My research proposal
Objective:
In my research I will be exploring the role of the camera and the implications of the act of filming.
Producing our own scene last week have set my investigation on an early start. I realized in the filming process, or during the process of ‘decoupage’, that I started to develop my own set of film ‘rules’ that are based on how I interpret my experience of reality. In this scene, the camera is used as a representation of the act of observation – playing my consciousness or awareness of my sense of self within the scene, as well as the absence of it when I am doing the observing upon others. Having established this representation, I then applied them to the different events or shots in the narrative depending on their nature. Whether it was a personal observation of another individual or just consciously observing my own self, a simple task quickly became an exploration of ontology and a question of the nature or act of observing anything.
Noticing the way I think about and respond to films, I find that I am generally trying to make sense of or rationalise the existence of a camera:
- Camera as perspective
- Camera as movement?
- Camera as a participant/performance
- Camera as an omniscience/omnipresence
- Whether it is depicted as a physical object recording or baring photographic witness to the events in front of it or an invisible window through which the viewer is looking.
This led to an epiphany of how I can explore my research through methodological experiments.
Schedule:
The language I develop over the next weeks will reveal how I seek to interpret the world as I create them.
- I will first develop a series of filming exercises.
- Through observation and reflection on the exercises, I will set up a list of my own devices that expresses and represents implications about the characters’ or my own experience of reality.
- This list will be applied to the events or acts in the final scene according to express what they indicate.
So far, what the exercises will be is undetermined. But I have come up with a few possible directions that can further explore method (or the filmmaking process itself) as an act of creating meaning or documenting the experience of reality:
- Covering an unscripted scene that is dictated by the firsthand experience of a place or event
- Composing a narrative dictated by any kind of sensual data of a piece of non-lyrical music or the space in a building etc.
- Writing down an action or event that occurred each hour/day/week etc. to form a story that is condensed and flows continuously in time.
- I am also open to work off found scripts or something anyone else has written.
Outcome
This list of ‘codes’ is not a canon to how to use or communicate with film language, and it may not be an absolute treatment of reality and neither are the more institutional and traditional ways of filmmaking. It is merely a personalized and individualized artistic expression that may potentially be a way of consistently expressing my own experience of reality.
Last week all focus was on our proposal presentation. It was interesting to have teachers and mentors from other different courses to sit in on our project proposals since everyone is interested in conducting research in different areas. It was very helpful to get feedback from a diverse panel.
Some of the things that were mentioned in my feedback:
- Dziga Vertov’s writings
- documentary or drama
- heightened reality or fiction
The next step from this point is to set up some exercises. I also plan to participate/assist in other’s exercises in order to observe and compare our different approaches to methodology. As my own research is mainly to do with reflecting after filming a scene, I have no need to form a story or construct an actual scene myself at this point anyway. Also, working with others keep my non structural investigation grounded as it may easily become too conceptual and irrelevant to methodology in the end.