Tag Archives: editing

superwho? – week 10

by

now that we are well underway into working on our major k-films,we’ve started setting ourselves weekly goals. so for my weekly discussion of my attempt of the constraint i will be discussing my attempts at our weekly goals. this week, each member of our group had to go out and film 5 of our 60 clips for the major film. just so that we can start to get a hang of things and understand what it really is that we’ll be making.

our idea is reality vs. fabrication. will people be able to tell the difference between which clips are real and which have been edited? probably. but hopefully not. and that’s what this week is for. for us to get an idea of what we’re gonna shoot and practice shooting it. we have three distinct categories of filming style

1. real –  this is the basic level of clips. stuff that implies a super hero. or kids pretending to have superpowers. pretty much it’s just things in every day life that may have something to do with super heroes or super powers.

2. fabricated – this is where the rehearsals and the editing starts to come in. each of these clips will be fabricated, i.e edited. these will be done to show things that could never really happen, happening. even something as simple as someone disappearing by cutting the film and continuing  it after the person has left the frame.

3. magic – this is the most important section, where we are blurring the lines between reality and fabrication. we want the viewer to be questioning whether or not what they’re seeing is real in these clips. magic tricks or science tricks, slight of hand or clever camera placement. this section will require the most thought and set up but could also contain the best clips if we get them done right.

my task this week is to practice with different types of editing of clips as well as get some of the real ones out of the way. we want a broad spread of videos that show different things but still all link together. at first i was just thinking about trying to edit these while filming or on my phone. but having started to film and actually think about them, i’ve realised that it may be much simply and also more effective to upload any videos i take and put them into the computer and edit them there where i will have a far greater amount of tools to use to make these the best that they can be.

hopefully they come out well.

a collage about collages – week 9

by

this week’s reading was interesting and for once, understandable!!! (maybe i’m a little to sceptical about all these readings.  but they’re just so tiresome and continuous.) shields provides us with a series of i guess i’ll call them dot points. all about collage and fiction and stuff. like adrian said on the subject blog, this “Could have been written for this subject”. and if it wasn’t, then i reckon this entire subject might have been written around this reading.

the reading itself, as i mentioned above, is comprised of various dot point like sentences (and sometimes paragraphs), making it thankfully very easy to read. it’s generally about collage vs the normal conventional fiction narrative. and you can tell Shields is a major collage supporter. he loves the idea of the many fractured parts coming together to form one whole. as he says, “collage is the many becoming one”, it “connect bits that don’t seem to belong together” and creates something new with them. remind you of anything? here we go again, korsakow!!! yay!!! i guess if this article didn’t relate in some way to korsakow then it wouldn’t really be here, considering korsakow is this entire subject.

shields describes the collage as representing the mind which he describes as “chaotic and opaque rather than unified and transparent” but likens this also to the journey and experience of life itself, saying that “fiction teaches that life is coherent, can be neatly tied up. but life flies at us in bright splinters”, in other words, a mosaic. “story says everything happens for a reason.” but it does not, and collages and k-films mirror this. and with a lack of reason there can sometimes tend to be a lack of plot. but Shields doesn’t say that that is a bad thing, rather that the “absence of plot leaver the reader room to think about other things”. although, i thought he may have gone a bit overboard when he said “plots are for dead people”. like… what does that even mean? calm down Shields. lets not get too over the top here.

moving on we see where Adrian got his favourite ideals, that of “collage as an evolution beyond narrative”. how many lectures has adrian been telling us that we need to get over narrative? the k-films and nonlinear is the way of the future. Shields knows where its at.

a really good point that i liked from the reading was bringing up the kuleshov effect, which we talked about quite a bit last year too. shields says that” meaning and emotion were created not by the content of the individual images but by the relationship of the images to one another” which is again what adrian tells us. in our k-films, it doesn’t matter what the clips themselves are, meaning only comes from how they are linked into and out from the other clips in the film. “meaning is a matter of adjacent data. everything is collage”. the most relevant point Shields made IMO to korsakow is – “you’ve found some interesting material, how do you go about arranging it?”. because that’s what korsakow is, arranging footage to create different meanings, unique meanings, that could never be achieved using simple linear narrative storytelling.

the only issue with all of this, which is something a lot of us have been asking ourselves have only been newly introduced to this new form of communication and story telling, is “how long will the reader stay engaged?”. because collage and korsakow is not for everyone, and a lot of people may not understand it. but as shield says “art exists to make one feel things” so as long as we can let our audience experience something, give them some form of emotion, then isn’t that all we can really ask for?