The Korsakow project film I have chosen to write about comes from the year 2012, and was created by Integrated Media One students Sunniva Sollied Møller, Michael Lincoln, Katrina Varey, and Scott Huang. The film is applicably titled ‘Bright Splinters’ and provides viewers with an immense variety of clips which explore the city of Melbourne from both close and afar.
The film is a beautiful, serene construction of images taken around Melbourne city, and as its name suggests, ‘Bright Splinters’ provides viewers with brief, colourful flashes in what is almost a portrait or music video of Melbourne. Some scenes have been highly thought out and framed, captured after what would appear to be hours of watching and waiting, while others seem to have been shot in a moment of inspiration and serendipity. Even this unconscious aspect of the film seems to reflect upon how many of us live our lives; sometimes we are too entrenched in our busy daily routine to be able to notice the more striking things in life, or see them and not and react without a second thought, while other moments we drink in, savour and remember forever, and it’s both of these moments the film showcases.
The film opens with an aerial shot of Melbourne, with white and yellow hue street lights on separate, parallel roads illuminating the image, which serves as a brief credit sequence as the creator’s names flash past down one of the roads – a clever idea, considering the film’s indefinitely spanning length, a credit sequence at “the end” would not be logical, or even possible.
‘Bright Splinters’ takes viewers not only for an indefinite ride around Melbourne, but instead on a visual journey lasting as long as we please. Even the film’s interface seems to indicate this infinite voyage through the city, as there is an excessive number of clips shot in both day and night times, with the thumbnails of daytime clips often appearing above the feature image, while night time ones appear to the right. This feature works exceptionally well, with viewers seemingly able to choose when they have explored enough in light or dark, and ‘wake up’ to mornings, or wait for dusk as the sun goes down. The moving thumbnails around the main image are depicted in black and white, an obviously deliberate choice, so when they are next chosen by audiences, they explode on screen in a colourful array.
This notion of a ‘journey’ is also conveyed in the film’s content, which often includes images of transport, from the busy station platforms of Flinder’s Street and Melbourne Central, and even take us on board the iconic Melbourne trams, until we arrive at our next destination. Be it a small coffee shop in a dingy alleyway on a cold Melbourne morning, or to grand aerial views of the city from Eureka tower, ‘Bright Splinters’ literally shows our wonderful city at all levels.
Most scenes are shot and displayed in real time, but there are a number of clips, particularly shown from above, that are time-lapsed or sped up and often provide the perfect transition to take us from day to night. Fewer clips are also edited differently, some footage being played in reverse, the most spectacular of these being exploding fireworks that begin as distant shining lights, before retracting as one and descending to earth.
While most of the film’s shots are stunningly composed, others, in my opinion, slightly lack the class and ‘choreography’ of others. For me, the static shots in the film work best, with movement occurring in the frame, rather than movement of the frame itself – the exception being the tilts and pans that have been operated on a tripod which are also nicely featured throughout the film, with the camera seeming to become more like our own eyes and possibly helps to involve audiences to a larger degree. However, the handheld, sometimes rapid and uneven movement in some sequences, which have also seemingly been taken on a lower resolution camera, does take away from the film which otherwise has a highly professional and polished look to it, but that is being picky.
The opening quote on the title page remains with us throughout the film’s entirety “Life though… Flies at us in bright splinters” (David Shields), as often I found myself trying to navigate through the picture to a previous frame I’d viewed, which sometimes proved impossible, but as ‘Bright Splinters’ appears to be communicating, ‘blink, and you’ll miss it’.