Category Archives: integrated media 1

active audiences – week 6

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a big part of last week’s lecture was the discussion of narrative in k-films and the ability to control interpretations.

 

Can narrative be anything other than cause-effect stories?

– cause – effect are conventional narrative. k-films allow us to step outside conventional to redefine narrative. we can’t just restrict narrative to one meaning

– when making a narrative, someone has put any given something in particular order to give a particular meaning. we organise our k-film in a particular order to give a particular meaning. even if this meaning can be interpreted and experienced differently. there are still causal relations between events.

– just because we have these storytelling techniques doesn’t mean everything is a story

 

how can filmmakers control interpretation?

– can they even control interpretation? it depends on what. some things are easier to control than others. but in anything that is made there will always be elements that cannot be control. there are different amounts f control that you can have and there will always be multiple interpretations.

– people are always coming up with new ways to interpret and analyse media and content

– everything is defined by it’s relations to other things and words. nothing can just sit by itself. it needs to be interpreted to exist. for example, in a dictionary, words can only be described by using other words. they do not just exist. they have been interpreted.

 

my favourite quote from the lecture (and i’m sorry, i don’t remember who said it) was that “it’s how you tell it that matters. not the story itself”. i think this is important because the story can be taken and changed and understood differently by any audience but they will still take in how the story is communicated. this is like with korsakow, it matters how the story is communicated because everyone will make their own story from this method of communication.

can movies be essays? – week 6

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this weeks reading was a hefty one and i have to be honest, i didn’t get through all of it. a lot of skimming was done. but it was just so long. i was finding it impossible to focus and figured off i was better off reading parts and taking them in than reading the whole thing but absorbing nothing. not that it wasn’t interesting. because the concept of film essays is a new and interesting one. it was just a very long, very wordy article that had a lot of foreign examples that meant nothing to me because i don’t watch those kind’s of films.

Laura Rascaroli tells us all about the concept of the “film essay”. a concept which i am assuming is related in some degree to Korsakow. otherwise, why would we be reading it. it’s about making and seeing films in a new and different way. not just pure narrative anymore, film essays are more biographical. the director and scriptwriter merge together. most importantly, it’s the voice of the filmmaker which comes across through the essay. like korsakow, it’s not so much about what is being said but about how ideas are being represented or delivered and what the audience can gain from that. a literary essay is a means for someone to try and communicate their ideas and opinions to an audience and thus a film essay is the same. it sits between fiction and non fiction cinema, blurring the boundaries between the two as it can be either, both or neither. from the article, “an essay is neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both the passion and intellect of the author”, the film essay is an exploration of ideas, led by the filmmaker. 

this is what korsakow is. it’s what we’ve been discussing. that’s it’s not about the content but rather how the content is delivered and how it can be interpreted. and this is how we have to look at our k-films. right now i’m still unsure about putting the whole thing together. but i just have to think about how i want to express myself and the clips that i have taken. importantly, it’s the relationships between the clips, not the clips themselves.

if the literary essay is a device for saying almost everything about almost everything, then the film essay can do exactly the same, only even more because it can show it too. this is where the benefit of cinema comes in. it is visual and audial (is that a word?) the viewers can see, watch, read and listen to the essay and the different elements combine to produce a far more cohesive and enriched work.

like korsakow, the essay shows the process of thinking, how the filmmaker goes about getting to the point they are trying to communicate. it is a reflective form, practically auto-biographical. the k-films show the inner workings of the filmmaker’s mind as they put the film itself together.

i only have two question coming out of this reading.

1. if our k-film is a film essay, why do we need a written essay to accompany it?

2. the article mentioned someone named Georg Lukács. are we sure this isn’t George Lucas trying to get his hands on another type of cinema?

 

a tiny respite – week 6

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there were no constraint tasks this week. i suspect this is because we were all doing our very important k-films. this means i cannot complete one of my contract clauses which said to discuss how i went about achieving the set task for the week. instead, imma talk about how i actually found making the k-film because i guess that was really the set task. and it links all the others together.

what i found the most interesting about making my k-film was that when i was made to put all these mostly random videos together to form one cohesive entity, i began to find patterns and similarities between these videos, even when i had not intended any of them. how does a clip of a tree branch relate to the sun setting relate to a photo mobile spinning in my room? on first glance, there are no connections. but as humans and as story makers and readers, we find meaning in everything we receive. this stems back to the active audience theory that we are all the creators of our own interpretations regardless of what the intended meaning was. i had not intended any meaning in my videos apart from fulfilling the given brief. yet one put together they formed connections. they required keywords, ins and outs, and these needed to make sense. because connections and relations are how we make sense of the world that we live in. nothing is separate, everything is connected. so when i was making my k-film i surprised myself by how much these videos actually connected to each other.

the more you know eh?

a dog’s life – week 6

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k-films are coming up and i’v been enjoying the sketch tasks everyone has been uploading. one of my favourite this week was Tiana’s very cute video about her dog. i believe the constraint was something from the point of view of a pet. this video completely nails that. you don’t see the dog at all but from the moment the video begins you understand what is happening. this is because not only does tiana have the camera on the ground and move like it was a dog but you can hear her dog barking in the background. i was actually convinced that the camera was the dog. then i stopped myself and realised it was just  a camera. good work tiana. you had me going there. but it’s a really well shot clip and i really liked it 😀

how much control does the audience have? – week 5

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the big topic in this week’s readings and lecture was the question of how much can we control what the audience interprets from our content? in reality, there are different levels of control that we can have depending on what the story is, how we communicate it and who is receiving it. but overall, you can never really be sure of how an audience will interpret your story or how much of it they will see, read, understand or change.

an interesting article in regards to this discussion is one describing the theory of “Active audiences”. the article/extract, which can be found here (you may need an emit login to view it, sorry) discusses how audience receive and restructure and rebroadcast any media they obtain. audiences are not passive so when we are making our media and our stories and our content, especially in the case of k-films, we must be aware that what we make can be interpreted in absolutely any way. while, as is evident in the article, the level of reinterpretation may vary between audience members, the theory is that every single person will interpret it not only different from the way the producer intended but from the next person to receive the text as well.

living plants – week 5

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so, in my usual troll of everyone else’s blogs for ideas, i came across bec’s video responses to this week’s constraints.

her video of light from the perspective of a plant is rally enjoyable video that succeeds in making me understand how this plant views light. it’s a simple, static shot of a tree in the sunlight but the many different elements that combine to make this video are what make it feel so alive.

first off, the screen is filled with plants, the leaves of the tree in focus, it’s branches. but also the leaves of a wall of vines in the background. the plants are the main characters in this video. however, they are not the focus. the focus is the light coming from the sun. the bright light shining onto out main plant is contrasted against the plant in the background who is in shadow and this makes the light seem so much brighter. the light also flickers and glows as the leaves move in the winder, making both the light from the sun and the plants themselves feel really alive and in sync together. however, the best element of the video, which ties the others together, is the music playing in the background. it completely lifts the video, giving the plant a personality and emotions and really shows how the plant feels about the light.

great video bec 😀

stories, narratives or discourse? – week 5

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the reading. first off, let me say how wide my eyes went in pleasant surprise when i saw how short this reading was! like seriously… why can’t they all be like this? it would give me so much more time to do the actual proper and important work for each subject. then i actually started reading it and realised that if it was any longer i may never get through it. ok, it wasn’t that bad. the start was ok, but a lot of the last half just went straight over my head, i had no idea what was going on.

from what i got, Ryan was discussing narrative and what it is that really makes up or defines a narrative, especially in regards to the rise of transmedia stories and storytelling that don’t conform to the to the norm of narrative storytelling. however, Ryan suggests that while the current definition of narrative must be broadened to allow for the new types of media, it must also be constrained, otherwise every text across every medium will be regarded as narrative.

Ryan provides a description of narrative as the combination of story and discourse. story being the sequence of events and discourse as the events being represented. thus, narrative is the textual actualisation of th story while the story is the virtual form of the narrative. so many words twisted in and upon themselves, i started to lose track of what was what and what was doing what in regards to what. this is where the study of narrative become very confusing. sadly, it didn’t end there. because then we moved on to other ways we can have narrative which can be  representation which are “medium free”. Ryan claims we cannot confine narrative to one medium but that it can transcend across all mediums, it is not simply verbal anymore.

expanding on the previous stuff, Ryan explains that story is not events, it consists of events. thus story is not found naturally in the world. story is a representation of events as a cognitive construction, a mental image rather than physical as discourse is. so story, and in a further sense, narrative, does not really exist anywhere, it is constructed in the minds of the reader as they are reading and interpreting texts or events. Ryan states that the ability to evoke stories to the mind distinguishes narrative discourse from other text types. any text can create a narrative in the mind of the reader. thus we can never be sure that sender and the receiver have the same story in mind.

there was also a big list about what defines a narrative and then a list following that about why that first list doesn’t always work. although that was probably there to help us understand more, it kinda just made everything slightly more confusion. but i was not a huge fan of the first list because it gave definitions that were too rigid. narrative and stories can and should be about anything and everything. they do not need to be bound by set rules, otherwise they’d all be the same. the good thing about stories is that they can all be different. i guess what it’s saying is, they can’t just be life. or about a rock that just is. that’s not a narrative. that’s just a rock. however, one of my favourite pints from the article was describing narrative as “world construction”. the idea of every story being it’s own world is interesting. everything that occurs, all the events and characters and reactions, are within a world that is solely confined to that story or narrative. again, it’s all looping back in on each other. but for me the idea is to create a world and then put everything in it.

but where does that leave us with our korsakow films? i rested each video i made separately, with no connection or bigger picture in mind. so, will they automatically form their own narrative world when i put them together. because these last two readings focused heavily on narrative, i still can’t tell whether they want our korsakow films to follow narrative structure or to be random and abstract. i guess what we learned from last weeks reading is that even abstract experimental films can have a narrative sooty. and form this we learn that narrative is really the ability for the mind to create a story out of the events that occur. so really, it doesn’t matter what we make, it will always be possible for someone to connect the events and create a story.

can a plant feel? – week 5

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the constraints this week were interesting ones. we had to describe objects and elements form the perspective of plants and animals in our homes. for one, what if we don’t have any animals in our homes. i mean yes, there is my brother. by i don’t think that’s really what adrian was going for. luckily i have my beautiful (if not incredibly stupid) dog so i wasn’t completely lost on what things look like to dogs. the plant on the other hand…. how do they have a point of view.

but when i started to think about it, this was a really interesting constraint task. because it got me to start thinking not only about these living things in new ways but about the objects themselves in new ways. what do these items mean, not just to my dog but in relation to me and the world? his food bowl. yes, it’s just a silver metal thing that sits on the floor. but to him its a meal. its random delicious chicken on a friday night as a treat. it 6pm every night. it’s a reason to get off his bed. it’s his gateway to the family dining room. and thats just a metal bowl.

the elemental constraint, light, water or earth from the perspective of a plant got even deeper :O. because to us, these things are a given. we walk on the ground. it’s just there. the sun comes up, gives us light and warmth (well, just sometimes in here in Melbourne), water is everywhere. these are the things we come to expect in our life. we can just have them. but to a plant, these things are everything. light is energy, water is life, earth is food and a home. what if we were to take these things away from them. put a plant inside. remove it from water. pull it out of the ground. these things are important to the plants so they would look upon these elements with a lot more interest and importance compared to how we would look at them. at the involves filming them in a different way to how i normally would if i were just to film them regularly. lets hope i can actually capture these elements

Art for art’s sake – week 5

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the lecture (sorry, symposium) last week finally felt like we were making progress and answering mostly useful question that were related to the subject. of course, the lecture was last monday, the day which i am now regarding as the worst day of my life so far (don’t ask me why, it’s been a shit week) so i have blacked out most of what happened that day. thank god i took notes in the lecture or i would literally not have remembered anything. it’s been a tough week for me and i am trying to catch up on everything now so rather than my usual meaningful posts, i’m sorry to say that this week you’ll be getting some simple points and recaps. but enjoy anyhow and feel lucky that i’m even ok enough to be doing this.

Are K-films art for arts sake?

yes and no. they change the way we see things. repeating films or certain objects/things forces you to notice them in ways you wouldn’t have before. gain a new understanding.

our sketch films are observational abstract – looking at regular objects in abstract ways. by taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar we see it differently. see the whole world differently.

documentary wants to engage with the world and change your understanding of the topic. are k-films documentary? do they provide and explicit engagement with the world?

making a K-film (not just watching them) change the way you think and do things. forces us to rethink : relations between things, our roles as makers, our roles as viewers, narration, all films.

 

self structuring K-films

interactivity is offering new possibilities for audiences. how different can films be when using the same footage? it’s all based on individual choices (eg., cutting up the story from first week in editing media texts). each person decides on the length, clusters, repetitions, links. billions of different options, there is no canonical fixed order. every single person would describe the same thing differently because they all see it differently.

you don’t need to define something to deconstruct it.

 

interpreting experimental films

experimental films are filmed AND interpreted differently – it all relies on the interpretation. K-films use abstraction for greater interpretation.

don’t make the films for a specific audience. just make and let them interpret. you can’t control what people will do or how they will interpret your content.