Tag Archives: narrative

the problem with no conclusion – week 11

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been jumping around a number of people’s blogs this week and a post bec made really caught my eye. she had some really good things to say about this whole non-linear, no-conclusion thing we’ve been dealing with all semester. because yes, we do need to start embracing the new types of online and social media dominating our world today. but, like bec says, that doesn’t mean that we have to completely disregard everything we’ve had up until now. they’ve been trying to get rid of print and books for years. but they’re still here. people have been telling linear, narrative stories since the beginning of time. obviously they’re doing something right if they’re still around today, and are the most popular form of entertainment out there. so why should we completely disregard this all because of some little non-linear stuff that is really big for a very small number of people? es, maybe that’s where main stream society is heading. but narratives and conclusions will still always stay with us, so it’s important not to completely write them off.

like bec said, we use narratives to escape our lives. they provide answers and conclusions where sometimes our lives don’t. Adrian does always say that korsakow and non-linear mirrors the way we think and how we experience the world, by association. but isn’t that why we have stories, to escape the real world and experience something different? bec has raised some good questions. she’s not saying to completely disregard what we’ve been learning, but just suggesting that we also don’t completely disregard everything we all ready know and have in society as well.

narratives and conclusions, part 2 – week 11

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the lecture this week again was consisting of discussions regarding conclusions, narrative and nonlinear in regards to korsakow. it seems people are pretty hung up on the fact that korsakow is different to what we’re used to. different doesn’t mean worse (it certainly doesn’t mean better), it just means different, it’s not what we’re used to. and this is still getting to some people. maybe they’re just xenophobic (although i never thought xena was that scary. sorry, that was a terrible joke).

people’s main issue appears to be that of a lack of conclusion with the k-film. that you can’t determine how or in what order someone will view it and so you can’t provide the conclusions that you want. this brought up the question, “should you have an end SNU?”. this was a yes and no kinda answer. obviously it depends on the kind of film you’re trying to make and the kind of experience you want your viewers to get. end SNU’s can be problematic because if they come up to early in the viewing of the film then the film will end prematurely without al the right stuff getting out. but an end SNU can also give clarity or information that might be needed ago end the film or deliver the final message of the theme. an end SNU is useful for a film with a strong temporal link or a literary timeline. again, the use for an end arises when we think mostly in linear narrative form. if we want our film to be a traditional narrative then we will want it to have a traditional conclusion and in that situation then yes, have an end SNU. but that’s not what korsakow is supposed to be a bout. it is decidedly different and allows you to be different. so why revert to the traditional when this is the way to do something new, non-linear is the way of the future (according to adrian). my favourite point from the lecture was again about conclusions. we are all hung up on them, on linear storytellings with narrative endings. but not every story has an ending, even ones told in linear fashion. and the example adrian gave was soap operas. soap operas are a story. they tell a narrative in linear fashion for half an hour five days a week. but they have no conclusion. ever. they just keep going. people can stop watching them if they want. and form their own conclusions about what that means or what might have happened. but in reality, thy have no conclusion. and that doesn’t seem to phase anyone. narratives and conclusions relate but they are no code pendant. you can have one without the other and we need to grasp that and understand it because by the look of things, that’s where we’re all headed in the future.

database narrative – week 10

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a different kind of reading this week. this one didn’t go on for ever and make no sense. although, i can’t really say i understood this one much, it kinda seemed to ramble and be a little incoherent at times. but at least they were kind enough to break it up into 8 relatively short pages with pretty pictures on the side.

so, what did i learn from this reading. to be brutally honest, not much. but i’m still here so i shall soldier on! it was about databases…. i think. i never really got what it was actually about. but the heading of the thing said databases so i kinda assumed that that is what every point was talking about. below are some of the interesting points and quotes that i took from the reading

“While plot provides important tags (hero, villain), schemas (goals, obstacles) and navigation instructions (genre), it is ultimately the cognitive and emotional investment of the receiver of plot – the subjective associations, desires, visualizations, decodings and fast searches – that transforms a mere series of selected details into a story network that is always more than the sum of its parts.

 

“Paradigm, the multiple relational aspects of story elements, becomes visible in a database; and syntagm, narrative sequence, is suppressed.

 

“Interface design, like production design in movies, is an art to primarily guide attention as it flows through and around multiple elements on a screen.

 

“graphic devices are integral to reading and understanding all narrative texts. One begins a book by looking over the table of contents, assessing the length and count of chapters and sub-chapters

 

“Before social media, friends shared photo prints and videos, but they often did so as ritualistic forms of linear storytelling: narrators addressing an attentive audience. Now, online friends post tagged sets of travel photos to social networks, often as events happen, and hope for conversations to start. While both methods speak of the desire to shape and communicate experience, the former uses media as illustration (and mnemonic device) for linear storytelling and the latter presents media as an interface to the unfolding “story” of experience itself.

narratives and conclusions – week 10 lecture

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more discussion about k-films in this week’s lecture, we discussed themes, emotions, narratives and conclusions. looks like everyone has the major k-films on their minds. the major point that i took from the whole lecture was about  the k-films not being a way to literally express any point but as a way to experience something for each individual. the point of the k-film is for everyone to interpret the content individually, they become a part of experiencing something without being told exactly what they are supposed to be experiencing.

how important are themes in a k-film? a theme gives us something to work around. like we discussed in one of the previously lectures, constraints are good. they allow for greater creativity. and a theme can do just that. limits that we work both within and around. even without a defining theme, as humans it’s within our nature to try and find any form of pattern or link between things, without pattern, all we see is chaos. our lives are associational because we link everything together so a them in a k-films allows them to feel more cohesive than they may be without one. however, the important part, like in the previous point, is to not always be too literal with the themes. infer a theme or idea without explicitly stating it. give the audience a means to enjoy and experience for themselves. its not so much the theme itself but how the content explores the theme. of course, this also depends on what the theme is, some can be far more obvious than others. for example the theme we have decided on for our k-film is superpowers and reality vs. fabrication. one of these is more obvious with the other and we are using this first theme as a means to explore the latter one. so while the superpowers themselves might seem obvious, the way that they are delivered and the ideas that they are being used for (reality vs. fabrication) will be more inferred than explicit.

does a lack of narrative or conclusion give an unsatisfying experience? the first answer to this was that we really need to move away from the ideas of linear narrative storytelling as a way of communication. that’s not what this course is about. of course, simply moving away from that isn’t that easy, it’s something that we have grown up with as part of society and is pretty much all we know. even though adrian says that non-linear is how we think, that’s how we think sub-consciouly, consciously we live in the world of linear narratives. what was a good point is that narratives and conclusions are separate. you can have one without the other. k-films can end. they can provide a specific ending clip. but even for the ones that are meant to go on forever, they must end. and that is when the viewer gets to decide the conclusion, which in a way makes that conclusion even more powerful because the viewer has decided upon it themselves (even if it’s just because they were bored with the film they were watching). and even without a set conclusion, we will always try to prove some sort of context or meaning to whatever we’re watching. even if the ending doesn’t make sense.  we don’t watch a film for the ending, we watch it for the experience. our k-filsm are the same. another really good point i liked was that the internet is kinda like a giant k-film. its comprised of links in and out, is uniquely experienced by each individual and has no end (except for those decided upon by the user). there is no meaning on the internet, we give meaning to what we see and contribute to it as well.

finally, we discussed the kuleshov effect, a topic that was brought up a couple of times last year too. the kuleshov effect reminds us that when we are making, not just our k-films but anything, that it’s not the shots themselves that meaning anything but rather each shot in its relation to those around it. meaning only comes from relations, the shots or clips themselves have no meaning.

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.

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.

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.

readings upon readings – week 4

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somehow this week, the readings for each of our subjects all seemed to interconnect. while this was kinda helpful in that they were all discussing similar topics, it did get a but confusing where they kinda all blurred together into one and i wasn’t sure which reading was for which subject and needed to be used to answer which question. and it didn’t help that the reading for this subject was the same as one we did for cinema studies this time last year and both it and the reading for cinema studies this week were covering documentaries of some form or another. luckily, my brain is completely fried and i managed to get through them all without a complete and total meltdown. and here’s what i gathered.

at first glance, i wasn’t really to sure where the connections were between boardwell and thompsons “film art, an introduction” excerpts and our course. but i think i got it (i’m prob wrong so feel free anyone to comment and give your own opinions). this reading began with narrative and the construction and functions of narrative and it’s effect on it’s audience. it then moved on to experimental films before finishing at the different types of documentary. these three sections can be combined to create what we are doing in integrated media this year with our korsakow films and the little sketch tasks.

we were given a simple task to make a 6 second video. but we still needed to make them. and that is where all of these topics come in. do we try and make a story when we film them? do we try and simply document something? or do we want to make them abstract and random, with no meaning? and yet, each of these are linked. when we choose what it is we want to film, we must then choose where we film it from, for how long, how close in, what it does, if we move the camera and why we are choosing that. and every one of these influences the film as a whole. and then, as an audience, we seem to immediately and subconsciously try to associate a meaning to whatever we watch. as the reading stated, as viewers,  “We often infer events that are not explicitly presented”, that is, we try and make connections out of what we see, even if nothing is explicitly shown. the reading claims that “In general, the spectator actively seeks to connect events by means of cause and effect.” but what if there is no discernible cause and effect?

this is where the experimental film joins the conversation. are our films experimental? are they abstract? are they associational? certainly when i filmed a painting on my wall, i was not trying to tell a story. there was no cause for filming it and no effect that occurred from it being there or bing filmed. and yet, can connections be made between that film of  my painting and say my other film of a wallet being opened and closed? again, when i took those films, i had no connection in mind, just trying to fill  the “something square” criteria. and yet, there may be abstract connections made. or even connections through causality, space and time. yes, both were square items, both were filmed during the day, both films were 6 seconds long. but perhaps the film of the wallet opening and closing following that of the painting insinuates purchasing the painting and now having no money? i don’t know. i just thought of that now. and i made these videos 2 weeks ago. and this make me realise how all the different elements of this reading fit together. that nothing is accidental, we all set out to make something when we film. even if we don’t know what that something is. but there’s another element to that, that the viewer can take what it is that we have made, whether there was an intended meaning or not, and create a narrative, or a story, or simply a meaning or set of connections.

and this is just with 6 second clips. imagine what it will be like when we actually make our korsakow films.

 

 

 

what defines me? – week 4

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the constraints of this weeks task are more convoluted than ever. and i thought timing something round was hard… now i have to not only work out what defines me, but i have to film it? i’m at that stage where i still don’t know, we are all still learning who we are, that’s why we’re at uni.  and i don’t want to go with the obvious, i like to try and think out of the box, but it’s not always so easy.

i don’t want to just film my parents feet because i can’t show their faces (and also, i hate feet). when asked to film objects  (well, actually, parts of objects) that define me, what kind of things can i film that don’t blend into the 3rd constraint of places that define me. i mean, my first thought of something that defines me is my bed. i spend the majority of my life there and i love it. it’s the centre piece of my room and i hold it very dear to me. but is my bed an object or a place? same with my car. i love my car, i use it all the time, but it kinda feels like a place. i guess a place is something i would define as something you could go inside right, like a house or a building. but you can go inside a bed and you can definitely go inside a car. and then an object is something you can use or do something with, like a ball or a pen. so a house doesn’t fit into that but a car does, you use it to get place, or you sleep in a bed (or use it to put things on). so which is which? maybe i just shouldn’t use my car or my bed. but they are really important to me that i can’t really think of a film that describes me without having them in it.

the next point is how to film them. we can only film parts of the objects, no whole. first off… why no wholes? is that too obvious? do they want us to be more abstract? will it become to narrative-like if we just show things that are special to us plain and simply? this task really brings the abstract ideals to this, because i need to consider whether, when i’m filming only parts of objects, do i want them to be understandable? can you tell what these parts are? or do i want them to be mysterious, as in we know that they are important to me but from the way they have been filmed, you can’t really tell what they are. do i only film one thing for each constraint or a range of objects and places that can be put together to form a bigger picture. am i trying to create a narrative or do i want to be as abstract as possible?

so many questions. i guess we’ll find out soon enough considering i need to actually start filming these videos

 

But my life is a story – week 4

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we finally got an interesting, (mostly) relevant and even somewhat entertain (towards the end) lecture/symposium this week. adrian and the others actually appeared to be answering the given questions (although i’m not too sure how that first question about reality tv related to the course) and there were some rather interesting points brought up.

for me the most interesting question and subsequent discussion was in regards to the increased accessibility of media nowadays and whether or not this is ‘ruining’ films. what was important about this, as jasmine (i think it was jasmine) said, is that ‘ruin’ is a very strong word. which is true. ‘ruining’ depends on how you classify and describe ‘films’ in the first place. its a very personal word and thus it differs for every person. Adrian then took over to discuss this in further detail, claiming that what is made on technology such as iPhones doesn’t even classify as film. first off, that’s because it’s not recorded on film, nor is it a physical video. it’s an all new thing. lets just call it a moving image (or MI) for the sake of this post.

now, of course, the definition of a film is different for everyone. when we think about film in the traditional sense, does this include television? or can it only include what we see up on the big screen in a movie theatre? is there a difference between a film and a movie? where do short films fit into this? or youtube. and then we get to vines…. are they films? they’re not tv. but isn’t television just film being broadcast to an electronic box? when you start to think about it like this, it all gets very confusing and the lines start to become very blurred. but i think that’s all what this course is about. blurring the lines between all the separate technologies, everything is connected today.

i’ll give you an example that adrian gave us when answering a different question in the lecture. this example was big brother. when we think about big brother, we think it is a just a television show. but it goes far beyond that. for one, it is happening live and continuously. even when no-one is watching or when the cameras aren’t on, the tv show is still going. and we see it on tv. but it goes beyond our television sets. it has it’s own website – an online forum where people can find out more information about the ‘characters’, see extra footage that they watch online or even rematch old episodes. we see recaps of it during the week during other programs, news about it written in the newspapers and interviews with eliminated contestants and hosts on the radio. then there’s the voting system, which incorporates the vastly growing medium of the mobile phone. people can not only watch from any time from their mobile devices, but they are a part of the show, sending in votes to determine who stays and who goes, a mechanism which rakes in millions of dollars. so, what does this have to do with the point i was just making? i’m not too sure, i may have gotten a bit carried away there. but this example showcases how widespread our media is today across the different mediums. interactivity is the key. people want to be able to be a part of what they are experiencing.

this is where korsakow comes in. if interactivity is what the public wants, korsakow is here to give it to them, albeit in a weird, abstract way thats not well known and kinda difficult to understand. but surely this is where the future of film and tv and other motion pictures are heading, to the realm of the interactive media where people can choose their story so that it is unique to them, they can be a part of the narrative. all this accessibility to production means ins’t ruining film, it’s creating new types of film, new categories that can’t even be defined. and are allowing for more people than ever to be creating their own content and experimenting and interacting with something that once only the elite and rich could do. this is what Sørenssen was talking about. this is what adrian means. this new accessibility is creating a new era of film or moving image. it is free, it is raw, it can be interactive, it can be made by anyone. the only reason we keep holding back is when we call it film. it is not film any more and that title is constraining us. we need to be able to drop that title and move forward. create new things. interact and experience all new mediums. woooooo!

my only question i would ask, based of the boardwell and thompson reading, is whether our korsakow films are supposed to follow a certain structure? should they be exhibiting cause and effect? narrative plot lines? or are they supposed to be random and abstract and experimental?

finally, i would like to add that the discussion (argument) at the end of the lecture between adrian and one of the students was brilliant. however, have to disagree with adrian, i believe our lives are narratives. they have beginnings, middles and ends. there is no meaning in a narrative until the reader assigns a meaning and that is the same with our lives. we take what happens and we give it meaning. our lives follow a cause and effect structure just as narratives do.