I wasn’t all too sure how to respond to this particular reading. It seems all well and good to justify a life attitude by using Steve Martin and some blues guitarist as exemplars.  Newport was even kind enough to add a rebuttal section to potential criticism. These rebuttals employed the exact examples rather than taking the chance to show how adopting such an attitude can be beneficial to the everyday worker. Newport probably did exactly that in later chapters that I am not privy to (If he did ignore me).

Surely, a middle ground must be found between a utopian craftsman mindset and ensuring you’re not being exploited as a worker. For instance, I work in (the sometimes soul destroying world of) retail to support myself. Sometimes, I will lean heavily on the craftsmen mindset, ensuring customers are aided in achieving their goals. I’m committed to making sure that I’m exemplifying the business’s values but undercurrent to this I’m making money. Not only that, I’m growing my skills as a communicator and professional to some extent. This isn’t to say that I don’t value the relationships I build with customers and my colleagues but I have multiple objectives. Alongside my goal for profit, I’m also eager to gain knowledge and to work effectively within a collaborative environment.

I think it would be impossible to delineate my goals and objectives for my part time work. At any one moment it could lean toward the Craftsman mindset,  dependent upon how I feel and who I am working with. Ultimately, I can see the true value of such an approach, particularly when beginning work within the media industry; looking to either ascend hierarchies or to build a business or body of work.

Still taken from BROTHER

My exploration for this semester was centred on creating a series of 10-12 vignettes, videos of approximately 1-minute duration. Within this series I intended to explore both drama and documentary conventions as well as exploring a more experimental and poetic approaches to production. My immediate interest for Film 3 was to look at the distinction between drama and documentary production and to explore ways in production can be mixed or ambivalent to distinction.
Each vignette was treated as a non-chronological aspect of an essay focusing upon Perception. Although non-chronological I hoped that in assembly each vignette would shed light on another providing further clarification or even an alternate viewpoint. My particular area of interest was the disconnection between our identities and the physical forms we present to the world. I treated this topic as a mere starting point and wanted my ideas and avenues of exploration to be shaped by my content creation and musings on production conventions. This decision to explore a somewhat improvised style was a means to challenge my current work ethics and my predisposition for extensive preplanning.

Throughout production I found that I had been somewhat optimistic in what I had intended to achieve. I found that my current habits were difficult to break and I constantly gravitated towards one particular idea. In doing so I believe I neglected avenues of exploration just so I could complete a vignette. I privileged the completion of one particular idea rather than investigating an assortment of other potential ideas. I found that focus also tended to lean towards the vignettes I had envisioned and presented in the Pitch. I also faltered in terms of my research and I believe if I had have delved deeper into other works exploring Perception I may have been able to nurture a more sophisticated approach to my content. Throughout the production period I do believe that I was able to expand my knowledge in referencing to both documentary and dramatic filmmaking. Through the various vignettes I honed my skills working in both an incredibly contrived environment with actors as well as naturalistic settings with non-actors. In these instances I was able to apply a diverse set of solutions for lighting and sound recording, both areas of film I was quite ignorant about.

My final product consists of five completed vignettes that I believe reflected my exploration into drama, documentary and poetic filmmaking. I also believe they are a fair representation of the original essay I have envisioned. In this format though I believe that the interplay between vignettes is negligible and true possibilities of this form only take prominence with a larger collection of vignettes.
Asides from this selection, I also filmed footage that could easily form a number of vignettes if I were to continue my undertaking. I concede that my original idea was more concerned with the completion of my final essay of 10 vignettes rather than the mere act of their creation, exploring the possibilities of film. An alternative approach could have been to base my project around a series of exercises that delved into a variety of production techniques or concerns. Although limited in experimentation, I believe this approach could have yielded unique exercises born of technical constraints or the premise of exploring particular skills.

“Here’s a good thing to do if you go to a party and you don’t know anybody: First take out the garbage. Then go around and collect any extra garbage that people might have, like a crumpled napkin, and take that out too. Pretty soon people will want to meet the busy garbage guy. ”

-Jack Handy

In this image is my car and my great neighbour Arie.
This image is also one that I took for Writing Media Texts last semester.
In it I was attempting to channel the work of Gregory Crewdson,  who creates highly constructed cinematic images. I find his work really quite eerie and alienating. The fact that his images are almost always set in suburbia they have a nostalgic feeling, almost as if you remember the scene walking home from school or in a trashy 90s film.  A friend of mine also said that my image reminded her of Google Maps which gives it another creepy sort of voyeuristic element.

Looking back I feel that I could have stage the image a whole lot better. The body was far to close to the car and any yuppy with half a brain can tell that the dry patch of the road reveals where my car was parked moments before. I feel that I could have also enhanced the mood of the piece if I had spent more time adjusting the camera settings.

Thanks Arie for being a great model.

Better late than never. I hope.

When first hearing of our blogging exercise I harboured both dread and excitement. Excitement at being able to produce something tangible and interact but dreading that this product was public and I was going to have to face my own technophobia. Both my excitement and dread were fuelled by Adrian Mile’s piece Blogs in Media education. The piece revelled the full potential of what I could create but also highlight how easy it is for others to view. However what excited me was the notion of blogs being something (ironically) organic that is always growing, changing and dependent upon its interaction with other blogs. The more we share between blogs and other places on the World Wide Web the more our blogs grow. The more we write, the more we find tonal variation as we shift between lengthy and more succinct posts.

As Adrian delved back into the discussion of books having a definite beginning and ending my mind wandered. More specifically it wandered back to the days when I read the dog-eared Doctor Who Make Your Own Adventure Books. Every time I sent K-9 to some morbid robotic demise it was under different circumstances at a different place in the novel. In that sense the book didn’t end where the yellowing pages finished, it could have easily jumped back to section 14. You could bounce between sections, stuck within a cycle of actions that always lead you back to being captured by Daleks. If you were stupid enough to try and escape immediately you would be captured once again. It’s just like when you keep finding yourself back on Slayer’s Wikipedia page due to some convoluted hyperlink trail (A friend told me this happens).
After writing all this I remember that even in this sense the Make Your own Adventure, story itself contains a beginning middle and an end…. the end being your own death.

Yes, I am fully aware that it is week three of the semester and I’m yet to post on my blog….I’m now going to proceed to make pathetic excuses  that attempt to hide my own laziness. By acknowledging this character pitfall, I’m halfway to addressing its detrimental effect on my life, right?

My technophobia and inability to control a computer has played somewhat of a role in my online inactivity, this is not really an excuse though seeing as though I could spend a mere few hours fiddling and I would be an expert at this stuff. On the other hand I have also had to come to terms with the fact that this is public which feeds my fear of failure. Once overcoming this fear, I will be resound to the fact there probably won’t be a grammar Nazi keen to destroy my happiness by critiquing a poorly structure sentence (similar to this one).
I hope that by posting this I may overcome my fear and that I might feel inclined to change my habits towards technology and so with that I shall start my binge blogging.