Tag Archives: tasks

stormless skies – week 11

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hello. week 11 here. i’m here to make you freak out and have a melt down.

yes! the dreaded week 11 is here. the week where we all realise how much stuff we have to do and how little we’ve done to prepare ourselves for it. the major k-film is almost due and we need to start filming. i’ve done a couple for it already. and they were actually really fun. it’s like being a child again, getting to dress up in costumes and pretend to be a super hero. or be thinking up different types of superpowers that i can film. or trying to force my dog into a superman cape and make him run around the back yard (he wasn’t very happy with me for that). and the other members in my group got some good videos too. my only issue with our videos is that they’re not all cohesive. you can tell they were made by different people. they don’t all flow great. especially compared to some of the other groups videos that we saw.

i mean, our clips are good, and i think they really suit our film. they just don’t seem very…… professional. i’m not sure. the others are really fancy. but in a way, our slightly more disjointed kind of film style works. because our idea with the clips was to film them with iPhones. they weren’t meant to all be perfect but rather be kind of “on the spot” kind of footage, as if you were seeing a superhero saving someone or doing something incredible out on the street and you quickly pulled out your phone to film it. so in that sense, that is the kind of film we have. and that style does work. its just whether or not our films will look cohesive enough once we put them all together. but that’s what trial and error is for. this week we’ll each be taking more videos and start putting them together into the proper korsakow file. maybe if we work on them together rather than individually then it could work even better than what we have already. let’s hope so!

superwho? – week 10

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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.

no constraints, just one big ‘ole film – week 8

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we’re well into the course now and the baby k-films are out of the way. however, this means no more constraints and that was one of my contract thing’s. so instead, i’m going to use this contract spot to discuss our plans and ideas for the major k-film project.

we’ve got a big task coming up. and we have to face it in little groups of three. k-films upon k-films and it’s all interconnecting. 60 clips is a big task. especially if we want them all to look good and mean something. i guess it’ a good thing we had all those previous constraints to prepare us. luckily with this task, we have one overarching idea that we will know from the start, rather than random constraints each week to follow so that should making working on it a whole lot easier and actually allow me (and our group) to properly map out what clips we want, what we want them to mean and most importantly, how we want them to connect. if we don’t plan out our film well, it’ll just be a big mess and all the stuff we’ve done leading up to it, including the mini k-films will have been pointless. i want to create something that will be enjoyable, interesting, but also just a great k-film. i want it to utilise the non-linear fashion of korsakow to provide a unique experience for every viewer.

lets hope this turns out well!

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?

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

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

 

how fast is slow? – week 3

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more video tasks this week. i don’t want to say that it was difficult, but it wasn’t easy. somehow, no matter how simple these tasks seem at first glance, they really aren’t. so many different things and layers to think about, just to make a six send video. what do I include? what don’t i include? what angle? do i cut between shots? if so, for how long and how many cuts? do i show the whole thing or just a part? should there be good lighting?

but this week, the most difficult question for me was…. what constitutes fast and what constitutes slow? i mean, i know a car travelling at 100 km/h is fast and a snail is slow. but i wasn’t really in the mood to go stand on a bridge above the freeway, nor go find a snail that was actually moving. and even if said snail was moving, he probably wouldn’t move far enough in the 6 seconds for it to even seem like he (or she. do snails have a gender?) was moving at all. so, i conclude, i have to go somewhere in between a speeding car and a lazy snail. where does that leave me? it felt that no matter what i was filming, if i was going for a slow movement, it looked fast. but if i thought the object was fast moving, it seemed really slow.

for me this whole task was just about finding new objects and testing speeds and cutting and angles. it made it an interesting task to complete because i had to think about the stuff around me in new ways to how i’d looked at or used them before. although, anyone who follows me on vine probably thinks i’m insane. but that’s another story. i am however, excited to not only see how these all fit together with my others once i turn them into a sketch film, but also to see what the others in my class do, because last week everyones different videos were so very different and it will give me an all new perspective and new ideas on how to use speed in future filming.

the closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes

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another week, another set video task. and i know they shouldn’t be too hard but this one got me even more confused than last time. i guess it’s good i have the ole’ blog here to help me try and think these things out.

so, we had to take one 6 second video about “light”, one 6 second video about “not light” and one 6 second video about “shadow”. Simple!!! we use those things every day, it’s how we see and how why we don’t. and yet again, somehow, i’m just unsure. and i’ve taken u number of different videos and each one makes me more unsure of whether i’m filming “light”, “not light” or “shadow”. and again, one of my main issues as well is not really knowing how i’m going to be using these videos, how they’re meant to look or how they’re gonna fit together. we lost our class last week due to labor day so we have not yet had the chance to go through the tasks or what we are meant to do with the videos.

my problem with the videos I’ve taken so far was that to take a video that showcased some light, it had to be dark enough so that the light was obvious (we haven’t had much nice natural light lately coz of all the random rain) and thus the light created shadows and also consisted of dark. so no matter how much i tried to make it about “light”, it always seemed to also be about “not light” and “shadow”. for example, the video i’ve posted below:

Light 1 from lauren on Vimeo.

this is one of my experimental videos trying to work out what i’m doing. i feel like it is mostly about “light”, but it is also featuring “not light”. gah it’s all so confusing. maybe i’ll take some more videos later trying just to do “shadow” or “not light” rather than light and i’ll get a difference.

stay tuned