In Week 5, when Hannah was out, we not only ran through and reflected on each group’s assignment 2 (beneficial in guiding us beyond), we watched excerpts from Chris Marker’s 1983 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless), which helped inform us of the types of fragmentary projects that we’d be setting up for in our third assignment. Ideas around the ‘essay film’ and the ‘diary film’ gave rise to the possibility of creating something more abstract with a collection of images – of things, places, people. We got sorted in groups based on our compatibility with others in the class, based on our confidence about certain parts of the assignment process.

Marker’s mode of filmmaking is particularly interesting (I’ve currently rented a copy — disappointingly not the Criterion — of Sans Soleil from the library to finally push myself to seeing it) and his fascination with the image is really kinda inspiring. One wishes that the price/procedure of using actual film wasn’t so off-putting/expensive/intensive — that texture is to die for. Alas, the digital age is upon us, and none of the stuff that we’re doing now would even be possible if film stock was still the dominant form. We know how it is.

Korsakow got introduced — the software that we’ll be using the bring a digital life to these fragmented projects. From its homepage, it’s hard to gauge what the hell the software even is. “THE FUTURE OF STORY TELLING. You are here, because you have heared of Korsakow, a software to create interactive films for the web. But Korsakow is much more than that. Of korsakow!” It’s definitely very Russian. What it can actually do hasn’t yet been revealed, and a lot of our thinking has been based on ‘what ifs’ — what can this software actually do? How can we use it to do…. things? I have an image in my head of how it works, and how I’d like it to work, but whether or not this’ll actually be right is still TBD.

We knew at this point that we wanted to involve music somehow, and this is where we began. Constraints, ideas. “we’re going to collect video fragments in response to the question, or idea of….”; “these fragments will be made within these constraints….”