Category Archives: Integrated Media

Week6_GELD. GR – Money and The Greeks

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In Geld. Gr – Money and The Greeks, Florian wants to find out how do Greeks react to the crisis? He find a very unique way to make this documentary

This project started in late 2011 when Florian Thalhofer and his later wife Elissavet Aggou traveled trough Greece to chat with people about how they are dealing with the economic situation they are in. While on the road, they wrote a blog about their experiences.

Money and The Greeks is different from other conventional documentaries because it is operated by Korsakow film system.

Over this documentary, it has a constituent background music. It feels like kind of sci-fi style with someone talking or digital sound. It consists of different content of video, some of them are produced by voice-over commentary and some of them are interviews. The interface style is different over the project. The formation of the videos is changing along with audience clicking into another new page.

Florian utilises the non-diegetic title to guide audience. The texts will come out when audience hold their cursor on the thumbnails. In a way, audience will not lose their track. Another amazing thing is Florian generates a rolling subtitle for four languages Greek, French, German and English. Honestly, this technique is indeed because of the content of interview. By the way, I wanna learn this technique as well. It would cool on my Korsakow.

 LINK

Week 6_Take Away from Lecture

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Over the lectures, Adrian talked a lot of the idea of narrative and story. This week’s lecture, Adrian explain how the narrative differs from cause and effect.

What is the point in redefining narrative as anything more than cause and effect?

In Adrian’s word, beautiful cinematography is just beautiful cinematography but nor the narrative storytelling. The fascinating images evokes our feelings but it is the embodiment of narrative. The images is only the cause generates some effects on us.

We are surrounded by causes and effects because everything can be a cause and effect, like walking down the road and being wrecked by truck. Causes and effects happen all the time in our life. However, only a tiny part of cause and effect is narrative.

Basically, what I get from Adrian is cause and effect is a constellation of random things happen in our life. They are not story but just non-narrative accident because they are unsequenced. We never know what would happen next moment and, of course, we are not ready for the coming. Nevertheless, narrative is a chain of arranged events with cause and effect. In other words, people are inspired by the random cause and effects for writing a story. Only a small string of the cause and effect can be used over the time.

Week 5_Language and lists

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Langauge consists of a series of signs that generate definite relationship of with each other. Narrative does so. The embodied knowledge is assigned by person who wants to express something with the relationship of cause and effect.

Bogost outlines another concept within the context. Lists is a term with non-narrative relationship. If language creates a definite relationship of the represented things, lists isolates every single things from this relationship. Lists is refusal for the connecting power of language, in favour of a sequence of disconnected elements.

“No one scribbles dmvn a helpful sonnet before going shopping. . . . Finding a list in a

book or a poem is an immediate reminder of the most obvious dif­ ferences between literature and every other kind of non-performing art: literature is made out of something, language, that is an everyday stuff. ”

 

The reason Bogost consider this kind of idea because of his observations. Although language could be vey literature, it is impossible for us to use a literature tone every second life. Lists is direct, simple, and easy understanding. People don’t take much time to comprehend the lists but literature language. Perhaps, someone has great ability to create narrative with make-sense signs. However, this is the small part compare to a big range. Non-narrative is dominant within context due to being flexible for more people than narrative tone.

 

 

Week_4 Constraint#4_Something defines myself

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Untitled from Kai-feng Wang on Vimeo.

In this video, i use many close-up shot to illustrate my Jordan shoes in details. There are only five shots. It would be a little boring if I only use close-up shot, therefore, I attempt to play some tricks on focal length. Adjusting the focal distance is to distinguish the background and foreground. It would be more aesthetics when I film the things on foreground with blurring background. That is a very enjoyable thing when you see the things become blurring. Additionally, I somehow this visual effect is matching the background music. It kind of works tougher with the quick cut and lose focal and focal image.

Disadvantage: the camera is a bit shaky and the camera movement is awkward because you can see the camera does not move smoothly. I should have a better hand.

Week_4 Constraint#4_ immediate family

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Untitled from Kai-feng Wang on Vimeo.

The task requires me to film an immediate family around me without showing their faces. Unfortunately, I live alone away from my parents. Well, but I found a old picture on my desk . An interesting thing is when you filming a film photo with a digital video camera, this is the moment i would say “Time fast, world changes”

I don’t use other elaborative techniques on this video except for close-up shot. My idea is photo describes itself (birthday cake, candles, hands, feet, old clothes) and I just re-record it. On the other hand, this photo was taken by 1999. I really like the little dusty spots on my family union photo that represents time.

Week_4 “MORE THAN 90% OF THE FILMS CREATED IN THE FIRST DECADE OF CINEMA WERE DOCUMENTARIES.”

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Interesting source from moments of innovation

Soon after the invention of the motion picture camera in 1890s, filmmakers turned it on the world around them. Nonfiction shorts, known as “actualities,” were among the most popular films of the era.

Actualities captured the everyday—workers leaving a factory, a train arriving at a station—as well as the unfamiliar. France’s Lumiere brothers established a network of camera operators that shot and sent actuality footage around the globe.

Operational from 1895 to 1928, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company made more than 3000 films, including this actuality short of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. From its founding until 1902, American Mutoscope shot on 68mm film, hoping to avoid patent suits from Thomas A. Edison, who used 35 mm—now industry standard. The results were visually immersive high-resolution images that earned American Mutoscope’s films the name “Living Postcards.”

Week_4 Take Away from Lecture

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Story and Life

In week 4 lecture, we had a big argument about “What is story?”

Some of us might say life is a story because we would encounter different kinds of thing over our life. However, Adrian argues that life is not a story, and we are not stories. Story is a chain of arranged events with cause and effect but life is full of accidents. In shorts, we are just dealing with accident in life.

There is no any cause-effect chain in life because we don’t what would happen next, like “Hit by car on the way to home?” LOL. If newspaper reports this news, they are just describing it.

“A passenger walked down street yesterday and killed by a car. The car driver was drunk and failed on his alcohol test and he will be sent to a jail.”

This is the description of issue cause we cannot take three random thing and define it as a story. The distinction between story and life is cause and effect. That means someone could make up the car accident as a fiction story. Why the car driver get drunk? How come the passenger walked down that street at that point?  Story follows the script. Every single thing is arranged by writer.

According to Bordwell and Thomson, how to make up a three things into a story.

Consider a new description of these same events: “A man has a fight with his boss. He tosses and turns that night, unable to sleep. In the morning, he is still so angry that he smashes the mirror while shaving. Then his telephone rings; his boss has called to apologise.

We no have a narrative, unexciting though it is. We can connect the events spatially. The man is in the office, then in his bed; the mirror is in the bathroom; the phone is somewhere else in his home. Time is important as well. The fight starts things off, and the sleepless nigh, the broken mirror, and the phone call occur one after the other. The action runs from one day to the following morning. Above all, we can understand that the three events are part of a pattern of causes and effects. The argument with the boss causes the sleeplessness and the broken mirror. The phone call from the boss resolves the conflict, so the narrative ends. The narrative develops form a an initial situation of conflict between employee and boss, through a series of events causes by the conflict, to resolution of the conflict. simple and minimal as our example is, it shows how important causality, space, and time are to narrative form.

Week 4_The history of camera

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Monday’s lecture, a question be asked

Is there a chance that the accessibility of media nowadays ruins film making instead of ‘liberating it from the old’?

This hot topic is always mentioned in recent day especially in 21st century. Digital and traditional filmmaking biomes a conflict.

I found a source in which we can know how the VIDEO RECORDER
 is being evolved. How the accessibility of media is improved  in the past many years1967_Sony_Video_Rover

 

Here is the PDF: Museum of vintage reel to reel video recorders. Open reel black and white antique video recorders.
Screenshot 2014-03-25 17.25.35

 

Jasmine mentioned the increasing accessibility of camera leads to a low quality production because many people are making a film without professional skills to secure their quality. However, she believes the accessibility wouldn’t be a matter to ruin filmmaking.

Adrian also asserts: we can’t define ourselves as filmmakers cause we film a video with our iPhone. On the other hand, it wouldn’t matter what camera equipment we use because there are lots of uses of video. Adrian gives a example that your grandmother uses a iPhone to film your 21st birthday party. Her purpose of filming is not to make a film but to share with your aunty who lives in US. Filming is as same as writing. We wouldn’t say a person who write 30pages blog post is novelist. What technology influences us is convenient for recording a video.

In my opinion, accessibility is good for creative product because camera equipment becomes common for people and they can film a video at anytime and anywhere. Especially, the emergence of  DV (Digital Video Camera) prompts filmmakers to produce with handheld cameras. In 1990s,small standard definition  cameras began recording  digitally. They were first use cinematically when they were embraced by the dogma 95  movement in Denmark. Thomas Winterberg’s The Celebration was fully filmed by hand-held camera which offers more spaces for their creativities. Filmmakers stylise their craft in an unconventional way.  In modern time, Some films, like Cloverfield (2008), highly employs the notion of DV camera for their filmmaking. The shaky, unstable visual effect begins to become a acceptable way for more people. I would say the video is not ruining the filmmaking but is helping.