Constraints are important for creativity. I 100% absolutely definitely agree with this statement made at the lecture. Whenever I have to write s story/create something I find it so much harder when we can do whatever we want. If someone told me right now to write up a script for a short film I would absolutely no idea what to write. But if someone said write up a script that can be filmed and edited within the next 48 hours under the genre of ‘western’, I would straight away come up with something. The 48 hour film competition does this and it is heaps of fun, I entered it last year with a bunch of RMIT students. Anyway that’s besides the point.

Context can not be preserved. For example, when ‘On the Waterfront’ was released in 1954, it was made in a certain context of the time, that nowadays can never be fully understood. No one can controlled how the audience will consume something. Media is consumed the way people choose to consume it.

What can Korsakow do? That is how Adrian wants us to think. What can we use it for? He says we are thinking about it wrong and that we shouldn’t think of it as how do we tell this story with this program. He used a hammer and nail metaphor.

The difference between Korsakow films and normal films is that the Korsakow films are not linear. They can still tell a story/narrative, however they tell them in different parts, different time lines and so on. This really inspired me.

It reminded me of 500 Days of Summer, a film that plays with time and we see different parts of a relationship in a non-chronological order. Something similar to that would make an excellent Korsakow film.

Something as simple as a character study would make a good Korsakow film, you can show different parts of their life, but it won’t necessarily tell the audience what to think. The audience can make their own assumptions based on which clips they see in the film. They can decide when they have seen enough clips, and choose to come back to the film and re-watch it depending on their engagement with the film.

Closure is not invested in the media object in a Korsakow film, it’s invested in the audience. They stop watching when they’ve had enough.

Overall,this lecture has been my favourite so far as I feel pretty inspired and motivated to create a cool interactive story through Korsakow. I love scriptwriting and the sentence that gripped me the most in the lecture was when Adrian said it’s not about having a kick ass story idea, it’s how you tell the story that matters. All the other lecturers nodded in unison.

This was a nice wrap up to the subject. Overall the subject has left me thinking about the internet and social media in a completely different way. I never thought about HTML building sites, or connections and links between pages. The internet got completely torn apart in this subject and I feel like I understand social media a lot more. Before Facebook was just something where I could chat with friends. Now it seems so much more. It’s a massive network. So many websites link to Facebook, it isn’t separate from everything else. I actually really enjoyed playing around with HTML, I’m planning to learn it in more depth sometime soon.

First of all, the most important thing of today’s unsymposium was that Eddie brought me chocolate Lindt balls. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Adrian demonstrated the power of online media through the example of The Faces of Facebook, a website that was started by a girl who ‘codes for fun projects’ called Natalia Rojas. Adrian pointed out that this girl would have received hundreds of emails with job offers due to her coding skills and all she did to put herself out there was create this project. I probably shouldn’t say ‘all she did’, as it would have taken a lot of hard work and skill and 9 programs to create (wow). But to get herself noticed she came up with something relatively simple and new and went out there and did it. Now even if I had an idea like this I wouldn’t know where to start. It really inspired me to start learning HTML in depth though. Back when I was 15 years old and blogging on tumblr I learnt a bit of HTML and would help other people with tumblr accounts edit their blog themes. I actually really enjoyed it but back then I didn’t think I could make anything significant through knowing how to edit a tumblr theme.

Adrian also spoke about a ‘small world network’. A network which has so many connections between things that it is simple to get to one part to an unrelated other part. He gave the example that Hollywood is a small world network. All the actors are in some way connected through movies they have acted in. Yet again he shows us another simple yet fantastic website called The Oracle of Bacon which demonstrates any actors connection to Kevin Bacon. At most the actors have only about 4 links. The most obscure actor has such a minimal amount of links to Kevin Bacon. Now when Adrian said that the most links he had found was 4 I took this as a challenge. I am still sitting here typing in the most obscure of actors and I can’t even get passed 3 links. It’s fascinating. “A structure will emerge”.

It was said that Technology is anything that isn’t nature for humans. And since we have advanced so far out of basic human nature like natural births without blood tests or ultrasounds, or food that isn’t  manufactured for us, is everything technology? Is everything about us now unnatural? Shaved legs, hair cuts, clothes, apples that were protected with insecticide, beds, houses, a letter, brushed teeth…