For our K-film on addiction, me, Ella and Tiana hope to capture the similar mood as is depicted in these pictures:
Mood Board Pictures
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Week 9 Reading Notes
Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage, 2011.
This reading was an interesting one, and not one I am used to reading. It was set out basically as a list of points in relation to editing in a film. When we look at our k-films, we could easily say that editing (after post producing our films) is linking them with the keywords and creating SNUs.
Some notes from this reading:
- According to Shield, we are told that in a story, everything happens for a reason. Infact, Shields believes that it doesn’t.
- He believes plots are for dead people.
- He doesn’t believe that collage is an evolution of narrative.
- Shields uses the analogy of broken dishes creating a mosaic, and how it doesn’t try to hide that it is made of broken dishes, but rather, celebrates it.
- What is the difference between looking and seeing? Can we make art or do we have to find it?
- Shields is drawn to stories because of the literature, not the characters, their problems or their relationships. He doesn’t just like to accept what is trying to be told at face value, but rather tries to find meaning for what has slipped between the cracks.
- “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.”
- “You don’t need a story. The question is how long do you not need a story?”
- Non-fiction is flexible.
Sketch Film Group Assessment: what we learnt
Attending this weeks group assessment on the k-films which we made was quite enlightening as I got to watch the films which my other group members made. I was with Lauren, Tiana and Kevin. I enjoyed watching the others films, and in particular, I really liked the way Tiana recorded her sketch tasks. It wasn’t a simple matter of pointing the camera at something and hitting record. It was clear she thought about how she wanted to record something and did so in a very aesthetically pleasing way.
Seth asked us towards the end of the session if there was a way we could find more meaning between our videos so that they weren’t just a random bunch of videos linked with simple key words such as ‘square’ or ‘light’. When we were recording our videos, we were unaware that we were going to be using them to create a k-film, and so, most of them looked like a random bunch of videos put together. I literally only used two keywords, which were shapes, or not shapes. I guess with our final film we will have to think more about meaning than just what we are seeing.
Also, I used quotes from songs, which I didn’t reference the singer for. And the lengths of the sentences need to be relatively short to make them easier to read.
Peer Perve Week 8
This week I came across Ed’s blog where he wrote up some notes about this weeks learning. Something which I found interesting is his writing on how K-films can structurally be hierarchical. This is due to the filmmaker giving certain videos more lives than others, or giving them more of a chance of coming up as a thumbnail than the others. I never thought of it this way.
Whilst this may be trying to structure a hierarchy of what is the most important in the video, sometimes it can be overbearing and a bit of an overkill. I for one, hate having to watch the same video over and over again. However, maybe this can be used as an advantage? If something is consistently being repeated, then does that make the viewer try to find the video they haven’t seen yet? Do they eventually start to identify patterns in the work? Could that work in our favour?
Week 8 Reading Notes
- complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and ambivalence.
- some documentaries use the form of a non-narrative as a way for the filmmaker to prompt the viewer to question the work.
- montage sequences expand our understanding of what is happening between shot to shot. This can impact on understanding or interpretation
- the spectator can activate non-linear relationships across a networked field of elements.
K film final planning
ALL THINGS ADDICTION
Peer Perve Week 7
This week, I had a look through Gina’s blog, and it was interesting to read her take on our ability to adapt.
“As Adrian regarded, we don’t see the world in a rectangular frame but we film the world in a rectangular frame.”
This is something that is very true, but also something I have never really thought about. I have never really looked at a camera and cursed it for not being about to capture absolutely everything from the top of my sight to the bottom, or from the left of my peripheral to the right. I have just adapted to its abilities and accepted that as its limitations. The camera focuses on what we want to see, because in the end, how often do we really pay attention to what is happening in the corner of our eyes. We have adapted to how a camera works as eyes which capture memories and events for us to reflect on in the future, and that in itself is a miracle.
Gina then goes on to relate this idea to Korsakow, and muses that we need to learn how to work with Korsakow and its structure and interface to create something. It may have limitations, but we shouldn’t view these as a hinderance, but more of a healthy limitation. The idea of keywords, ins and outs and patterns is one we need to adapt to, not try to change. We need to work with our mediums, not against them.
Symposium Week 7
- Tyranny of representation
- Software is an instrument
- Representation: ever since the linguistic tern (1940) in humanities theory. Linguistic tern: how we understand the world around is – semiotics. This would account for what the world means. Meaning became more important than anything else.
- Language is inadequate to account for the world. And if we think it can, then it means we are putting ourselves at the centre of the world.
- We are not the centre of the universe, nor top of the food chain. The world exceeds us in every possibility.
- For every claim we have made about why we are special, science has come along and disproved us.
- If we only think the world makes sense according to our immediate world, then that is linguistic imperialism
- Things in the world have their own agency and capacity to act – we can’t control them nor are we in charged of them.
- 50 years ago we thought we were in charged of the environment. We thought that the planet existed for us and its resources were there for us to use. Now we realise that that was a silly way of viewing the world. Today it might be something else i.e. farming animals to butcher them. Maybe in 50 years time, we will look back and think that we acted barbaric.
- Television is headed in the direction of opera. It will become more expensive to produce, will be funded from different areas etc.
- Our media use is becoming more and more niche.
My First K Film
I’ve created my first ever K Film using Korsakow, and you can find it here. Enjoy!
Symposium Week 6
- It is the telling of the story that matters. Not the story.
- The Beatles: we can make a nursery rhyme a top ten hit.
- When considering non-linear narrative, how important is Ryan’s sixth criteria for identifying narrative; the notion of ‘closure’?
- Closure links to cause and effect
- In Korsakow we can have an end SNU, but if we are working with non-linear narrative then there really shouldn’t be an ending
- We can get non-linear films which still imply a start, middle and end structure
- The person making the work may want to create their own sense of closure by providing an ending
- Closure is essentially a fundamentally idea to ending. Only when somethings ends do we understand something. When we get the ending, we can look back through what we have seen and try to understand why certain things happen
- Films can break in Korsakow 2 thirds through, and we should be able to assume that it is the end
- Personally, I don’t think I would like no closure in a K film. I think it would feel undone and it is almost as if you can hand in what ever you have done up to that point and you can get away with saying ‘I didn’t want an ending’.
- The audience controls and defines when closure happens depending on what we put in our work.