Video essays: probably in my top 10 all-time favourite things to watch. I’m probably in agreement with the majority of what was said in today’s lectorial (week #10, for future reference) about the ‘new essay’ age. These wonders provide a much richer experience than the traditional essay, a given considering all its visual and aural material, but a well needed richness that demands the viewer’s precise attention (There is something so satisfying in the act of viewing something where someone has taken to the time to delve into the rabbit hole of cinema and pick out even a few little bits and pieces, rearrange them, and then put them back together).

The academic pushes towards this medium are deserved, and the creativity that such a platform opens up is both inspiring, given a newfound creative freedom, and terrifying; sometimes limits aren’t always detrimental. Making a good video essay as opposed to a good traditional essay is indeed a difficult task. It requires greater patience (a ginormous amount of extra time), an compositional adequacy both with the essay’s visual and narrative elements, and demands greater confidence in its presentation. But in turn comes a much more rewarding experience–if everything works out in the end, you have in your hands the sweetest result of a century+ of video evolution: insight.

Some YouTubers in the area I’m keeping (relatively) up to date with:

Sony Walkman advert from 1979. 

At once one of the most insanely fascinating and traumatically uncomfortable images I’ve ever seen. A simpler time, for rollerskaters and on-the-fly music lovers alike. And this isn’t even the most enthralling part: enter, the Walkman effect. This refers to “the way music listened to via headphones allows the user to gain more control over their environment“, something we’ve all experienced at least once in our iDriven lives.

Initial models that featured two headphone jacks even included something called a “hotline” switch which, when pressed, activated a microphone which lowered the volume in order to allow those listening to have a conversation without removing their headphones. How’s that for innovation?

Of course, criticisms regarding the potential isolating factors involved in the worldly detachment achieved through plugging and playing cropped up, but how can one even consider the potential for narcissism when they’re tied ear-to-ear, arm-in-arm with their best friend in the whole wide world? and they can chat on the way? Unreal.

edit

verb

• to choose material for and arrange it to form a coherent whole
• to expunge; eliminate
• to prepare by deleting, arranging, and splicing, by synchronizing the sound record with the film, etc.

Editing is one of the most underrated techniques in the world. While watching a film most people fail to properly acknowledge the beauty of the edit. If you walked out of the theatre and quizzed your friends on their favourite aspect of the film, how many do you think would pick editing as a highlight? Much of this arises from the fact that the majority films these days are generally edited coherently, ensuring basic temporal and spatial continuity–and it figures, editing is so frequent and camouflaged that it becomes hard to notice it, let alone grade it. Some will say that good editing is editing you don’t notice at all, and other citations range from “Movies become art after editing“, and “The film is made in the editing room“. So in order to fully appreciate the edit it’s necessary to take it back a step (or in this instance step all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum) and look at bad editing: the infamous basketball scene from Catwoman (2004).

It doesn’t help that the scene is deeply cringeworthy at a base level (how you gonna do that in front of those kids, Catwoman?); the sporadic and haphazard editing only makes the scene incomprehensible and, in many ways, unwatchable. What could have been achieved in less than 20 cuts is done in ~130 of the most purposeless and ugly shots of the 21st century. The cuts hold no weight and bear no tension, lifelessin comparison to the masterworks of a Leone or Kurosawa. Catwoman itself was a disaster, so its incoherence can’t be entirely blamed on the editors (Halle Berry later blamed Warner Brothers: “Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, god-awful movie… It was just what my career needed.“), but when the job is put in the right hands, the results can be electrifying.

As touched on by Jeremy Bowtell in the week #2 lecture, editing is as much about the ‘spaces between‘ as it is about juxtaposition and the combining of parts to create new meaning. Film editor Walter Murch (2005) [whose credits include Apocalypse Now, The Godfather: Part III and Jarhead] argues not only that ‘the cut [should] reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling‘ at a certain moment, but should ‘advance the story‘ and ‘occur at a moment that is rhythmically interesting‘. So when these suggestions are applied to a film like Catwoman, where does it rank? If random and volatile zooms and cuts are your thing, then obviously you’re in heaven, but to the average person the frequency and meaninglessness of the editing is jarring. Sometimes it’s beneficial to keep things simple.

A film like La Jetée (1962) relies heavily on editing; its existence is central to its use of, and with these restrictions Marker succeeds in creating something wholly unique and wonderfully spellbinding. An album of b&w photographs, a few simple cuts and a little help from an insightful narrator is all it takes to build a world from the ground up. A scene doesn’t have to be a violent flurry of transitions, like in Catwoman, but more a methodical and structured arrangement of shots, like in the scene below: Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966).

Morricone’s scoring here also plays an enormous part in the creation of tension between the three central characters (a touch easier on the ears than Mis-Teeq’s Scandalous) but at its simplest it remains one of the most sweaty-hand producing scenes ever put to screen, achieved in half the amount of shots in Catwoman‘s basketball scene and with a 100% higher success rate. A true emotional high.

Here, less is more, but excess isn’t always detrimental. Take the stairway shootout from Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) as the perfect example:

Utterly absurd but undeniably engaging; a true nail-biter. De Palma’s trademark slo-mo (and intimate focus on set pieces) elevates a basic gunfight into a gritty, edge-of-your-seat extravaganza complete with high-stakes pram down the stairs action (coincidentally also scored by Morricone). All in all, there is no one perfect way to edit. Much of the style depends on context, genre and overall meaning, the emotions attempting to be conveyed or the tension attempting to be exuded. The beauty of the edit is something to be appreciated, no matter how many times it involves Halle Berry groping a man on the court.

A short walk from campus led the group and I to Melbourne Central; both the shopping centre and train station possessed an abundance of media, a hub for all things advertisement, which in turn presented itself as an easy target for our task. Media is everywhere, especially at the one place where advertisement rules all: a shopping centre. One thing caught my attention, as much as something of the like can in a society where the commercialisation of historic landmarks is nothing far from the norm:

“Shot Tower Museum
Entry via R.M. Williams”

Of course, I have no idea how long this has been here, whether there are other entries, whether it is on task or even counts as ‘media’, or if it is just an overtly paranoid observation taken during a task where the aim seemed to be to critically survey the idea of advertisement media: but I viewed this flag as another example of the new integration between our regular, everyday lives and the idea of media as an ecology. An inescapable unification, one that doesn’t necessarily need to be escaped from, but is spreading in an all-encompassing manner which molds the way in which we exist as human beings in today’s day, and is expanding in a rapid and camouflaged motion.

Other things we noticed included:

UP HIGH

• Digital billboard advertising everything from Usain Bolt (he sprinted down a running track and smashed through 3D text so my guess is he’s doing something for shoes) to the latest Samsung Galaxy Gear
• A long, draping Myer flag (if I remember correctly it featured a model??? someone confirm)

MID-GROUND

• Storefront advertisements in nearly every shop
  • The Nike store sported a looping video of a new pair of shoes (pictured)
  • An exuberance of sale posters
• Many on-ground billboards featured an element of interactivity: from Fanta bubbling popping games to QR codes plastered on the frames

BACKGROUND

• Depending on the product they were selling, or the mood they were creating many stores intensified their attention to lighting (pictured)
  • Bright white/blue LEDs for electronics stores such as Samsung and Telstra, as opposed to:
  • Warm reds for HOYTS Cinema, and:
  • Easy-to-digest, welcoming lights exhibited in most retail stores

In searching for “ALL types of mediated communication including how many times you interact with your smartphone”, I also found that I slipped my beloved phone a whopping TWO times to interact with it in ways other than to snap a quick pic (both times conscious of the fact that I was committing treason against myself and my investigation). Funny pictures of dogs were observed on both accounts.

At this point I still can’t answer the question as to what media actually is, but I’m almost certain in the fact that it is everywhere.