began to think about how this could aid me in creating a rhythm within my Assignment 3 edit. Maybe these shots could break up sections, as rust is universal, no matter where you film. Maybe they could be shown in a loop? These are concepts that I am pondering thanks to the unintentional repetition of what I find compelling.

Another inspiration for repetition in my final piece was this MTC play I saw recently called ‘Working With Children”, which tackles the subject of teenage eroticism and performance (sounds wanky but its good). I really enjoyed the performance as a whole, but what interested me the most was how the performer would use repetitious movements and phrases to tell a deeper story beyond words, and put the audience in a trance. This idea of a repetition used to create a numbing of the mind is something else I will think about in the preparation of Assignment 3