In Wednesday’s class, a handful of the class sat around a table and gathered all and any pieces of our Assignment 4 project we had ready. For some, this meant pulling out test footage and/or audio. For me, this meant inspirational research pieces and idea briefs. We went around the circle in a round robin fashion and both people were given 5 minutes each to present what they had at the time for their partner, describe and evaluate on their ideas, and get feedback from the person they were presenting to, and vice versa.

My idea for the audio-visual aspect of Assignment 4 is to create an interactive journey through a house and tell a story using audio about what happened, using the application, Korsakow. This was a very new idea to me at the time of pitching to my peers, and while it is more developed as I write this development blog post, during Wednesday’s class, I was very bare bones.

One of the most helpful ideas my partners and I developed was to talk about how you ‘know through vision, but you learn through audio’. This is exactly what I want to with my final piece. Static or slow panning shots of still objects and environments, but with the soundscape I want to create, the story and context of the piece will be clearer / more open to interpretation.

Some other ideas that have been really helpful were the idea of slow pans, an excellent mic hired from building 9 and how moving through a space can tell a lot about the environment. These have helped me develop the narrative and choice aspects of my final piece. How to guide audiences through a story and make them think they are discovering it for themselves.

This feedback session was really helpful, especially in inspiring me to make what I want to make and evaluating how I want to do it.

In class today, we learnt how to create and experiment with creating interactive films using specific programs. The idea of an interactive film is to have the viewer guide themselves through the story, picking what they watch next, and how they experience the project overall. I found it really interesting how simple the tool we actually used to create the interactive films Korsakow was! While the interface is a little dated, and the software itself isn’t scaled to the right resolution on my computer, I’ve really enjoyed messing around with the software, and creating patterns and rhythms of videos for viewers to navigate their way through.

The feature I find most interesting is the way you can create tags, and link pieces of media together through these tags to create an algorithm that suggests the next videos to watch based off the similar tags. Alternatively, you could have a completely random process, but the calculated and formulated tagging method is really unique to the Korsakow program. We experimented with both the randomized and calculated tagging in class, and while I struggled to formulate a neat layout I liked, it was exciting to see such little programming equate to such endless possibilities!

I was inspired and experimented with Hannah’s method of grouping and linking videos together, and had four tags in my calculated linking test using Korsakow. These included; water, industry, stillness and movement. While I need to work on my theming skills, these four tags allowed me to link all the videos together to at least two degrees of separation so that you couldn’t get stuck in a loop of the same looping videos. Furthermore, I’ve been having troubles setting layouts for the videos, as the layout is always a couple changes behind my newest version, and I cannot really get it to update without creating a new project.

These are all minor issues that can be ironed out over time, nevertheless, and I am excited to continue to use Korsakow in the future for my final audio-visual piece for Assignment 4

One of the biggest struggles I’ve had with developing my Assignment 4 (besides a little sickness) is my indecisiveness when it comes to picking what I want to ‘notice’. Throughout Assignment 3, my main theme/idea I focused on noticing was the interactions between nature and industry and their byproducts. While that came quite naturally to me, new ideas for the audio-visual component of Assignment 4 have not come as easy. Throughout this semester of Seeing the Unseen V2, I’ve had this fascination with ‘stillness’ and ‘movement within stillness’. Almost like a real-life cinemagraphs. While I’m not entirely sure how and where I want to explore noticing through stillness, and small movements, something that inspired me to lean towards stillness was this poem by Myronn Hardy named STILLNESS.

While this poem has nothing inherently to do with this course, they way Hardy builds this scene and has the reader go through this delicately crafted journey where everything feels still and silent. Hardy’s beautifully constructed passages tell this emotionally gripping story about lost childhood, empty promises and torn relationships. But to me, it feels so self-driven. While Hardy has meticulously crafted the structure of this poem, I feel like I am exploring it alone, the first time ever. That feeling is something I want to evoke in my interactive final piece for Assignment 4.

If I were to visually imagine this poem, the whole world would be still, with a camera panning around to these focal points within a story, all taking place in one location, a house alone on a hill overlooking the coast. This isolated, still, moment in time location is something I might consider focusing on for the audio-visual aspect of my Assignment 4. Like one park, one house, one room. These are just first ideas, but I feel a lot more confident in exploring noticing now for my final assignment after unpacking that poem.

Hardy, M. (2015). STILLNESS. Callaloo, 38(2), 328-329,426. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/docview/1680991007?accountid=13552

One of my biggest points of contention when starting to produce and develop the audio-visual aspect of Assignment 4 is whether or not to use a phone camera, and if I don’t use one, use a DSLR or a hired camera from RMIT resources. There are pros and cons to each, while the convenient, portable and spontaneous nature of my phone lends itself perfectly to ‘noticing’, the quality of the content I capture, both movement wise and picture quality, wallow in comparison to the steady and crisp footage gained by using a DSLR and tripod. However, the aesthetics of the phone camera add a layer of noticing in itself. So, which do I pick?

While I had been leaning more to the DSLR and tripod side of filmmaking, my opinion changed after reading Aesthetics of Mobile Media Art by Camile Baker, Kasia Molga and considering how much I’ve spoken about him in this assignment already, my idol Max Schleser. This paper published by the trio discusses the history and insane potential for creation that the progression of mobile phones has had on media practitioners, from the now nostalgic pixel quality of primitive phones to the now incredible HD (and now 4k) capabilities of today’s smartphones. The article addresses the pros of smartphone media creation that have been rattling in my mind; its ‘intimacy’ ‘portability factor’ and their ‘predilection for close-ups’.

While being an interesting and engaging read, this academic work by 3 worldly scholars have given me a whole new perspective on how mobile media has been progressing, and their confidence in the platform and its inferior picture quality (in comparison to media specific gear) being portrayed more as an aesthetical choice has given me the confidence to almost certainly use my mobile smartphone as the main filming device for Assignment 4.

Baker, C, Schleser, M. & Molga, K. (2009), ‘Aesthetics of mobile media art’, Journal of Media Practice 10: 2&3, pp. 101-122

In class today we looked at a few examples of how we could approach our Assignment 4 audio-visual products. These included an interactive media product using tools such as Korashow, and video collages using Adobe Premiere Pro. While I have been playing around with the idea of using aspects of collage in my final audio-visual product for this assignment, similar to how Max Schleser uses overlapping and masking in my previous research post about his product ‘Midtown’, I hadn’t really given much thought to an interactive final piece. However, after experimenting with the tools and watching Ceci N’est Pas Embres (This Is Not Embres) by Matt Soar in class today, it is most likely going to be the style I use for my final product.

Matt Soar is a filmmaker living in Canada who took his family to a small village in France for half a year and decided to make an interactive film portraying an outsider’s/newcomer’s perspective on the town and its lifestyle. As an audience member, you have full control over what you want to watch, learn and experience of Matt’s time in France, whether it be the neighbourhood dog that could open unlocked doors, or his families worry about the weather before their trip. Soar does this through a seemingly endless string of connected videos, based on keywords set by the filmmaker, using the application Korashow. This app allows you to link videos together, and create random branching timelines based on themes, ideas or pure chance for the audience to experience and work their way through.

This style of audience-driven experiences and their process of interacting with the film based on what they notice and are interested in is incredibly unique, and something I have never experimented with. I would love to have a product where each person’s interaction with the film is somewhat different from the next’s, similar to what Soar has created with Ceci N’est Pas Embres.

Soar, M., 2013. Ceci N’est Pas Embres. http://embres.ca/filmE/

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