Monthly Archives: April 2016

Exercise: Narrative Structure in PB3

 

  • What is the controlling idea: How to deal depression in a creative sense.
  1. How is your portrait film structured?
    It’s a discussion of an event using voiceover. I don’t want to have sound of my own voice, I want it to sound as if it were unprompted. Just a story, or a personal journey. If I were to talk, I want it to break the 4th wall of interviewing. That the prompt itself needs to be heard to understand the response or even elicit one.

3. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee?
I’ve chosen this person because they’re an eccentric. It’s a hard hitting topic, of being idle and falling into depression, however I think through my interviewee’s quirkiness and passion for invention I can show a light hearted, even humourous side to this person.

  1. How is your portrait being narrated?
    I am going to use voiceover in conjunction with correlating footage I will shoot and also find. I want to start with introducing the interviewee, focus on their property, the environment, then question why they are living in this place, the reasons that led them there, and overcoming the conflict of depression.
  1. What role will found footage play in your portrait?
    I will really need to utilise found footage for pickups, as I only have one day to film with my subject. It will be in an enforcement style. I think it’s really easy to use retro style footage to contrast with modern footage.I am considering juxtaposing “normal” family footage with the footage showing the isolation of my character.
  1. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point?
    I think the portrait will begin with nearly undermining my subjects eccentric habits. It will be comedic at first, and nearly pitiful, but after we hear the reasoning behind why he does what he does, we will find an understanding of his behaviour and come to see this character as quite strong.
  1. When does this turning point occur and why?
    I am planning for it to occur halfway through. I want it to be an equally comedic portrait as it is meaningful. I think that shows depth for this person, having two sides, being multifaceted.
  1. How does it gain and gather momentum?
    I think I will begin by hooking the audience in with the characters eccentricism. The interesting inventions, lifestyle and quips. Hopefully the audience will want to understand my interviewee more and I will abstain from asking hard hitting questions for a while, and when I do I intend for the audience to want to know more about the man behind the machines.
  1. Where will your dramatic tension come from?
    A gradual exposition of the overall conflict prompted by questions. I think I will shy away from using footage here and show directly the interviewee answering questions so there is an undivided attention brought to the subject’s emotions.
  1. Does the portrait have a climax or resolution?
    I think the film will climax when the subject is discussing his depression. This will be resolved when we can see that the behaviours that were shown as laughable and “quirky” are actually coping mechanisms exhibited in a creative way. This will convey the character’s strength and ability to turn something unfortunate into something productive.

 

The Slap: story arc

We are discussing empathy in class today and I think a real standout example of a fluid and demeaning story arc is in Christos Tsiolkas’ novel and tv adaptation of The Slap. The blurb for the novel states:

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.
This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the slap.

The novel is told through each character’s perspective, as 8 key characters are given a chapter to further the narrative. Not to give spoilers, but the story begins in a suburban barbecue in Northcote, where we can already see the party of adults pushing social strains, with polite arguments between strangers and pressures on the friend group. As the night continues the tension in the party grows, and so does the attitude of the children attending. After a game of backyard cricket goes wrong, a member of the party slaps a disobedient child. The child was not his own.

From this we see a total division between the families involved, those on the side of the slapper, and those defending the child. However the more we see from each character’s perspective, the less we can empathise with anyone involved. The man who committed the act is found out to be a domestic abuser with a history of violence. The mother of the child, who subsequently sues the man, is portrayed as a manipulative attention seeker. However none ever asks the child if he is okay, or if he wants retribution.

This is a great example of a shifting protagonist, a varied story arc. It’s a story that makes you question your own morals, and by the end, the people you originally persecuted are the ones you are rooting for.

The Slap can be watched on Stan or ABC iView.

im so angry about everyhitng all the time

Last Monday I watched Germaine Greer on Q&A and I cracked it. Mentally and physically. As in I was sweating.
I was ghost-tweeting for my housemate who is a Journalism student and I had to stop and notice that I’ve never been so engaged with TV in my life. It was only driven by the chance one of *my* tweets would come up on the screen however it was also something else. There’s this kind of anger that I have inside that is only stirred by arguing against about misogyny/homophobia/transphobia/racism ETC aka social injustice.

I managed to find 50 ways to call-out Greer as a transphobic out-of-touch bigot, without undermining her gender ( so that I was the bigger person). Yet still, after 5 retweets of a tweet not even published by me, I wasn’t satisfied.
I knew this woman wouldn’t see reason and it cut me so deep that she has a platform. I get this feeling when I read newspaper article comments, or see people using the word “SJW”. Maybe it’s because in my generation, EVERYONE has access to platforms to express their opinion (even me).

So it was just something I noticed about myself. As a generally placid person, I can’t fathom this rage I have in me? It’s really bizarre when I think about it.

 

 

 

MQFF: a volunteering experience :^)

This is a little post about my experiences volunteering at a film festival for the first time. It’s not heaps related to the course but it was a great experience to see the nitty gritty of the event management in the film industry.

I was given a chance to counter at Melbourne Queer Film Festival, which is like 4 of my interests in a sentence. I was rostered to work at ACMI this week, performing tasks such as handing out flyers, directing customers to screenings and most importantly; recommending films. I was given a few free sessions and I got to go see Girls Lost, a Finnish film about a group of teenage girls who brew a tea from a magical plant that has the ability to turn them into boys for a night. They get to experience adolescence, school and peer groups as boys, showing the social inequalities between genders. The film also tackles transgender dysphoria, which is rare to see in films about teenagers.

I was able to see many more short films, and feature lengths, but this is the one that stuck with me the most. Hopefully in story writing, screenwriting or some sort of class like this, I would be able to produce a film that dealt with this matter. I don’t believe I have a trained eye in cinematography, but I do believe I can write a narrative.

The cinematography was stunning, and so was the soundtrack. Lots of Fever Ray. Here’s the trailer, so everyone please buy a ticket and support a Melbourne festival.

MQFF: Tickets Available at: http://tix.mqff.com.au/browse15.asp

Girls Lost Trailer: 

Me Being a nerd:

Our awesome volunteers with their induction packs. Thanks guys, we couldn’t do it without you! ???

A photo posted by Melbourne Queer Film Festival (@melbqueerfilmfest) on

 

 

 

Camera Exercise

In this weeks Tutorial, we began a short exercise that was aimed to give us some experience working with the cameras. I was paired with Immie and Sylvia and while I checked out the equipment, the girls wrote a quick script addressing the brief; how to survive your first 6 weeks of uni.

The audio quality of the attached mic was pretty terrible, and I remember in a class I took at La Trobe they really hounded us to not use the attached camera mic. However this is just a short exercise and carrying around a boom or even setting up radio mics would be a waste of time.

I edited on Premiere Pro in my hour lunch break between classes, knowing I wouldn’t have much time this week for the video. I would have liked to use some sound effects but I struggled to find royalty free SFX that were any good. Next time, or maybe soon I will re-upload it with some better audio.

Anyway, here’s the video, complete with an establishing shot, interview reactions, action shot of interviewees and pickups.

Class Exercise: How To Survive Week 6 of Uni from rosie pavlovic on Vimeo.

 

 

Lecture Week 5: Textual analysis in practice.

The subject material of Textual Analysis mirror a subject I did in first year uni which was an intro to Design Advertising. The subject pulled apart an analysed the formal elements of the advertising’s composition, along with the connotative and immediate readings of the image, video or sound.

This process of gathering empirical evidence for analysis was split into a four part structure. It began with the Denotative perspective of the image which asked; what is the literal reading of the image? For the lecture this week it was a photo advertisement from GQ magazine promoting cotton shirts, displaying a man throwing a child into a pool.

A connotative reading may suggest that the man was the father of the boy being thrown into the water in a playful matter. The beach resort they stand in is deserted, yet suggests that they may have exclusivity to the area. The font on the brand suggests that the product is a fine, affluent and high class brand, and the image of the man throwing his child, wearing the expensive shirt, into a chlorinated pool  shows that he has disposable income, as the shirt may get ruined. Recklessness with expensive items is a freedom only the rich can buy.

The audience for this image is readers of GQ, a magazine aimed at metrosexual 30+ men, and advertising of luxury items suggests the readers have a high socio-economic status. The targeting of this audience pushes the ideals that these shirts are for the men who do not have a financial pressures. That luxury items are casual and even disposable. The image suggests buying these shirts provides a carefree lifestyle.

The final aspect would be to analyse the composition and aesthetic of the image but I’m not sure if this is needed in a media reading of an image

 

Reading Week 1

I’m finding it really hard to read a text and not be biased or passionate when analysing it, but I know I have the capability to. This was a big part of the curriculum in year 12 and those months of text analysis practice do come back to me.

The part that stood out to me the most from Alan McKee’s “A beginner’s guide to textual analysis” was the comparative analogy where he contrasted a western viewers interpretation of an image to an Indigenous Australian’s interpretation/ This gave me an understanding of how an audience or producer’s reality can exist in different planes, and how there is no inaccuracy, because the experiences of a collective audience is so vast that any piece of media is sure to resonate with someone.

It really does come down to context as the way we can understand and interpret. The contexts are the items that we can critique, not the content.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯