The Zen Files

There’s been a lot of words on the street about this film. Pretty much all good from what I had heard. So I thought I better give it a watch myself.

If you’ve been tuned out from all media recently, you won’t know that this film was created over a 12 year stint, with the same primary cast, tracking the life of a boy in Texas, through childhood to adolescence. From when Ellar Coltrane (who plays the main character Mason) was six-years-old, the cast filmed once a year, every year, up until 2013. Thus, half of the joy of this film was tracing the changing hair cuts and body types of the characters; something that has never really been done before – in a narrative form of film anyway.

My favourite part of watching the three hour ‘time capsule’, was its historical context (if you can call it that). Mason is the same age as me and so his growing up through the late 90s into the naughties was particularly relatable. Richard Linklater (the director) takes you through the Harry Potter craze of the early 2000s, incorporates the ’20 Questions’ game, Motorola razor flip phones, ripstick skateboards, the introduction of Facebook, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Bright Eyes and Britney Spears all during their primes, online porn and Dragon Ball Z. This film is pretty much as real as it gets…without becoming a documentary (although it does have a certain neo-realism feel). Sitting in the cinema I was rather surprised when Mason gets drunk and baked on the eve of his 15th birthday. For any film, but particularly by American standards, that is an incredibly young age to start getting involved with illegal substances. However, I quickly realised that it was around that 14 mark when all of my friends started doing the same things… it’s just how life actually is and this film isn’t afraid to show it.

This concept for a film is something that I think every aspiring filmmaker has thought about in their lives – what if you could actually get the same actors to play their younger selves? But for me, I always come back to the same problem – technology. What if camera qualities and film techniques and methodologies progress too far over the years of shooting? Wouldn’t it cause a weird discontinuity throughout the piece? This complication is what I was most interested in seeing Linklater tackle. I assume they used all the same cameras throughout the film as there was no change in quality (in regards to its visual ‘crispness’); but there was definitely a development in the cinematography and editing. The first hour or so is filled with unfocused shots; and I’m not talking nice shallow depth of field compositions, but that frustrating kind of ‘blurry edges’ look, where it feels like you’re wearing glasses of the wrong prescription. Nevertheless, it dramatically improved towards the end, specifically the last scene out at ‘Big Ben’ which has been carefully filmed for aesthetic effect. Similarly the editing is rhythmic and flowing in Mason’s later years, but at the beginning it seems too calculated and jumpy – when a character’s speaking the camera would be on them, no one else, so we weren’t receiving those critical reaction shots.

Overall, it was an incredible film… even just for the sheer amount of dedication the whole cast and crew have shown to finish it off. It’s long, but it seems to just wash over you and somehow gratify those inner-most voyeuristic tendencies we all have.

Evan and I seem to have extremely similar interpretations and opinions about last week’s reading by Shields, see his post ‘Jigsaw Writing’ and my post ‘Mosaics’. Similarly, Steph talks about this fragmented style of writing in her post ‘Collages’, comparing it to one of Picasso’s pieces ‘Guitar’, an artwork we had studied last semester in Editing Media Texts.

On a different note, Michael gets deep and meaningful in the realm of social networking. His blog post ‘It’s Late And I’m Full Of Feels And This Is Semi-Related To Networked Media’ presents a topic that I’m sure everyone who has a phone or Facebook can relate to. He discusses the idea of a message being ‘seen’ and the resulting ‘disheartenment’ we all feel when we think the person on the other side is ignoring us. It really does suck. Especially when you crave the empathy of that particular person. Thus I agree with Michael in saying that these networks that are ‘designed to bring us together are even better at tearing us apart’. However, I do have something to add… it can be even more frustrating when you receive that tick of ‘receivement’ from the person you’re messaging and the message is something legitimately and professionally important. Just last night I contacted a girl who I needed to do an interview with for Broadcast Media. She had already agreed to do the interview, it was just a matter of organising a time and date to do it. I know she’s seen it… but still no reply grrrrrr.

 

 

‘A word can only mean something, not because of what it is, but because of what it is not’.

As soon as this sentence streamed out of Adrian Miles’ mouth in this week’s symposium I was intrigued. I mean, I’ve gotten used to over-analysing every concept to the endth degree in this subject, but even still, the idea that words do not literally have meaning attached to them amazes me. Reading a word and decoding its meaning comes so easily to all of us, even now as I’m typing this sentence, I am essentially encoding meaning into these words, placing letters (coded markings) into a specific order so that someone else can come along and understand what I was thinking in the minute just gone by.

Adrian used the word ‘boy’ as an example to illustrate his point. The only reason I can draw meaning from this word, whether typed or spoken, is because it looks or sounds different from what it is not – it isn’t soy, it isn’t coy, it isn’t joy. Thus the reason ‘boy’ means a male child or youth, is through its contrast to other words. I suppose this explains that action of abstracting a word for yourself; you know when you think about a word really hard, repeating it over and over again in your head until it doesn’t make sense to you any more, it just becomes a jumble of sounds or a pattern of letters? The only way to think about that word again and make it make sense to you, is either by trying to completely forget about it or by putting it in a sentence, changing the context it’s in and essentially comparing and contrasting it to other words.

Of course the topics of ‘meaning’ and in turn ‘intention’ also stem from this idea…but that’s for another day!

Another proud moment for my friends…making me feel all gooey and happy inside.

This one’s in relation to my prior blog post ‘Talented Human Beings’, where I was sharing a video clip created by Declan Sands. Now instead, this music video features Declan and his brother’s, or Surf Dad‘s, recently released EP ‘Unholy’. I’m not sure if I’m just being biased because I know these guys or because I’m oblivious to what’s going on in the music world, but I think it’s a pretty unique and captivating concept to release an entire EP as a sequence of interconnecting short films. The director of the film, Sam Millar, is a gun in the editing suite and exhibits particular expertise with lighting techniques – this is the first of his stuff that I’ve seen since he was in high school four years ago, so fingers crossed there’s more where that came from!

The first page of this week’s entry by David Shields had me a little bamboozled. I was asking myself: what is this? how do I read it? and, well, why is it set out this way?

However, by the end I realised that Shields had purposefully written the piece in a ‘mosaic fashion’, which was in fact the main focus of the reading. I came to really like how it was arranged because even though the paragraphs/sentences were ordered (signified by the sequential numbers heading each of the segments), each part could be read and understood independently of the rest of the writing. Even though it was not ‘multilinear’ like hypertext (in fact Shields calls it ‘nonlinear’), the article still had the same sort of feel to it, as the text was fragmented into shorter ‘stand-alone’ segments.

In comparison to most of the readings for uni, this one was seemingly easier to read. Generally readings are rather long and in order to progress through the pieces you must understand the first part so that you can understand the next ones. Thus, I often find I am overwhelmed by the amount of information I have to take in and am constantly re-reading segments of the text. Shields’ ‘collage’-style of writing, although fragmented, still had a flow to it and so I finished reading the entry in quite a short amount of time, feeling like I had understood the majority of what had been said. I couldn’t help but think that this could be the future form of writing as it would gratify the short attention spans of people today.

The most interesting part of the reading for me, was that Shields talked about the concept that ‘the relationship between the parts is more important than the parts themselves’ with regards to Soviet montage filmmakers, something I had surprisingly picked up on in one of my first blog entries. He notes the similarities between mosaic, collage and montage, saying that meaning ‘is a matter of adjacent data’. In film, this idea relates to the relationship between shots because ‘meaning is not inherent in any one shot but is created by the juxtaposition of shots’. Ultimately the main question that collage/mosaic/montage artists face is that they’ve ‘found some interesting material – [now] how do [they] go about arranging it?’

My recent obsession is 3D printing; so I was delighted when the topic came up in week 6’s symposium. A question was asked as to whether technology could progress independently of art and culture – now, although I think it was a good question, I think the answer or conversation associated with it is rather unproductive: people like Raymond Williams have been arguing about technological determinism for years.

Anyhow, in the case of 3D printing, the answer would be no. There are of course conflicting ideas surrounding the concept of whether the creation of the 3D printer was a result of a societal change or need for the technology or whether it was an outcome of technological advancements (stemming from 2D printers and 3D computer imaging) independent of the outside world. However, when 3D printers did come into existence, people took them on for various reasons and from there they progressed as a result of art and culture, as well as science. A simple example would be the development of 3D colour printers. This element was added to the machine because it was needed for various forms of ‘art’. Let’s take a Nike runner… now some people might not consider a shoe a form of art, but it is still an expression of someone’s creative ideas, a shoe is still ‘design’. What happens in a lot of factories (sweatshops) today is that the ‘perfect’ Nike runner will be printed, colour and all, so that the people who are making the shoe can examine the artificial model to see if they are sewing/dying/moulding the right thing in the right way. This example shows that it was in fact the technology that responded to the needs of society, specifically that of design.

3D printers are still developing now (and have a long way to go in my mind), mostly due to the need for medical advancements. If you’re interested, take a look at this video on human ear transplants, created from 3D printers!

I decided I should probably try to follow a few more of my peers this week, considering that I will undoubtedly run out of people to mention in my posts if I don’t. Plus I like seeing what others have to say – even if I do end up feeling quite inadequate writing-wise afterwards.

So, I just gave Ellen and Nethaniel a follow…

I actually found Nethaniel’s post ‘Start School Later‘ through Kenton’s post ‘Week 6: What’s the word on the streets? (well blogs)‘ (which made me feel kind of proud of our cohort, I think we’re all starting to get the hang of this blogging thang, we are beginning to create our own discussions, independent of the readings and symposiums in Networked Media).

Anyhow, these posts talked about the ideas of lectures being filmed and put on blackboard so that students can watch them from the comfort of their homes, at whatever time they may want to. Although I don’t think this is the best idea for the social connections we must create to make the most of this course; I completely agree that it would be better for people’s sleeping patterns. For one, the travel to and from uni takes at least one hour out of most people’s day, which could be better used for studying (or sleeping) and most people’s energy levels do not support the 9-5 working/studying style. In fact it is common for adolescents’ energy levels to take a dive mid-afternoon, but then peak at around 7 at night. (This is also mentioned in Nethaniel’s post ‘That Nine to Five Feel‘).

I also wanted to mention Ellen’s post ‘Remember Neopets?‘, purely because I love and miss Neopets as well and will probably end up spending the next 3 hours playing ‘Ice Cream Machine’!

This week’s addition to the participation checklist was to link out to other student’s blogs, who are also participating in the Networked Media course here at RMIT. I feel a bit like Adrian Miles doing shout outs, but I do like this idea as it gives me the chance to interact with other students online and commend them for some of the great things they are putting out there on the net.

1. This blog post still makes me crack up laughing. God love Tyson our Communications lecturer, but I absolutely agree with Kenton when he says ‘never in my life have I wanted more badly to see two people locked in a room together… Traditional university skeptic and Network Media lecturer Adrian Miles and rigid university practice enforcer and History of Communications lecturer Tyson Wils.’

2. I do feel like a bit of an intruder commenting on this, because this story seems so personal, even the way Michael has introduced his short story entitled Mara implies its ‘auteurist nature’ which reveals ‘great truths about the personality and media consumed by their creators’. But nevertheless, I needed to say something about it. I’ve been pondering on it for a while, trying to think about how I could turn it into a film; however, this is one of the rare stories I don’t think should be pushed into a moving picture form. I think films work best with minimal dialogue and although this story does have limited spoken word, it is predominantly made of ‘thoughts’ and would thus most likely end up as a highly narrated short video. Its pensive and delicate nature lends itself to written form all too well. The only person who could possibly do it justice in an audio/visual format would be Michael himself – probably starring himself as well.

3. Just a general mention of Giorgia, whose blog posts reflect her personality beautifully. She is incredibly complementary and wears her heart on her sleeve. Her openness and honestly is clearly evident in her blog… I’d give her a follow, her posts are consistently interesting and beautifully worded.

 

 

My Dad and I often end up talking about the similarities between architecture and media as we are both very interested in these realms of creativity – I’ve been working in his architecture office for a couple of years now and he’s also the person I go to about film or photography. Anyway, we were in the car last night discussing the architectural theories he’s been studying recently; one of which was deconstructionist theory. From what I can gather, this concept was the aftermath of post modern theory, which was of course the aftermath of modernism. It is characterized by fragmentation, the manipulation of a building’s surface and curvilinear shapes which appear to distort and dislocate elements of architecture. The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit deconstructivist ‘style’ are characterised by unpredictability and controlled chaos. But what caught me, was the idea that deconstructionist architects are against the idea of a structure with a singular ‘narrative’, or purpose. My Dad hates the idea that something has to have a narrative; a concept that is drummed into us as media students constantly. There are people out there whose sole job is to create ‘interpretative narratives’ in buildings. Take zoos for instance; there is now a massive concentration on how people move through spaces and landscapes, what they read and in what order and how their senses are engaged.  Ultimately these designers want to create a fabricated story experience for people. But deconstructivist theorists ask why… Why does there always have to be a narrative?

Let’s take the famous deconstructionist example of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum located in the Spanish city of Bilbao. As you can see from the image below, the very appearance of the building looks deconstructed and fragmented, it is hard to know where the ‘centre’ of the structure is (probably because there really isn’t one). Additionally, there is not one preferred entrance nor one preferred pathway through the exhibition. In fact, every person who receives an ‘audio guide’ essentially chooses their own way through the gallery – it is up to them to press the numbers on the audio device, which correlate to the artworks they are looking at, in order to find out more about them. What is important to note here is that there is not one set sequence they must view the artworks or rooms in.

I found this idea related to a lot of what we have been studying in Network Media in regards to materiality, but specifically the second of this week’s readings, which concentrated on the differences between interactive narratives and print narratives. Like deconstructionist architecture, interactive narratives are ‘polysequential’, they are ‘discontinuous’ and ‘non-linear’ or rather multi-linear. Furthermore, hypertext narratives are also fragmented and decentralised – deconstuctionists were ‘pulling apart’ the elements of architecture to make new forms, just as hypertext authors are essentially ‘reconstructing’ narrative form by deconstructing it. Interactive narratives and deconstructivist structures are also both unpredictable – deconstructivist buildings are designed around the idea of shock and surprise, similarly most hypertext narratives are created on the basis that the outcomes of the story are not set in concrete from the beginning, nor can they be fully controlled by the author. As Douglas suggests, someone who ‘reads’ a hypertext narrative ‘cannot be entirely certain… that [their] carefully considered choice [of pathway] has not triggered a connection randomly’. Interactive narratives do not necessarily have one default story route from a single place. This essentially means that ‘the same answer to the same question does not [necessarily] yield the same reply’. Thus, just like deconstructivist architecture, hypertext mediums are also a form of ‘controlled chaos’.

 

 

 

Although this week’s reading was mainly centred around the concepts of reading and writing, it also brought my attention to the very simple idea of ‘the web’. It might seem completely obvious, but it is interesting to think about why the World Wide Web is titled that way. Using the metaphor of an infinitely large spiders web has helped me to grasp the idea behind hypertext and multilinear texts in general. The very straight-forward explanation of the World Wide Web on Wikipedia is ‘a system of interlinked hypertext documents’. As with hypertext, points on a spider’s web are connected by different links or ‘trails’ (a term coined by Bush’s ‘Memex’) and there are several different pathways to get anywhere on the web, none having a particular entry or ‘departure’ point. This idea of an audience member, ‘not coming through the front door’, but dropping through the lounge room ceiling of the text, was something I also picked up from last week’s reading on hypertext. Similarly, in regards to multilinear narratives such as ‘Titanic: Adventure our of Time‘ (the CD-ROM), even if 5 different users/readers began the ‘story’ at the same place, they would most likely follow 5 different pathways, ending up at 5 very different positions in the plot.

I wonder what ‘the web’ metaphor for a linear book would look like? Most probably a single string of ‘proteinaceous silk’ that isn’t attached to anything…