Another week, another Cinema Screening. I can’t say I was as excited about this week’s ‘Holy Motor’ than I was for ‘The Wizard Of Oz’. Nonetheless, I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Immediately I knew it wasn’t something I’d seek out in my own life. It’s got a kind of David Lynch feel, but I definitely enjoyed Mulholland Drive more than this, I gotta say. Some of my friends were saying that they at least enjoyed the cinematography, but personally I was so confused and made uncomfortable by the plot that I didn’t have time to admire the artistry. The film basically follows a man a day in the life of his job, but it’s a little more obscure than something in an office. I didn’t totally get it, but it was something along the lines of an acting gig. He’d get ‘appointments’ and portray roles, only they seemed to be real life situations. I liked that idea, but felt it wasn’t executed in the right way. It was a bit slow, incredibly weird and don’t even get me started on the finger biting, latex suit sex or monkey family. It did have some good things to offer here and there though – for example, Kyle Minogue’s odd little cameo (although breaking into song felt out of place) and the hilarity of Oscar (the protagonist) awkwardly leaving after playing out an old man’s death. I especially liked the little car scene at the end. Other than that though, I really didn’t love it.
Monthly Archives: March 2016
Media 1: First Assignment
During my first Media 1 workshop we were given an assignment that would be due the following week. Well, it’s the following week, and I’ve been working on it for a few days now. I still haven’t totally wrapped my head around the process, but then again I could just be overthinking it. The basic brief was to make a ‘creative self portrait’ using media (audio, visual, textual etc) and essentially demonstrate your personal identity. Part of the project is to display it all here, on my blog, with a short explanation for each section. So here it is!
Video:
#1
The first video is just my bed side table and my bed. I showed this because my bedside table says a lot about my aesthetic likes and literary ones, too. Theres a lot of plants and stuff, as well as a framed photo of me and my best friends taken a year ago, and then a stack of books I’m currently reading. On the bed there’s my favourite book, hence the emphasis on it, called ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’.
#2
This one is pretty obvious, it’s a video of my cat. Her name is Violet and she’s my basically my best friend, so it felt automatic to have something in my portrait with her in it.
#3
This is a short clip in one of the sections of the NGV. It’s in here because it’s my favourite room and the NGV as a whole is one of my favourite places to go in the city. I love art, and I love the atmosphere there.
Audio:
#1
First audio is just something that is in my daily life – firstly is the sound my laptop keyboard being typed on and then the sound effects from this silly IPhone game app I’ve been using when I’m bored called ‘Farm Hero’.
#2
The other day I woke up, as I do every day, to the sound of Magpies outside my window. So I thought it was fitting to record their chirping because I really find it peaceful and close to home.
#3
Final clip is audio of the kettle boiling and me preparing Miso soup packet for lunch. If it isn’t soup, it’s tea or a hot chocolate… I just use the kettle a lot.
Photo:
#1
This is a picture of my polaroid camera, photo album and a few photos of myself and friends. I love photography but I also love the novelty of polaroid film and with every special occasion I’ll take some pictures.
#2
This is a photo of my two favourite sweet things – chocolate (or more specifically, caramel crunch Lindt) and Passionfruit.
#3
This photo was taken at a cafe with my best friend (pictured right). I chose it because she is a huge part of what makes me who I am, as well as the fact that we’re drinking juices (I’m in love with fresh fruit juice) and you can see my Nikon camera strap, because I’d been filming all day that day for fun.
#4
This photo is of a bath bomb. I’m a lover of long baths and I really love Lush products, especially bath bombs. I also have a huge fascination with space and this bath bomb looked like there was a galaxy in my water.
#5
This photo was taken in the local park just down my street, Johnson’s Park. It’s a place I’ve been going since I was really little, and I find it really peaceful. If I’m stressed I go there to unwind and disconnect from social media. I also went there to study all through my year 12 exams last year. It’s also symbolic of my love of the natural world.
#6
50 words of text
‘I always wanted to be something better
I always wanted to shine
and now I know I can’t deny my nature
I can’t go back if I wanted to
I don’t, I don’t’
– Angel Snow
This song was my favourite for a long time and also just holds a lot of personal significance for me. These are my favourite lyrics from it.
Real or not real?
(Anyone else a Hunger Games fan? No? Okay just me then)
An interesting almost philosophical debate was breached in Media 1 Lectorial today, about the rise in technological socialising versus the old school face-to-face interactions. Brian Morris brought up a slide entitled ‘Debates about mediated vs unmediated communication’ which basically referred to social society within 2 distinct categories. Pre-Modern society in which the social world was predominantly experienced through direct experiences and interactions – and Modern Society: characterised through media/texts/maps/books and an online platform to interact with peers.
And it got me thinking, are friendships and interactions online as authentic as face to face? Did mass media technology create a fake ‘imagined community’ while actually bringing about the downfall of genuinely real interactions?
Hell no.
My opinion on this matter is fairly set in concrete, and I guess it’s because I’ve been made to think about it long before this Media class. Older generations love to critique the youth and the way we communicate – even younger artists like to pretend they’re being profound by making some kind of un-original art statement about the death of social interaction as a direct result of social media. If these people actually interacted with the medium though, they’d find that at it’s core is something so much more than that.
Social media is a platform in which everyone from around the world have the ability to interact and relate to one another in a way that never existed before. You can communicate with distant relatives, maintain long distance relationships and get regular updates from friends or family as they travel overseas. Twitter alone enables thousands of people from all walks of life to find one another in a collective space and… socialise. Facebook is a website that allows you to chat with your friends online after school, or get updates about your Uncle and his family on their trip to Rio. I find it so fascinating when people comment on other people’s use of phones as if they’re ‘stuck in their own bubble’ and being ‘anti-social’ – when it comes to me and I’m sure many other teenagers like me, we’re probably on FB talking to our friends, so that logic is ludicrous.
From personal experience, I wouldn’t have half the friends I do today if it weren’t for social media. Regardless of the ‘pathetic’ sort of stigma attached to the idea of online friends, I’ve actually found it to be entirely a positive experience. As someone apart of the LGBT+ community (which is small, I’m sure you know), finding likeminded people who understand your sexuality is difficult in the public sphere. Online however, I’ve been able to find many Gay, Lesbian and Trans people who not only get me, but generally have a lot of similar interests, too. Of course, that isn’t to say we should spend our entire friendship talking online – that is a little unhealthy – but some of my closest friends were made via Tumblr (even if that is a little lame), and we’ve continued strong personal connections in real life (IRL, if you’re into that kind of slang). I’ve got friends in America, a friend in Adelaide who visits often and who is honestly my favourite person from Adelaide (and I’ve got relatives there… shh don’t tell them). I’ve got a best friend who lives in Crib Point for god’s sake – who even knows where that is? I certainly don’t, but she remains one of my favourite people, and we catch up regularly.
So there you have it, social media is not destroying the very way in which we socialise. If anything, it’s improving it. It’s allowing young people who can’t find others to identify with or teens who struggle with social anxiety and giving them a chance to find real personal connections.
Cut to:
Right now I’m my second Lectorial for Media 1 ever, and we’re taking a ‘break’ to give a shot at making another blog post before we start up the next task. We just had a guest speaker, an RMIT Alumni, Jeremy Bowtell. He talked to us for about 10 minutes about editing, shedding some light onto a bit of the history. He started off by explaining that editing overall, is about ‘holes, spaces between and gaps’ as well as juxtapositions. Jeremy gave us some historical examples – such as Eisenstein who created the very earliest example of what we know as a montage and someone who suggested that film must be a ‘tendentious (argumentative) selection and juxtaposition’ which should influence the audience in the desired direction. Other examples Jeremy presented were people like Edward Dmytrk, who believed you should never cut unless you’re doing it for a specific reason – and Walker Murch, who focuses more on emotion, story and rhythm. The presentation also showed 2 different clips – I have to say I was more interested in the Scorcese scene than the early black and white. I’ve never seen “Casino”, but now I’m a little intrigued.
Musing #1
I have no clue what to do for the first Media 1 assignment we’ve been given. It’s due this coming Thursday and although the whole thing has been explained to be several times (both in person and via email) I still haven’t got a good grasp on the concept. The whole idea is to make a ‘creative self portrait’ (no selfies – boohoo). We have to follow a number of pre-requisites including audio, text, visual and so on. I’m going to brainstorm for the next half hour possible ideas that really incapsulates me.
Wish me luck!
Are you paying attention?
Do I have Deep Attention or Hyper Attention?
In my first Lectorial ever I learnt these two terms. My first impression was that I totally misread Hyper Attention as hypertension, but aside from that, I’d never heard about the different kinds of focus. Deep attention refers to the ability to keep un-compromised attention onto one thing at a time – like reading a book without distractions and so forth. Hyper attention is pretty much the opposite and occurs when one focuses on several things at one given time. Considering I’m sitting here listening to music on 8tracks, checking Twitter and talking to two friends at once on Facebook while writing this… I guess you can figure out which attention I have.
But it’s an interesting concept, because I definitely am capable of deep attention and in fact, it’s crucial in order for me to be productive a lot of the time. I’m writing a novel in my spare time (I have said, I’m a sucker for story telling) and it took me months before I could really write anything. I spent a lot of time planning, sure, but the only reason I was able to churn anything out at all was because I went to the beach during summer break where I had no wifi. No wifi = no distractions. I had too much spare time on my hands and so I read a whole book in 2 days and wrote 10 thousand words of my novel in 2 weeks. Maybe it isn’t much, but considering I’ve barely written 3 thousand since being back… says a lot.
So society is hyper attentive – constantly on the move, wanting to absorb everything at once. It’s about time, really, because I’ll spend hours doing one thing and being productive yet feel like I’ve wasted time only to spend the same time doing nothing (watching TV, talking to friends, reading social media updates) and feel fulfilled in a different way. Multitasking has always seemed like the more appealing option; watch TV while doing homework, study for exams with a classical soundtrack, check Facebook while watching a movie. We want to be turned on 24/7 and the only time we really get a chance to stop that is when we completely disconnect, like I did when I had no wifi.
So do I have deep attention or hyper attention? The jury’s still out. I feel like I really work better and am naturally built for deep attention, but have been programmed in the modern tech age for the opposite.
P.S. My aim is to quote movies for the titles of these… let’s see how far I get before I give up! 10 points to whoever knows where this one is from.
Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in high school anymore
To cut a long story short, University is very different to High School. For starters, blog posts are considered assessable, which is interesting. When I first read that we had to make regular posts on the internet about our feelings and what we were studying, I was a little skeptical. I’ve blogged in the past (let’s not talk about the 2010 Lucy on blogspot with a blog entitled ‘Sunny’s Photographic Life’ – who even is Sunny? A question I’ll never get the answer to…) but never with this kind of importance.
I guess I still blog here and there, in a way, social media is a form of that now. I use Twitter and Facebook and even Instagram as a form of expressing my thoughts, but this is still a challenge. Those posts are limited with a word count of 150 (on Twitter anyway) and no one likes to read a paragraph long Instagram comment. I learnt, like most other people my age, how to express my thoughts quick and to the point. This is a different take, a more traditional one and I’d like to see where it goes.
I used to write regular diary entries too – and someone at Uni told me that that’s the essence of blogging really. So I figure I’d start here, telling you a little about myself before I get stuck into talking about Media or Cinema Studies or anything else intellectually driven. So… Hi! I’m Lucy, I’m 18 years old and I, like everyone else here, have a love for film making. My passion is story telling – whether that be writing (scripts or otherwise) or visualising them in cinematic form. And I watch far too many TV Shows and movies, which is probably why I picked the studies that I did. I have a cat called Violet and you’d probably find out soon or later that I really really love all cats. I live in Northcote, so getting to RMIT campus is about a 20 minute train ride – lucky considering some people have come from across Australia to study here. I will be posting on here regularly, obviously, it’s school work… so I’ll see you around, I guess.
P.S. I hope all you Cinema Studies students appreciate the pun in my title. I thought it was very witty.