Tag Archives: Korsakow

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.

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.

Life is a Musical, Essay

LIFE IS A MUSICAL, 2012

By Mardy Bridges

What the piece does (Lecture 3) is illustrate the beauty of mundane things in a poetic, visually and aurally beautiful way. Aesthetically, Life is a Musical, was very beautiful. The clips all showed ordinary, everyday objects and the sounds that accompany them. The project effectively demonstrated the beauty in the simplicity of these commonplace things that the audience would generally take for granted were they not displayed in such a way.

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The content was simple and focused on aesthetics and sounds rather than action. For example, in the clip of the microwave we saw the hand close the door so that the microwave started and the humming sound began, but the bulk of the clip simply showed the exterior of the microwave with little to no movement. The frame was set in an interesting and visually pleasing way, not showing the entire microwave but showing the door partially with a reflection. This was more beautiful than if the entire microwave had been shown and is an example of how the project aims to demonstrate the aesthetic and aural beauty in commodities. Many of the clips were framed this way, only partially showing the subject.

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Because of this aesthetic style, each clip might be thought of as an abstract film, (Bordwell, David, Thompson, Kristin, 2013) and these films were arranged into a categorical interactive documentary. (Sørenssen, Bjørn, 2008) The clips all have sound in common, they sounds are not identical but many are similar and they are all in a similar style. There is a recurring pattern in the videos, in that the clips are either of people and human sounds, shown in the clips of people speaking, the little girl laughing and the person rubbing their arm, or technological/industrial, shown in the multiple clips of traffic and of household machines.

Rather than creating a balanced user pattern between videos, where technological sounds lead to human sounds and vice versa; the industrial clips lead to other technological clips and the human clips lead to other human clips, with little crossover. This use of pattern means that if the user chooses the technological clips their Korsakow experience will mainly revolve around the technological clips. This would be completely different than if they had chosen a human sound in the beginning, and therefore were offered mainly human sounds to choose from. Obviously because of this the user’s interpretation of the project will be completely different depending on which route they decide to take. In this way the project is very clever and the meaning is rather ambiguous and dependent on the user.

The interface for these was also flipped: for the technological clips the three previews were on the right side of the main video, and for the human clips the previews were on the left side of the main video. For clips that were ambiguous, and could be interpreted as human or as industrial, two previews were offered on either side of the main video. This mirrored image use of interface and pattern might be interpreted as a comparison between humanity and technology, whereby one is a reflection of the other.

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Which ever way you choose to go, the project seeks to highlight the beauty of the mundane, a smile, the clinking of a spoon against a mug, traffic and city lights, the beeping and blinking of an ATM etc. There was no hierarchy or obvious ordering of the clips. This illustrated that they were equal in value and in beauty to the creator. The user was allowed to make their own connection between the clips and this connection would revolve around the pattern of simplicity and beauty in both the human and technological clips.

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Source film: Life is a Musical

Week 5 Class Notes

All non-fiction is a form of documentary.

On this basis we are making a documentary. This confused me because I generally have believed that all documentaries had to take a similar form. This obviously is not true if we think of all non-fictions as documentaries. It greatly opens up the spectrum of what I can do with my Korsakow project. I intend to make it quite abstract and ambiguous, as our independent projects have to be as the clips are so random and not planned in conjunction with each other.

The Korsakow Design Interface

Super excited to use Korsakow. It requires a lot of detail. The lives of the system and the keywords determine the patterns that occur. You have to use these to create some kind of interpretation. A rhythm between clips, moods, aesthetics or themes.

You can’t come back to the same time, but you can come back to the same place.

 

Life is a Musical

I watched Life is a Musical, a project by Media 1 students made last year.

This was an impressive project. Aesthetically and aurally it was really beautiful. Who ever did the filming did an excellent job of composing the shots. They were really balanced and sometimes quite abstract, often not showing everything in the frame. They chose completely ordinary objects and settings for their projecScreen Shot 2014-03-23 at 12.12.26 PM Screen Shot 2014-03-23 at 12.17.11 PM Screen Shot 2014-03-23 at 12.33.35 PMt and the lack of a distinct action, plot or a clear subject really emphasised the beauty of the mundane objects/scenes they were displaying. In this they really captured the poetic nature of the assignment.

The sound was of course an important element of the piece, and it stood out, as neither the sound or visuals out shone the other. Many of the sounds were similar though and that was a shame, the sounds were similar but in different locations and thus the shots were different. I think there was a clear focus on industrialism and the tools that we use everyday in our everyday lives. The microwave, the train, the  escalators etc, but I’m not sure if it was intentional or it was my interpretation.

I really love that they have placed no negative or positive attitudes toward anything, they have merely explored it in a really ambiguous way as to allow the viewer to appreciate the beauty of its simplicity and the simple, ordinary objects, and take their own interpretation from the work.

The connections between the main shot and the links to other shots were possibly too random though, if these weren’t as seemingly random (it was as if little thought had gone into it) they might have formed something of a clearer narrative or an opinion that they wanted to get across. Although I just said that I enjoyed the ambiguity of it all, I do think a narrative or categorical approach even would have made the piece stronger or more engaging. I couldn’t make much of a connection between distinct sounds, it just seemed like they’d grouped different but similar clips together and linked them to each other randomly.

Aesthetically it was stunning though, and as an abstract film it worked well. It might have just been too abstract for me as I like there to be some sort of message or connection that I could take from it. All I got from it was that the ordinary is beautiful, I feel like that’s a really simplistic and obvious message. They could have made it more complex and deeper by contrasting nature’s sounds and industrial sounds etc. If this was what they were trying to do, it was too subtle and wasn’t balanced enough to be effective.