Beginning the new class of Film & TV 1 this week below are a few questions I have answered which look into what I have taken from the first week and also what I eventually hope to take away from the course.
Q1: In 200 words or less please outline your goals, desires – what you want to get out of this semester. You will review this later in the course. Many will rethink this dramatically – this is a good thing.
A1: This semester my main goal is to produce something that exceeds my expectation of what I currently think I am capable of. I hope to do this through learning about and practicing all of the aspects and roles that go into producing a film. There are several things that I wish to get out of the semester and these include trying roles that I am not comfortable with, learning to work in the most effective way as a team, building good working relationships with my classmates/group members and finally, I hope that I am able to have fun throughout this course!
Q2: Consider Jasmine’s lecture on Screenwriting and briefly describe one point that you have taken from it. A point that excites you, something that was completely new to you, perplexes you or even one you take issue with.
A2: A point that particularly stood out to me this week in Jasmine’s lecture on screenwriting was her information on character and creating characters. Although not all of the information that she gave about character was new to me, she did introduce the concept of creating the protagonist for your story before actually determining what the story is itself. Throughout high school when story writing I had never taken this approach, but now thinking about this method and also trialing it in tutorials this week I learnt that it was a very effective way of coming up with story ideas (especially if you are given no particular topic to write inside).
Q3: Select from one of the readings from week 1 or 2 and briefly describe two points that you have taken from that reading. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you
A3: From the week 1 reading, “Narratives” (Branston, G. and Stafford, R.), one point that particularly interested me was when it was identified that many ads effectively make use of short little narratives. This made me think about certain ads that I had seen on TV recently and I immediately noticed that the advertisements that came to mind were the ones that used narrative form successfully for example the AMMI ads featuring Katut and Rhonda. Another point taken from this reading that I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about was the idea that there are different ways to portray narrative across different mediums. This meaning that how you depict something through a medium such as film could actually vary vastly using something such as radio or photography. How you might need to change the way in which narrative is told is also relevant across different cultures.
Today after months of speculation it was finally announced that amongst many other serious consequences, the Essendon Football Club would be forced to give up their place in this year’s AFL finals series as a result of their so-called “drug scandal”. It is clear that this whole saga has been an incredibly touchy topic and through its course it has tarnished the reputations of many significant figures, not to mention that of the game of AFL football itself. With today marking a somewhat conclusion to what has been a painful issue, I feel it is important that attention is turned not only towards the Bombers, but towards the issue of drugs in sport in general.
As a child I viewed sport as something fun to take part in and as something exciting to watch. I loved being active and I aspired towards being like the professional athletes I saw in the media. I feel, as I have gotten older however, that the sporting spirit that I fell in love with has been replaced with a fiery competition based more around money than performance. Today athletes aren’t just competing for a title; they are competing for a living, for sponsorships, for their club’s futures. With so much more consciously at stake and with technology every day providing new ways to gain a slight edge, in any form, the issue of doping becomes especially relevant.
Doping in sport is by no means a new issue, but it is evident that in the past few years alone we have seen so many of our heroes destroyed as a result. In the midst of the Essendon drama and in the lead up to the IAAF world athletics championships we saw several of the world’s fastest men found guilty drug use, and it was not so long ago that we saw Lance Armstrong torn apart. It is becoming an all to similar story, and the picture being painted as a result is that of the path of success being concurrent with the use of illegal performance enhancing methods. No athlete can be trusted, and successful athletes are now permanently targeted with speculation over whether they are legitimate.
With each new encounter, like that of the Essendon Football Club, the face of sport continues to change, this change not being for the best. The wrong example is being set and above all the health of athletes everywhere is being tampered with. Ultimately, instead of the key to a level playing field being a doping free environment the opposite is becoming true and it is scary to think what this might mean for the darkening future of sport.
Yesterday the Girls School that I coach hurdles at had their major competition for the year. All of the girls performed exceptionally and after several months of hard work received a deserving 2nd place overall out of 24 schools! Extensive preparation from students, staff and coaches had well and truly paid off and the school had achieved their best performance in the history of the meet.
Below is a picture I thought I’d share of one of my athletes leading through the early stages of her 90m hurdles race.
As I discovered after the tutorial this week, there were in fact several Youtube clips for us to watch in place of not having the unlecture. The particular video shown above shows a TED talk by Ken Robinson about creativity in children and what schools are potentially doing to this. I found it very interesting how he spoke about how original ideas are formed on the basis of being wrong and making mistakes, and when looking at past experiences that I myself have had I found this to be 100% true. With this in mind he then made it clear to see how there is a new notion in schools where children are punished or discourage for being wrong and it became obvious how this could lead to lack in creativity, something he describes as “just as important as literacy”. I won’t say much more he is such an engaging and interesting speaker that a recommend that it is well worth a watch!
In light of the upcoming 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech I have thrown together an image which poses the question of whether Luther King’s dream has been fulfilled. In the 50 years since the speech equality in America has come a long way, especially in the likes of Obama serving his second term as President, but what do you think?
This week there was no unlecture due to classes being stopped due to strike action, but I did however in the optional reading provided, The Age of the Essay, come across some interesting thoughts. I found it fascinating how the author completely shut down the way in which the majority of us were taught to write in school. This being the structured essays, usually about a text, that are so methodical and dry that we end up not enjoying both writing itself, as well as the particular text we are attempting to write about. I feel this to be
very true as I am aware that I was personally turned off writing to an extent when I was told so strictly exactly what I should write, how I should write it and what it should be about. I like how the writer suggests through this piece the essays should be flexible and not restricted and it is specified how the writing should be convincing not because you argued well but because you present the right answer. There were many other stimulating points raised but these were the particular things that resonated with me. I will certainly be thinking differently when I next sit down to write an essay!
Last night I was watching the latest instalment in one of the few Australian dramas that I have become attached to over the past few years. After starting to watch part way through the first season I found myself purchasing the DVD box set on its release so that I could view the first half of the season that I had missed as well as the second half that I had already seen. I did this all within the space of two days. It is safe to say that from this moment I became one of those devoted and almost bordering obsessive fans. Today I have all three seasons on DVD, I like their Facebook page, I follow them (and most of the characters) on Twitter, I have their app installed on my phone, I have downloaded the music featured in various episodes and being a Melbourne based show I have even gone as far as seek out and visit the locations in which they film. When the show isn’t running on TV am counting down the days until it returns and when the show is running I am counting the days, hours, minutes and seconds between the airings of each episode!
With all this in mind, last night I feel that everything might have changed. This show, which is known for its incorporation of everyday family dilemmas with relatable humour, has now introduced its first main character death. Yes, I understand that actors/actresses come and go and that sometimes there is no other way to write a character of a script. But the dark emotion which surround the episodes following the death of a loved character are sometimes the ones where I find myself no longer attached to a series. I know that the next time I sit down to watch this show it will not be with the excitement that it will bring a good laugh. Instead it will be with the dread that I must spend 50 minutes watching the characters that I have come to know so well experiencing pain and heartache, and with the knowledge that the vibe of the series will never quite be the same.
*Below is a link to an article highlighting some of the reasons behind the decision; I guess giving it a read may have helped me to become a little more accepting!
This week in both the “unlecture” and the readings we looked into the idea of design fiction. This is a topic, I’ll admit I hadn’t put much thought into before and was more of a term that I had kind of accepted, not recognised. But now with some sort of explanation provided I find myself overthinking the term to excess! How do people speculate over the unknown? How do you design something that doesn’t exist? On what occasions have fictional designs in the past become reality? Have I ever subconsciously imagined something futuristic and has that something ever become a reality?
With all these questions I have experienced thoughts rushing from science fictions films to my parents continuous comments, “when we were young we would dream about having portable screens that would allow you to speak face to face with someone miles away in real time” (this being a direct quote from my mother who discovered Face Time when my dad travelled overseas last month). These thoughts have made me excited at the prospect of what we imagine or the fictional things we design, in that there could be a good chance of them actually existing in the future. This, however, is at the same time quite confronting when we then consider that some of the things that are imagined are not thought up with positive intentions.
I feel that this is a topic that now it’s there, it will really stick in my mind for sometime. In the interview with Sci-Fi writer, Bruce Sterling, the concept of design fiction as an “interesting new way to think about the future” is introduced. Though I feel that interesting is just scraping the surface when it comes to looking further into this idea as there is just so much to speculate about!
This week I have been feeling slightly creative and as a result I thought I’d allocate some spare time to experiment with the technique of “sequence photography”. This particular type of photography is when on a stationary camera, a high shutter speed is used continuously to capture each aspect of an action. Each individual photo is later photoshopped so that each stage the subject completed appears on the same one background.
I became eager to experiment with this technique after seeing images of this style uploaded onto Facebook of one of my friends completing long jump. I wanted myself to learn how to produce an image similar and using instructions from the following site, http://jpgmag.com/stories/14474/, I set out to take some pictures where my sister does gymnastics, feeling the skills performed in that particular environment would look most effective in this form. Below is my favourite result.
