Author Archives: simonelau

Found Scene Analysis – Django Unchained (2012)

Django Unchained (2012)  – The Reunion of Django and Broomhilda

The use of doors in this scene plays a significant role in symbolising freedom and establishing hidden qualities of the narrative. The first shot, where Lara leading Broomhilda across the house, ends with a shift of focus through the front door and into the external fields. The end of this panning shot highlights Django and King’s plans to help Broomhilda escape to freedom whilst also juxtaposing the framed view of freedom from within the imprisonment of the house. The message of freedom is further embedded, at the end of the scene, by the glorifying shot of Django (the hero) revealing himself to Broomhilda as the door between them swings open.

Whilst being used to reveal the hero, the filmmaker also used the door as a hiding mechanism. As King opens the door to greet Lara and Broomhilda, we first see Lara behind a narrow opening of the door, surrounded by the darkened interior of King’s room. It later on opens up to reveal Broomhilda. This perspective portrays a sense of secrecy that Lara is unaware of. It also seems to be peeking through from behind King, perhaps implying there is another presence in the room.

The coverage of the interior space of King’s room also help establishing Django’s hidden presence. The camera is initially set up in front of the hiding character, panning back and forth between Broomhilda and King before finally centering the two participating characters. At this point, Broomhilda moves from standing side on to facing away from the camera, indicating her lack of attention of what is behind her. This is followed by a wide shot of Broomhilda in the corner of the room from where King is standing. This shot reveals the door behind Broomhilda and is followed by a close up of Django waiting behind the door.

I know its late…

late because this blog is no longer being assessed and nobody will be reading this anymore…and late in the sense that it’s two forty five a.m.
but i felt like i got something to share so, here it is:

whilst conversing with my peer, production and media essay partner, Linda SHI about our media essay, I had an epiphany – one that should have seemed obvious from the start – about the nature of hyper-narrative/collage (and our networked essay, to which it lends it’s form):

Linda: ‘…the whole original idea was so that all our posts are linked and we’re responding to each other ( but we don’t necessarily have to say: responding to blah blah blah) like our posts are in a way the result of another post but they can be singular arguments and we can link within the posts’
Me: ‘yeh that is very well put!! xD sorry i kinda got confused and lost track of our concept. thanks! And that way they are both responses of each other depending on which one the reader lands on first…so the whole nature of the media essay or hypertext at least is temporally paradoxical’

Although linear when viewed by a reader who chooses their own path through the collage, as a database, all the individual parts paradoxically and simultaneously all exist before each other.

Me: ‘WOW……sooo deeep!!! i need a joint now’

Dogs’ Philosophical Lens

Despite the awfulness of Hay-fever: all the physical symptoms that wakes me up at 7am every morning but glues me to the tissue box and bed til noon, clumsiness that had me spraining my ankle and almost falling on my dog’s…(well), fogginess in my thoughts when I’m trying to plan my assignments and general unproductiveness…It was quite an enjoyable week.

I managed to find the time to:

Play and spend time with my dogs
Delve into nerdy philosophical topics that fascinated me:

Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock raises questions about materialism, fundamentalism, ideological structures in scientific reductionist viewpoint vs. science as a mode of inquiry, the existence of consciousness…

(Warning: the first 2 are quite long ones for those not familiar with JRE)

Joe Rogan Experience #550 Rupert Sheldrake
Joe Rogan Experience #551 Graham Hancock
Rupert Sheldrake’s Banned TED Talk
Graham Hancock’s Banned TED Talk
Geek out on camera lenses and realising it actually doesn’t cost that much to get a good pair lens for video!
5 best lenses for video on DSLR
Video Lenses
Best lenses for Canon 6D
and remained calm and peaceful minded constantly.

Progress

This week in the first half of the symposium, Adrian went through tips on how to write a critical media essay and how to inventively integrate footnotes as links and so on…

Then the entire second half (perhaps longer than that) was dedicated to one question that was posed from the class: How does The Long Tail affect the music industry.

Despite the symposiums usually being rather one sided or leading to a semantics debate, the discussion responding to this question actually didn’t go off-track. And there were some very relevant ideas to think about.

Media industries on the internet> a scale-free network> this model disrupts physical retail model> The hit market> Big media have to be generalists> Power law> The Long Tail> more sold by the long tail than mass entertainment> Constant change> in a transitional time> Industrial vs. Post-Industrial

 

20% of this post delivers 80% of the information

Notes based on Week 9: Reading and Symposium

Pareto’s Law: The 80/20 Rule

Observation of economic inequalities: In most cases four-fifths of our efforts are largely irrelevant.

  • 80% land owned by 20% of population
  • 80% profit produced by 20% employees
  • 80% crime commited by 20% criminals
  • 80% web links link to 15% webpages
  • 80% citations go to 38% scientists

Bell curves:

  • pattern in most quantities in nature , with a peak distribution and very few on the extremes ends.
  • A signature of random networks.
  • Disorder

Power laws:

  • a continuously decreasing curve, implying many small events coexisting with a few large events.
  • Acknowledgement of hubs.
  • transition from disorder to order

How does order emerge from disorder?

network

Some fascinating visualizations of networks.

‘These

hubs

are the strongest argument

against the Utopian vision

of an egalitarian cyberspace. Yes, we all have the right to put anything we wish on the Web. But

will anybody notice?

If the Web were a random network, we would all have the same chance to be seen and heard. In a collective manner, we somehow create hubs, Websites to which everyone links. They are very easy to find, no matter where you are the Web. Compared to these hubs,

the rest of the web is invisible.’

(p.58.)

Peer Review

In the face of all the uncertainties of large infrastructures such as the Internet and the power grid, Carli wonders just how dependent we are on these networks, and how vulnerable we may be when these now, essential parts of our living suddenly fails. Callista thinks there is a lacking of definitions of the terms (e.g. neutrality) we often debate in symposiums, which lead to massive confusion. And suggests that we need to define our terms before launching into discussions. I totally agree with her on that.

And last but definitely not least, Marcus urges us to think about where we are headed in terms of technology, and how this may affect what kind of future we have. He mentions that all these technologies are in our hands, some use it to bring change into the world, others to “impose peace” on others. However, further on, he takes on a much more technological-deterministic point of view: saying that technology makes our lives easier but also ‘endangering’ us. There are some great questions raised by Marcus, but I think we also ought to review the way we speak about technology, as it very much reflects our state of mind. We sometimes say ‘technology does this’ without even meaning to be tech determinist, but it slips into the way we talk because we are not consciously choosing to not be determined by it. By acknowledging not only the power we have to change this attitude in the future, but also the social factors and our intentions that have influenced history as well as technology has, we will start to speak less of what technology did but rather how has it contributed and affected us in return.

Marcus’ post brings up a really thought provoking question: we can choose to use technology for the better, for peace even. But can we create or invent technology with the same motivation? Most of what is available to us today began as technologies invented and used as national defense, “war prevention”. Maybe its time our major technological advances are created with more peaceful intent – with the greater good in mind or to advance our species civilization or contribute to how we can progress as a species instead of as a country.

sky_rocket_by_spoof_or_not_spoof-d654o8k

Collage on Readings

Here are some ideas from the week 8 readings:week 8 reading collage1

“MY PART IN THIS STORY BEGAN, AS MANY STORIES DO, MORE OR less by accident, in a small town in upstate New York called Ithaca. And a place named after the mythical home of Odysseus is, I suppose, as good a place to begin a story as any. Back then, however, the only Odysseus I knew was a small cricket, who along with his brothers Prometheus and Hercules was part of an experiment I was running as a graduate student at Cornell University with my adviser, Steven Strogatz. Steve is a mathematician, but pretty early on in his career he started to become much more interested in the applications of mathematics to problems in biology, physics, and even sociology than in the math itself.”

In one of his paragraphs, Duncan J Watts demonstrated, with subtlety, an example of social networks. The end of his previous sentences is directly connected to the start of the next, hinting at the six degrees of connection. He also describes his involvement in the story as an ‘accident’. Knowing now that there is no such thing as random network or accidents, Watts choice of words plays cleverly on the very nature of networks.