Category Archives: Opinions

Film and TV 1 Reviews

The Chase

Extremely well shot, loved the colour grading, sound, actors and range of shots and choreography of actors was all really well done. The tension was built really well but the story lacked. It ended before anything had happened. Also I feel like the decisions that the girl made in that situation were unrealistic. I highly doubt many young women would run into a secluded alley if they felt they were being followed. It would have been more powerful if it was shot at night, and then that might have made more sense. I liked the suspense, but I think the ending would have been better with closure. It felt like the entire thing was leading up to something big, and then it just ended. Really well shot and cut together though. This team worked really well with moving shots, angles and perspective.

 

Budgerigar

Budgerigar was really funny. I liked it. The colours were fantastic and the way that tension was built and the fast cuts were used was fantastic. I particularly loved the brave use of dramatic lighting, it came out really well and wasn’t unnecessary or showy, it just fit the scene. Didn’t like the twist of him being in love with the brother that was like himself.

 

Sliced

Cutting the scene with the girlfriend was a really good decision. I loved the symmetry of your shots. It was really well shot. The script could have used some tightening on the details, and some tiny improvements, but so could most films. It was really good, it was genuinely funny, the story was clear and well told, the shots in the supermarket (despite the unfortunate placement of the bread haha) and the dramatic outdoor shot of him taking the bread out of a baggie were superb. I do think ‘White Bread’ was a better title though, kinda emulates ‘White Powder’.

 

Shelter

I liked it, but the story was a little cliché, and seemed more like a small scene from a feature film rather than a short film, that wasn’t really an issue I’m just not sure if that was the intent.  I thought it was well shot and the space was used really well. The sliding door thing was really cool, and the use of light was great, whether done in post or during the shoot. I didn’t get the vacuum nozzle gun and the calculator wall thing though. The film didn’t seem like a comedy so to have those rather novel props in there was just confusing rather than humorous. It detracted from the storyline, distracted the viewers and killed the tone of the piece a little.

 

Milk

I really loved Milk. It was relatable and funny. It had a shaky start though, that first scene didn’t really flow well. The cuts of the second housemate were a little confusing; something didn’t fit together well there. However, from the moment that the non-empathetic-pickle-eating-housemate says there is no milk, the piece flows. Some of those moving shots are insanely good, but one was a little too shaky. That one shot might have been better with a stationary camera. The ending was great though and loved the “ethnic kid stole my scooter” thing. I love comedy that picks on racism itself and how stupid it sounds rather than any particular race or person. The story was perfect for a five minute short. The film was built up really well and there’s nothing like an ironic ending. I can’t really remember that well but I think the audio could have used a little fine tuning.

 

Behind the Candelabra

I watched this movie almost by accident, I had nothing to do and was procrastinating wildly when I found it on my housemate’s hard drive and gave it a play.

I belong to Gen Y. A generation that is so used to hypermedia that we refuse to pay attention for more than two minutes to anything we stumble across on the web. So naturally, I found myself skimming through the movie.

I watched this semi-non-fiction, fictional narrative, in a non-linear way. It was an interesting way to go about it. Completely different to the Korsakow project that I created and the ones we viewed. Those were not narratives, they were lists. The interface guided the user between objects on a list, whereas in the movie I guided myself between different stages of a story. It didn’t matter that they weren’t in order.

This I think would be the only way to effectively tell a story through a Korsakow project. Rather than trying to tell a narrative, take different stages in a story. It needs to be a story such as the exploration of the deterioration of a relationship, where the cause and effect aren’t necessarily the most important thing, more rather, the beginning status and the end status are important and different events that show how the protagonists got there.

I now have an idea for a Korsakow fiction project where it explores one person’s life through a diary. Each clip having a date but the viewer not having the opportunity to watch them in order, only relatively randomly. So you can explore someone’s journey not from start to finish but from random state to random state and piece together their personality gradually. I think it’s a great idea and could work fictionally or non-fictionally if you were to use a real person and a real visual diary, or to create a person and their story through fiction.

Institutionalised Education, Actor-Network Theory and Elliot.

This is something that I don’t think I’m supposed to say on an academic blog, particularly one made for and by the people at RMIT; I am not hoping nor aiming for anything above a pass in this course or in many of my courses. And I don’t think that that should reflect badly on me.

My intelligence (what ever of it there is) is more insightful and creative than academic. I’m forgetful. I will remember the names of theorists and their theories but not together. I can describe the painting and make an educated guessplanation of what the painter was thinking when he painted it but I won’t be able to name the painter; I’ll give you a deep analysis on the themes behind a poem, but I won’t be able to cite a single line.

More importantly though, I’ll remember the idea. I will apply that to my work and to my own ideas. The things I’m learning are constantly influencing my opinions, my philosophies and the work that I do. I make connections and I apply them, and I think that that is more important than being able to name-drop Baudrillard and Nietzshe over dinner.

I wholly believe that studying topics which bore you is of very little purpose at all, because if it won’t aid in your personal happiness, even in the very long term, what good is it to you at all? And so of course I study; but the study I do out of class is very infrequently on class content. I study the things that I am passionate about: advertising campaigns, innovative ideas, contemporary ethical social ideas, new philosophical realms. And then I write and I design and I conceptualize, outside of class. The work I do that interests me seems to always happen out of class.

This course in particular hasn’t interested me all that much. And so I have allowed myself to give it low priority. There is obviously something in the content that our tutor, Elliot, is passionate about and that makes me want to be passionate about it as well. I’m caught between wanting to understand what he sees in the content and my own boredom. There’s nothing quite like seeing a person in their element, someone who has an interest in something that most people overlook, and is dedicated to it and knowledgeable on it and good at it. I don’t think that networked media is exactly that thing for Elliot, maybe this all has something to do with games or film and the ideas underlying them or what ever it is that he is passionate about, but I can’t see it. I did make my own connections though, and I am happy about that. Actor-network theory and design fiction have made some sort of impression.

Actor-network theory is one of the first things that I have found of interest and practical use in this course, personally. I wish I’d had the guts to stand up for it in the class symposium, but I didn’t.

Actor-network theory makes it possible to trace broad relationships between people and things, and things (actors) could be anything, to understand perfectly what effect different actors have on each other and how they act in connection to one another. It’s an exciting proposition. It would be difficult to map out, considering the amount of actors in any given scenario, but when done efficiently it would be an effective way of understanding and explaining relationships. You could understand the functionality of every actor within a network, eliminate the defunct ones, reinforce and strengthen the effective connections.

This might be practically applied to advertising, one area that I am passionate about, and it might also be used in conjunction with design fiction, another topic that I found practical and interesting. Design fiction and actor-network theory are both related to strategizing, and I think they’d compliment each other extra-ordinarily well.

Imagine understanding relationships and the actors within a network so well that when adding another actor to this network, a speculative one, a design, you could anticipate the reactions of the other actors.

Actor-network theory could be a method of realizing the attitude and complexity of the relationships of individuals, within a particular society, most applicably in our case to online communities and people who share interests online. Target groups, if you will. It’s an open prospect, and one that could be used to better understand people for more effective manipulation of individuals within societies, which of course is the role advertising plays in supply and demand, isn’t it?

I have found something that I could be passionate about within a stream of content that I didn’t think could offer me anything, but something which Elliot made to seem like a golden pool of opportunity.

I am paying terrifying amounts of money to study this course at RMIT, and it is a very highly esteemed course that I was surprised and proud to be accepted into; and I look forward to working in media and to work in media a “Bachelor of Communications (Media)” ought to come in handy. And I didn’t only sign up for the piece of paper, I wouldn’t let myself put in so much time and effort just for a qualification, I do want the knowledge, and knowledge such as actor-network theory and design fiction is exactly what I want.

What I’m trying to say with this post is that I may have purposely only scraped the surface of this subject, and perhaps I should feel irresponsible, perhaps, to quote Adrian Miles himself, I should wonder “what the fuck am I doing wasting my time here?” as I did ask myself when I read this post, but I don’t. Instead I am glad because even if this isn’t my thing like it is or relates to Elliot’s thing, I found some things from it that are my thing.

It’s nearly 2am now. I think we’ll put this tired and irrational writer to rest for the night. This may be my last post on networked media, but it won’t be my last academic blog post, because the use of this blog is another thing from this course that I hope will become my thing, and I’ll be glad if this post is my last, because it’s my favourite.

Independence and power of the online network

In class discussion we covered the readings as usual, covering mainly the dependence (or lack thereof) of the internet on humans.

A few points were made, such as the fact that these days programs make decisions on their own, that no matter what the internet might do on its own it was originally made by people, that people were brought up by their parents but they are still independent when they leave home and therefore the internet can be too, and also the fact that all of nature is determined by pre-existing factors and a great butterfly effect, and therefore neither humans or the internet are independent.

My opinion is that, no, the internet is not currently independent and for as long as human beings use it, it never will be. As long as there are the ‘makers’ out there writing scripts and protocols that develop the internet, and as long as there are ‘users’ out there whose needs and wants are shaping the way that the internet develops, it can not be independent of people. (I’m also a determinist philosophy-wise but I really think we went of track with that tangent so I’m not going to comment on it.)

This brings us to the power play within the internet. It is very interesting that, as the reading points out, the development of the internet has destabilised former societal power structures and instead this technology that doesn’t have a central power is the focus of so many lives and indeed is fundamentally entangled with our day to day beings. I agree with the reading in that there still is power in the internet, however the fact is, the internet is developed by the people who use it. It is an extremely democratic network because there is not central power, the needs and desires of every person lead to new technologies and processes on the internet. I think this is a great thing, politicians and global leaders may not. The issue it does lead to though is that people with great programming skills have an advantage over the average user on the internet and therefore have more power than them. They could use this power to do the wrong thing, as has happened in the past with viruses and online scams, but for the most part people with developing skills use it for good, and progress the internet into new and promising waters.

Excellent advice.

Sometimes I forget that the greatest resources you have are the people around you. This is possibly the simplest life hack of all time but also an incredibly helpful one that people often choose to ignore: Ask for help!

And I mean with everything and anything. At uni, if you’re having trouble with one aspect of work, or you want to know where you could improve; ask a teacher, another student or someone else who knows that they’re talking about.

If the slightest health issue is bothering you, you have a headache every morning when you wake up or you think you’re more stressed than you should be, talk to a doctor about it!

Unless the person you’re asking is a complete arsehole, you’re not likely to be turned down.

Often you’ll find that your problems, as small, insolvable and insignificant as you think they might be, have the most simple solutions.

And all you had to do was ask!

Playing the sexist “PMS” trap

I should have learned by now that voicing my political opinions on Facebook is never a good idea, but I did last night and as a result, a man I went to school with came back with, “Someone needs to change her tampon.”

I wasn’t even being overly emotional, I was voicing a reasonable and evidence-based argument that Tony Abbott is a bit of a moron.  I have to admit that I did use some naughty words, but that was more for emphasis of my distaste for certain racist political campaigns and some bad decisions in relation to certain environmental and educational budget cuts.

And then he pulled the PMS card.

It’s a trigger attack. Obviously this line is going to enrage almost any woman even more, and by becoming furious, as any woman would be entitled to be, she proves the man’s point.

It’s a trap that sexist morons have been leaning on for years. She can either retaliate, proving him ‘correct’ or back out, giving the man a false sense of having ‘won’. I backed out.

A friend kindly pointed out that any man who needs to use the PMS line is obviously lacking in any kind of intelligent argument or general decency. That friend happened to be a woman and this man’s response was, “Cycles are in sync.”

This happens to women who voice their opinions all the time.

It’s unfair, it is blatant sexism and even as a joke-at a woman’s expense-it reinforces the inequality that men and women have been working towards straightening out for decades.

A woman can’t be emotionally invested in an issue without some dumb arse somewhere telling her she’s “on her rags”. It’s sexist, it’s unfair and it needs to stop. It should have stopped about 40 years ago. It should never have started! But it did, it continues and it needs to stop.

Even when men use the line just to push a woman’s buttons, it genuinely does stop women from voicing their ideas. It really does.

There are women and girls out there who don’t want to stand up for themselves and their opinions because they don’t want to be seen as an unattractively emotional and angry feminist.

There’s an unfair stigma around the word feminist so that instead of simply meaning, ‘a believer in gender equality’, it implies ‘angry and emotional bitch’.

It shouldn’t be that way. If you believe that men and women are and should be treated as equals; congratulations, you are a feminist. It’s not a bad thing and no one should be embarrassed to admit it.

In fact, every decent person should consider themselves a feminist, perhaps not an active one but a feminist at least. By not doing so you’re suggesting that you don’t believe that men and women are equal and you are probably not a very nice person. Gender equality is a sensitive issue, stay away from an argument by simply saying that you believe we’re all equals, and mean it and act like it.

And don’t ever put a woman’s (or a man’s) opinions down to a by-product of PMS. Very, very uncool.

And if you were wondering, this is the video that I posted that started it all.

Connecting travel to design fiction

Two of my last posts are about Design Fiction and my travels to India. While writing my post on India, during the period of time that I was studying Design Fiction, I was struck by a connection between the two-albeit an abstract one. (Very abstract.)

I live in Australia and I live an Australian lifestyle that is very separated from the lifestyles of Indian people living in India.

For me, India is another world, almost like the speculative worlds that we discuss in Design Fiction.

I was almost like the product, the design that was thrust into a speculative world to see how I would react and how I affected the world around me.

The flaw in this theory is that I am not a piece of technology or a design, I am one person and I didn’t have a huge influence on the society around me. However, the society did have a big impact on me.

Travel is like reverse Design Fiction.

Noticing… what?

In all honestly I’d never even taken any special notice of the word ‘notice’ once at all in my life before reading this weeks reading. I’ve never seen the word come up so many times in a novel, let alone each paragraph of Mason’s piece.

I agree with Mason that we don’t notice most of the stimuli which we encounter in each day, but I think it would be less productive than more to start noticing pens and doorways as he suggests.

I really liked what was said about conversation. In any conversation that I may not be interested in, or having heard a friend say something that I don’t agree with, I often notice my body language change despite my own efforts to seem positive and engaged. It’s something I notice but something I can’t change.

So in a way, noticing personal action might be good but it also might just enhance anxiety. Who knows. I really think I ought to talk to my psychologist about this.

Any reading that needs to be brought up with my psychologist is either very good or very bad. And where is Mr Wilde in all of this?

It is in my practice to interpret readings into my own language and point of view in order to learn, and this is what I took from Mr Mason’s ideas:

  • Notice beauty, enhance your creativity.
  • Notice new things, interesting things, to enhance creativity.
  • Notice the language, spoken and unspoken, of other people, to understand them better for selfish reasons and unselfish reasons.
  • Notice yourself, your behaviour, to better yourself.
  • Take note of those things that happen that might be of some significance to you in the future, and reflect on them to gain full use of that incident.

I really don’t see what this has to do with my learning though. Self-development, maybe, but learning information, not so much.

I have however noticed myself not noticing things more than usual recently, so I will in the future try to be more ‘mindful’ than ‘mindless.’

The article, Researching Your Own Practice, by John Mason, can be read here.