Sounds that the character might hear.

– government speakers
– cars
– crowds
– whispering
– constructions
– trucks

– water dripping
– wind
– trees moving
– birds
– mud
– train
– cars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvtoyk9DisM

A very abstract short film carrying a sense of fear throughout.
First thing that comes in mind after watching this reminds me of the beginning of the movie “Holy Motors” directed by Leos Carax. I remember the opening scene where the character slowly walks into a theatre with unrelated background sounds. It creates a very strange and mysterious fantasy atmosphere. In this short film Absurda, I was hoping to see the screen to move but it didn’t, I feel uncomfortable because I am so use to videos with moving camera shots. The frame in frame also reinforces the idea that I am an audience. I feel like I am not only watching the theatre space but also the space that is inside the theatre screens. Along with the strange background sounds, the whole scenery created 4 different dimensions at once.

Character development activity:

This character wish to take a gap year to travel in the US  alone. She just graduated her Year 12 and wish to do something adventurous. However her parents disagree this idea as she is wasting time where she can go straight to university and get a degree. They believe that it is too dangerous and wasting money. She really wish to chase her dream although without her parents support.

MEDIA 5 // WEEK 1
FINDING THE EAR

Reflection

A short film by Wes Anderson.
This is the first time that I watched a black and white film by Wes Anderson. Anderson is very well known with his distinctive and colourful set designs in his work. However, throughout this film, I can still identify some unique techniques and characteristics of Anderson.  He often create and allow subjects to activate the small objects in the surroundings. The bold and jump cuts in editing create a very storyboard like is also a highlight of his work. Watching his film is like reading a story book, flipping pages to pages. The sense of humour he uses throughout his film is very subtle. Example can be awkward pauses at the end of conversations or weird stares from strangers.

 

https://youtu.be/-WhKt_CkXD0

A short film by Christopher Nolan.
I actually wasnt sure who this director was until I heard he is the director for Inception. Sci- fic movie wasnt always on my list but yet it is quite similar (sometime) to surreal film. After watching this short film, I am definitely in love with it. It is strangely constructed and has a very surprising ending. I guess this is also a characteristic of Christopher Nolan’s film, it is always working within one world in another world, the multiple dimensions is something that I am fascinated about. Somehow this reminds me of the movie Peeping Tom, the use of “dimensions”, creating multiples layers of world through one visual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWs1SM0xYiI

This short film although is my least favourite comparing to the other two, I still enjoy it with the way its delivering the story to the audience. Just by the beginning, it reminds me of some kind of comedy program. It is often in fast pace, one joke over another joke. The voice over makes makes this film stands out a lot. It uses a personal perspective to tell the story which makes it more interesting, audience are becoming the character as they watch the film. Audience are allowed to put themselves into situations as the voice overs continue, through this, I feel like audience can get more emotional throughout.

Chapter 2. Rabiger, Michael. 2006, ‘You and the creative process’ in Developing story ideas, 2nd ed., Focal Press, Amsterdam, pp. 15-19

After reading this, I do have a more clear idea when developing stories. There is this specific sentence that caught my attention on:
“If you need therapy to survive, it is (and must be) self- directed. Art, however, is other directed, and people make it to grapple with the mysteries of human existence.”
Whether this is referring to films or not, I very agree with it no matter in what kind of circumstances. In terms of creating a story, art is basically creating something out, using our own creativity to imagine and build non- existence situations. To some extend, this is something as a story teller must have, but we must also bare in mind that therapy sort of symbolises the fundamental of story telling. The basic is something we follow but yet it is also something we are able to put twist on.

In this Signal collaborative project, I have taken a role at the PR team. I really enjoy being part of this team and I have gained a lot knowledge working with other students.

My main role in this whole project was quite diverse, I get to touch base on every bits and little which let me experience and learn a lot of new things. My major role was to do anything related to communication design including, designing poster, flyers, logos, banners for social media, booklet and layout of the website. I also taken part in editing biography photos for the website, pretty much branding and shaping a certain theme for the entire Obsession project. I am very happy to be able to utilize my previous experience and studies of graphic design into this project, although it is quite a lot of work, it is something I am passionate about and enjoy doing which makes thing easier.

As I am not a good writer, Elaine took a huge part in writing up short paragraphs and descriptions for the site and social media platforms. While Marissa did a fantastic job with the press kit and release it on time. Also thank you for Gianna for linking all the blogs to the student names on the site, which probably will take me a while to do it. Also Siobhan from the production team was nicely helped me with setting up the biography page as there’s only a few of us that can edit the site and I couldn’t reach to Gianna for a while, Siobhan had gave PR a big hand. I think overall our team have done a great job, we communicate a lot throughout the entire project via Facebook chat. However, it would have been better to have actual meetings, as some members sometimes will miss out conversations easily. Also time management for the booklet was quite last minute work, although Linda have set up a draft booklet, members from other team reckon if the booklet is more uniform with other design will be the best, as it will be more presentable to the public and other students. As I couldn’t make it to the first printing of the booklet, there was a little mistake with the printing and have to reprint the day of the exhibition, luckily the booklets were made before the actual opening. From the poster design, I have also learnt that many things has it’s requirements, such as the guide line for City of Melbourne logos and Signal logos. All these have its standard measurements and placement on any posters. Although it has caused a lot of trouble sending back and forth to Amanda for approval, it is something important I should bear in mind in the future as these are the rules. Also the copyright matter of the signal photo I used in the poster needs a bit of editing as it shows other artist’s work which sits on copyright problem.

I also realized the importance of communicating with members from other team. Such as on going communication with the entire class, when it comes to submitting work like thumbnails and blurb, not everyone did what they were suppose to do resulting in a lot of missing things and delays with the booklet and website. At the end, the whole PR and production needs to directly message to people who haven’t done it and chase them down. Unfortunately, there were still last submissions which made the booklet and website look “unfinished”. I think in order to fix this “delay” problem, we should plan the due date a bit earlier and also chase people down a week before so we will have enough time for the late submissions. Apart from communicating with the class, communicating with other teams is also quite important. I have on going conversations with the production team updating where we are heading to, while Marissa keep track with the documentation team as they are the team who provide us material for the website- the biography photos. I am glad that we have communicated with other team because there were moments where our team has work overload, we were glad that Nicolette and Claudia were offering helps as well as calling others to help especially for printing and organizing posters.

As for the RMIT exhibition, I didn’t really take a part of it as Installation team was mainly in charge with it, all I did was to send over the poster design which Robbie helped with re0formatting as I was having too much assignments and doctor appointments going on during that week. I am grateful to see the whole class was so considerate and even Robbie was putting a lot of effort in communicating and following up thing with us.

Reflecting of this semester, it has been a great half year, considering this six months is my year 2, I am very happy that I have taken Specific to Site, not only the course suited me so well, Robbie and the classmates were a wonderful team. I love working with all these people and it have been a great and successful exhibition at the end.

Female realities: Beauty has been concealed.

For this final project, I’ve decided to approach Obsession in a way to celebrate the beauty of female body. “Concealer” is a piece that redefines the form and freedom of a female body in relation to the public, as well as to empower the voice of female in the 21^st century.

Gender has always been a topic where I am very interested in, growing up in a conservative city Hong Kong have shaped me to be a more expressive person, seeing people being close minded have motivated me to be more open up especially with human forms. My approach of this project is very simple, it is simply four shots of a female being topless, I want audience to enjoy and focus on the beauty rather than having too many actions inside the frame. I am a very sensitive person when it comes to body parts, our body is a work of art, every single person are born to be unique but yet we carry similar body features. However, in today’s society, we are still intolerant the fact of having female body parts being shown in public. Knowing that Signal is a projection project in a public space, I am extremely excited to challenge this idea with the public world. Unfortunately, my work needs to be removed due to nudity at the last minute.

The fact that nudity is still unacceptable in public is because the culture and social beliefs have been built there throughout the decades. As Lynda (1990) had said, “to suggest that pornography needs to be examined in relation to other forms of cultural production”. Cultural is something that can never get away with, no matter where you are; it is something that is heavily linked throughout the whole world. In terms of displaying a topless female body in public space, “any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize vulnerable points…The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins. There is no reason to assume any primacy for the individual’s attitude to his own bodily and emotional experience, any more than for his cultural and social experience.” (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1966) (Nead, 2002) I do think the line of the boundary of what is acceptable and what not is determined by who we are and what we want to believe. My intention of this piece is not to draw discomfort, but to let audience to draw curiosity and be imaginative. One major founding from this project is that the “notion of unified form is integrally bound up with the perception of self, and the construction of individual identity”. (Nead, 2002) Our interpretation is often what forms the results.

“Art is imaginative, porn is pure fantasy” (Levinson, 2012)

The process of this project also takes a huge part of the message I am trying to deliver. During the production of this project, we caught a lot of attention from the public’s eyes. Although there weren’t a lot of people around during the shoot, it draws a lot of attention because there is a female being topless in a public space. The “transformation of the female body into the female nude is thus an act of regulation: of the female body and of the potentially wayward viewer whose wandering eye is disciplined by the conventions and protocols of art” (Nead, 2002) Once again, the attentions we get reinforces the idea of interpretation, because a lot of us socially believe that it is “wrong” to have a female topless in public, people cant get away with this erotic idea in their mind. The moment when I know my work cannot be projected, the first thing come to mind is that what was the clarification of what not to acceptable and what is, the fact that some of the shot didn’t even show any “private” parts needs to be taken down as well triggers my mind a bit. This moral concerns from the decision arise in this context of art, the blur line of this piece is unpredictable, and by the end, if this work is really shown to the public, what effect will it really bring to the society?

As for my audio of this piece, it focuses on human breathing sound; I looped the entire sound repeatedly to bring audience’s attention closer in knowing and understanding our body forms. Other than the appearance and aesthetic, the sounds that our body makes is something that we don’t always pay much attention to. The delivering of breathing sound let audiences to create and building up imaginations, their interpretation can sit between relaxations or the idea of sexually stimulating. It is a confusion mix of responses depending on what the viewer’s think it is.

The main aim of this project is to celebrate of being female in the 21^st century, however it is sadly not expressed in the way it was intended to be. Our body in today’s world is detrimental to our society with pornography; it is something we cant get away with it due to social norms and cultural beliefs. The message that I am trying to deliver is not that fact that we don’t accept our body features, but it is the fact how we should view them in our own way.

 

References
Lynda, N. 1990 “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society” Vol.15 (2), pp.323-335, viewed 20 October 2015

Eaton, A. W. 2012 “What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?: A Feminist Perspective on Art and Pornography” Vol. 1 Chapter 14, viewed 28 October 2015

Nead, L. 2002 “The female nude: Art, obscenity and sexuality”, Routledge, viewed 30 October 2015

Levinson, Jerrold, Maes, Hans, 2012 “Art and Pornography : Philosophical Essays” Corby : OUP Oxford, viewed 20 October 2015

Happy birthday to Robbie.
My last class for Year 2.

I also refine a few things, logos, poster, flyers and letter head for the press kit release which need to send off on Tuesday. Also need to get everything ready for Claudia so she can give us a shout out at the radio.

 

Thankfully Mariassa stayed behind for the PR team for the posters printing.
The posters will go up around uni later in the week.

Missed half of the class on Wed. We did screening on each of our final drafts. Some feedback I receive is that I can push a bit more with the sound, however I guess I will leave my sound on loop as I prefer the sound to be as minimal as possible to match my visuals.

Its great to see other student’s approaches. They are all fresh and new to me, I’m fascinated by each of our interpretation to this topic Obsession.

Other than our individual project, we also have to be responsible with a role, that will be the PR bit for me. Our press kit must be done by the weekend and send them out by next week as it might take some time to process. The poster and flyers are pretty much done, just need to refine the logos according to the guide from City of Melbourne. Other than that we also need to sort out the website and the booklet. Hopefully these can be done before next week.

There were more guidelines than I expected, other than measurements, the position of other logos needs to be on the left side of the City of Melbourne logo or else the poster will not be valid. There are other element that needs to be consider such as the use of colour, if the poster sits at a certain group of colours, the City of Melbourne logo needs to be different too.

Below are the media invites and poster.

https://www.nowness.com/story/virgo-lena-c-emery-michiru-shin

“I wanted viewers to create their own symbolic ties between the poem and the imagery”- Lena C. Emery

 

Her concept is quite similar to mine (refering to the project “Concealer”), but instead of using a poem, I want to focus on the details of our body, how it can associates to the public space.

audio : breathing