About Max

A slightly mature-age student who has returned to study after working several years in TV, in the Script side of things. I'm always eager to learn and cross pollinate old knowledge with new knowledge (and vice-versa). My interests and hobbies include various forms of writing (screenwriting, travel writing), charting the contours of the unconscious (i.e. sleep), finding original personalities, travel, tropical cocktails, breaking out old breakdancing moves when the mood strikes, pointy Italian shoes and a well fitting pair of jeans and much, MUCH more.

Adaptation – Case Study

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Max

Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) presents numerous overlapping narratives, which converge in the film’s action-packed finale. Essentially, the film explores screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s difficulty in adapting Susan Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief for the big screen, adding fanciful and heightened elements to Kaufman’s real-life writer’s block, including Kaufman’s fictional brother, Donald, as a means of satirising Hollywood’s reductionism of source material to formulaic three-act fare. While Adaptation is certainly not the first metafilm (a film which draws attention to its own production), it does represent a superlative example, in the way that it cleverly weaves the viewer through multiple levels of fiction and reality.

In the main, Adaptation presents two intertwining stories: Charlie Kaufman’s immense difficulty in adapting The Orchid Thief and the depiction of parts of Orlean’s original novel, including the theft of rare orchids by John LaRoche.

Adaptation contains all of the elements that Levi Manovich regards as being essential components for a story. Charlie Kaufman fulfils the role of author and narrator, both of the script and in his fictionalised form on screen. Susan Orlean is another author of – and in – Adaptation, whose source material is depicted in stylised flurries between the main story of Charlie’s writer’s block and who is credited accordingly (despite the fact that little of the original novel features in the film). A third author in Adaptation is Charlie’s brother, Donald, whose high-octane genre filmmaking tropes takeover the film’s final third, despite Charlie’s disdain for such cliches.

Interestingly, the film’s script is credited to Charlie and Donald (who is Charlie’s alter-ego, although this wouldn’t have been known by many unsuspecting audience members when viewing the film for the first time). In doing so, the filmmaker’s draw attention to the veracity of the events we have just witnessed unfolding on-screen: have we just seen a genuine dramatised ‘making of’? Did Charlie and Donald really get hunted down by Orlean and LaRoche after discovering their pursuit of rare orchids had to do with the psychoactive chemicals it contained? Did Orlean and LaRoche really commence a drug-addled affair? Without prior knowledge, the audience is letting wondering what is real and what is not.

Another interesting element of the film is the portrayal of story guru Robert McKee and how Kaufman uses McKee’s ‘story commandments’ to parody himself in the film. Despite Kaufman’s disdain towards what he sees as McKee’s formulaic instructions, Kaufman elicits help from his action-writer brother Donald to help him finish his adaption of Orlean’s work, and indeed Adaptation itself ends with a high stakes final act and the protagonist who is left changed by what he has just experienced (for the better).

Remix is also an important part of Adaptation, largely through this self-parodying, its action-packed final act (the most pedestrian part of the film) as well the script which Donald sells called ‘The 3’, which is a humorous play and satirising of high-concept Hollywood thrillers and specifically, split personality thrillers.

Story Lab – Week 2 Reflections

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Max

This week we looked at remix culture, as well as the role of audience participation in the crafting of narrative.

As a writer, it is heartening and relieving to hear that there are no wholly original stories. It takes the pressure off a little. The elements, motifs and basic ‘creative language’ that are used to construct stories are well-established, having been around (and having constantly evolved) for thousands of years.

Originality is still a noble and achievable goal for creatives, through the fresh and original collation of familiar elements. Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), for instance, takes familiar tropes of amnesia and noir-ish elements (including a hard-bitten protagonist) and presents these in a fresh new way by playing with chronology. Similarly, Pulp Fiction (1994) assembles classic characters and scenarios of bygone American genre films and music in a modern setting with a nifty re-structured chronology to keep viewers hooked.

Daniel also raised the question in class of whether language is necessary for storytelling. My answer is an emphatic yes. The language doesn’t necessarily need to be spoken or written; the language may be symbols; providing that as a medium, they encode the author(s)’ meaning and can be decoded by the audience.

Sometimes that decoding is quite straightforward (as in the case of genre narratives, like Frankenstein (1930) and many more), while at other times the message or theme presented is far more abstract and requires greater (and far more subjective) interpretation on the part of the audience, which was the case for the short film we watched in class.

Story Lab – Week 1 Reflections

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Max

It’s very useful to deconstruct what story is and to examine its mandatory components; which, like good stories, are open for discussion.

For me, a story conveys a message (or theme); it intends to affect the audience in a deliberate way. Nowadays, with the explosion of interactive media, the intention of the author might be to engage audience members in crafting the narrative and the meaning they derive from the experience.

I have always preferred traditional narratives, particularly film, rather than transmedia because, to my mind, being immersed in a single medium facilitates the suspension of disbelief (which is something I want when seeking out entertainment). In comparison, a transmedia project draws more attention to its form by prompting participants to switch between media.

Nevertheless, transmedia works successfully capture contemporary life in a way that a single medium (such as a film, tv show, or computer game) cannot. For instance, on any given day most of us switch between several different platforms – smart phone, laptop, tv, tablet, etc. Transmedia projects thus capture the essence of 21st century life by spreading across these various platforms; they capture the freneticism and fragmentation (and arguably, overstimulation) that have come to define the modern techno era.

I am interested in learning about transmedia firstly for pragmatic reasons, since any media practitioner practicing nowadays must have some degree of cross platform applications to remain viable and competitive. Secondly, should I want to capture and communicate the aforementioned freneticism of the contemporary era, transmedia seems like the most fitting outlet – echoing the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s sentiment that the medium (or media) is the message.

I am confident that traditional, single platform narratives can exist harmoniously alongside multi-platform projects, since – in their best forms – films and television offer a carefully structured, ‘uninterrupted’ emotional catharsis that audiences still crave, and which I believe is not offered by transmedia projects.

Hypertext & Cinema 3.0

Posted on October 26, 2014 by Max

In this essay, I would like to explore how Web 2.0, as a conspicuous and popular representation of a networked cum hypertextual environment, has affected the composition of narrative, using cinema as an example. I am particularly interested in this as a screenwriter and how, in a world of multiple platforms as nodes in a network, a film narrative must embrace these various outlets if one is to reach the greatest audience. This relates to network literacy and ‘being comfortable with change and flow as the day to day conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, and recognising that all of this may change, and appear differently in six months’ (p. 207, Miles, 2007). This is particularly resonant to the script or novel writer, I believe, whose work will invariably undergo umpteen drafts and is often ‘years in the making’. Throughout my discussion, I would also like to explore the concept of interactivity, comparing traditional cinema with ‘Cinema 3.0’ (Daly, 2010).

In her article, Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image, Kristen Daly (2010) claims that ‘cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in a network, intertextual space, which enables new developments in narrative that are increasingly interactive’ (p.1). This interaction includes interpretation and user-participation; the latter leading Daly to term the 3.0 audience member as ‘viewser’, in the spirit of Bruns’ ‘produser’ (Bruns, 2008).

Daly (2010) cites The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999) as an early example of Cinema 3.0, where the pleasure isn’t simply in the viewing but in ‘searching and navigating’ (p.87) and finding out what is real and what is not, aided by Web materials as another node in the network, and a source of knowledge production and dissemination.

Other films which fall into the Cinema 3.0 category include the ‘remix’ films of Quentin Tarantino as examples of hyperlink films, where viewsers gain enjoyment by making the links to other films (via pop culture references) while watching such films.

The overall thrust has been films of increasing complexity, which reflect the complexity and fragmentation of the lives of contemporary viewsers, whose daily activities include surfing the internet and checking their smart phones; constantly networking and hyperlinking. Thus filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan can afford to depict highly complex plots and stylistic amalgamations in films such as Memento (2000) and Inception (2010), whose fans immerse themselves in online discussion forums discussing and testing different theories about the films’ meaning(s). If Jean-Paul Sartre argued that interpretation was property, and thus ownership: do such films afford viewers a more collaborative, interactive, and enjoyable experience that traditional ‘non-interactive’ films?

These are fascinating questions and I genuinely find myself grappling with creative choices and how to best adapt narrative to ensure viability in our multi-platform, boundary-less media landscape. I believe network literacy is essential for any writer striving for viability. Yet, as someone with an unashamed preference towards traditional narrative, I also wonder about the longevity of such films in an increasingly networked and complex multimedia environment.

For instance, I find Daly’s (2010) comparison between Cinema 3.0 films as films which cause viewers ‘think and link’ rather than just be ‘passively entertained’ (p.97) incorrect. In contrast to this idea, Rob Cover, citing Umberto Eco’s 1979 categorization of open and closed texts, notes that:

‘…the open text which deliberately gives an audience more than one possible interpretation is, in fact, less open to creative interpretation than the closed text…’ (p.151, Cover, 2006, author’s emphasis).

In other words, films with a built in ‘interactive’ dimension, such as The Blair Witch Project and even Borat (2006) – in which viewsers are enticed online to see what is real, what is not, what is staged, etc. – are not as open to individual, unique, aberrant interpretation as straightforward narrative films which are ‘diversely interpretable along individual and imaginative trajectories.’ (p.151, Cover, 2006). Thus, the viewer is not provided with pre-defined options to choose from, and must rely more on their own creative agency to interpret what they have witnessed.

The tendency towards so-called ‘Mind-game films’ (Elsaesser, 2009) and ‘overload’ films, such The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception, which reward multiple viewings and ongoing scrutiny by packing in as much plot and complexity and multiple drawn out climaxes, give the viewer more value, more bang for their buck. In reference to consumer compulsion towards DVD purchases, Australian media commentator Laurie Zion noted consumers’ ‘hunger for extra features’. I believe a similar concept is at play with the films mentioned above, which reward viewers with more information, features and revelations, the more they consume the networked product across multiple platforms. Perhaps this is the face of merchandising in our contemporary world, such that buy a t-shirt or poster with film icons is no longer satisfy enough to sustain engagement and spending across different platforms.

On a personal note, I feel that films such as Inception undermine the ability for closure for the viewer, which traditional cinema provides. Inception may reflect the fragmented inter-textual nature of our contemporary lives, but I feel it does not enable us to meditate on, seek refuge from, or make sense of our chaotic lives. In trying to work things out – and being aware of constantly trying to work out the plot – our ability to suspend disbelief is compromised. While Inception, like a puzzle, provides viewers with a visceral and cerebral workout, our emotions are left behind; thus the ability of cinema as a cathartic medium is also compromised. For this reason, I was distracted from deeply engaging in the subplot involving the film’s protagonist, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the guilt he feels – and mystery – surrounding his wife’s death.

The issue here is one of immersion. While there is great fun to be had with a film which depicts multiple worlds and artful self-reflexivity – as in the case of Adaptation (2002) – there is also the risk of alienating the viewer. Daly (2010) sums up this feature of Cinema 3.0:

‘Viewsers are encouraged, if not forced, throughout the movie to try and figure out where they are in time and in levels of diegesis; thus, they are constantly navigating and popping in and out of immersion.’ (p.93)

I deeply enjoy ‘mind-game’ films, providing they do not remove me from the narrative to a point of no return. For instance, Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987) – as an example of traditional Cinema 2.0: The Time-Image – immerses the viewer in a vivid world of classic film noir cum supernatural tropes, yet the film’s wicked Deus ex machina challenge’s the entire narrative which has unfolded in the preceding 100 minutes. Some audience members may feel cheated by the film’s resolution, however I did not, since my attention and involvement was sustained throughout the film.

Hypertext, however, affords a very different viewing experience. According to Landow (2006), hypertext provides the foundation for a network. Hypertextual films then, as artefacts, represent just one point in the network, linking to various other nodes; online discussion forums, additional material on the film’s website, and online news articles interrogating the veracity of a film’s events (the various lawsuits which sprung up after the release of Borat provide one example) are all part of the network or web surrounding the film. Thus what defines the network is the relationship and communication between these different nodes (Landow, 2006), each of which is involved in ‘knowledge production and dissemination’ (p.206, Miles, 2007).

Thus, we see an inherently social, community quality to many of the films of Cinema 3.0. Films such as Inception, The Blair Witch Project and Borat entice viewers to crack the code, as it were, promoting discussion and incorporating the audience into the film’s discourse. An emphasis is placed on shared knowledge, community and collaboration, which I think can only be a good thing.

In comparison, the films of Cinema 2.0 offer an overall more personal viewing experience (the quality of individual films notwithstanding). While virtually all films have an online presence by virtue of having been uploaded to Web 2.0, what distinguishes these films from their successors is that they are less deliberately and explicitly interactive and networked. Despite this, earlier blockbuster films such as Star Wars capitalised on having a franchised presence, having video game spin-offs, merchandise and the like, as part of its network.

In summary, I believe that the traditional narratives of Cinema 2.0 are not dead or dying and will continue to exist alongside the more interactive, hypertextual films of Cinema 3.0. Clearly, both types of films provide a very different experience for audiences. Nevertheless, the question of how popular traditional (i.e. non-interactive) narratives remain in the future is yet to be seen; perhaps the audience for such films will become increasingly niche.

As a media practitioner and a lover of ‘straightforward’ narratives, network literacy obviously plays a huge part in understanding different audiences’ needs and calculating how, where and why a film will reach a market, in an effort to remain viable.

References:

Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage (Vol. 45). Peter Lang.

Charles, L. (2006) Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan [Motion Picture] United States; United Kingdom: Twentieth Century Fox.

Cover, R. (2006). Audience inter/active Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history. New media & society, 8(1), 139-158.

Daly, K. (2010). Cinema 3.0: The interactive-image. Cinema Journal, 50(1), 81-98.

Landow, G. P. (2006). Hypertext 3.0: Critical theory and new media in an era of globalization. JHU Press.

Miles, A. (2007). Network literacy: The new path to knowledge. Screen Education, (45), 201-208.

Myrick, D. & Sanchez, E. (1999) The Blair Witch Project [Motion Picture] United States: Artisan Entertainment

Nolan, C. (2000). Memento [Motion Picture]. United States: Summit Entertainment.

Nolan, C. (2008). The Dark Knight [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Brothers Pictures.

Nolan, C. (2010). Inception [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Brothers Pictures.

Parker, A. (1987). Angel Heart [Motion Picture]. United States: TriStar Pictures.

Analysis-Reflection 5 – Screen grabs

Posted on October 26, 2014 by Max

1) This is an original screen grab from Angelo’s interview. I wanted to make the scene a bit warmer (at this point, Angelo’s discussing his passion for music) and also wanted to reduce the brightness on his face.

2) I’ve enhanced the Orange/Red/Yellows, and this makes it look like sunlight is being reflected of Angelo’s face. It’s quite a nice effect, if a little artificial.

3) I’ve reduced the brightness and increased the contrast slightly. It takes some of the artificial reflection off Angelo’s face and also gives the scene a bit more impact / emotional gravitas, I think.

4). This is an original screen grab from Angelo’s performance at The Mexican Corner, at the climax of the film. I wanted to have Angelo stick out a little more, since this is his ‘moment’.

5). I’ve again reduced the brightness and increased the contrast. I think this helps to take attention off the fellow in the background in the red shirt who was stealing some of the attention and also it gives the seen a slightly grainer, natural feeling; we’re less aware of the presence of artificial lighting on Angelo.

Scissors, paper… hypertext

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Max

Lisha talks about the learning potential of hypertext systems, providing that students apply themselves thoughtfully to Web 2.0. Mustafa contemplates the benefits books and e-books. He believes that physical books will live on because of people’s nostalgia for the form (and as an adornment)! Amelia felt a little fatigued after reading Ted Nelson (this seems to be a common theme) but the accuracy of Nelson’s predictions force us to sit up and take stock of the network culture in which we live. With this in mind, should network literacy be cultivated earlier for newer generations? And James wonders considers if the Internet be a dying technology in the way that some argue books are…

…God help us?

Master embedder

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Max

Having not embedded anything before…ever…

…I thought I would begin with my preferred citizen journalist, Russell Brand.

Enjoy

Symposium 6

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Max

Interesting discussion today on the potential of hypertext, as set out by Ted Nelson many decades ago… and how its capacity to represent a dynamic communication network isn’t quite being realised on the Web, despite the myriad advancements in technical invention over the years.

Conceptualisation and thus realisation of the technology (vis-à-vis that enduring form vs. content debate) seems like one very plausible reason. Or to put it more simply, people are still stuck in the paradigm of linearity from print as the default communicative technology (…at least up until the 21st century).

Indeed, using text alone (via print) to express the full intricacies of a network and dynamic (or reciprocal) streams of communication between ‘nodes’ in the network doesn’t quite do it justice, I think … The network is a 3-dimensional beast which 2-D schematics go some of the way to helping visualise… but only some of the way.

Hypertext

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Max

Landow’s writing on hypertext and what it means for the way we communicate provides a comprehensive conceptual detailing of the rather profound differences of this medium relative to print.

There are a lot of ideas in here. Perhaps my biggest takeaway idea is that hypertext facilitates a network and what a network emphasizes is the communicative aspect of the artefact (i.e. the text).

The technology of hypertext and the internet seems to sum up everything that defines that nebulous term postmodernity – decentralized, non-hierarchical systems of organisation, etc, etc. – that prioritize the dialogue and the discourse incited by a text (if that’s where you began) – rather than the sacredness and infallibility of the text alone.

Although, in the era of the digital technology and hypertext, hierarchies do of course still exist, masquerading as community – look at Facebook or Google, for example (I’m not singling you out here Google, it’s just you’re prone to exemplification and superlatives). I’m reminded of a quote by English cultural theorist Raymond Williams talking about the tendency of the most powerful groups to shape the ways technologies are used (way back in 1974) – which he describes as:

‘[a] counter-revolution, in which…a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could further reach into our lives’.

Nevertheless, hypertext as a technology seems to inherently favor a kind of socially democratic form of community. So a homegrown website might be bought out by a corporation once it becomes popular, for advertising revenue, but then another homegrown site will pop up.

Anyway, I’ve digressed somewhat. …

The immediacy of hypertext allows us to follow a thread of enquiry immediately and if we are to participate in a community, which the online environment encourages, then we have to communicate our information, our knowledge, our thoughts – rather than keeping it private (notes scribbled along the margins of a printed page) – and that I think can markedly stimulate the way and the speed at which we learn… (so long as we are literate enough about the network to be wary of possible pitfalls).

References:

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Freedman, D. (2002). A’Technological Idiot’? Raymond Williams and Communications Technology. Information, Communication & Society, 5(3), 425-442.

Pretty Fly for a Cyber Guy

A collection of ideas, reflection and analysis on media workings, a few other random delectables…

Author Archives: Max