I’ve always been intrigued with film photography. From the process of shooting and not being able to look back at what you’ve taken, to the process of developing the film stock, everything could be based on trial and error. A missed opportunity of a sunset could be or a child’s first steps could be destroyed if the exposure settings were wrong, film stock was left too long in the developer solution, the solution was contaminated…and it goes on. It is the idea of these hits and misses that, in my opinion, makes film photography so interesting, and the results have a certain character, a mood, and sense of nostalgia. No, it may not have 24 megapixels or crisp colour representation or insanely fast shutter speed, and more importantly the option to bring it into Lightroom or Photoshop to enhanced, create, curate, or even produce an entire new image digitally. (Linking back to having automation, a computer and instantly “beautify” an image with a click of a button by using filters and adjustment layers.) But I feel the digital mode, or this high definition space age we live in takes out a lot of character, soul, or meaning, from our work. The hits and misses are eliminated, leaving us this canvas that we are allowed to exploit and when we’ve done something not to our liking “cmd+z”. Imagine life with an actual “cmd+z” function, I fear I wouldn’t be able to get by an entire day.

Having formed groups for our next assignment based on a graph we plotted during class ranking our capabilities, skill sets, and technical-know-how. We got down into business to discuss some themes and constraints worth exploring for Assignment 3.

Several themes that came up was the play with emotion, and colour, or maybe how colour could be a representation of different emotions and vice versa. And our constraints would be having to shoot on film, with a 35mm camera in landscape mode. Since non of us has access to any film video cameras, we decided to do several media fragments by using still images to make a stop motion. Steph also gave us some recommendation to view some of the films made by Stan Brakhage, an experimental filmmaker, particularly Mothlight where it was done on film.

After having consulted Hannah, we understand that our project is inherently modular just by the nature of how non-linear as far as our project’s narrative goes. We might draw some inspiration from visual diaries, documentaries, and the “all-so-famous” Are You Happy? project that was showed to us during class. I guess the key thing for us to focus on right now is to find a strong and simple theme, and really just honing down on it, sticking to it, and see what sort of media fragments can be made from that particular idea or concept. Right now with emotions and colour can be viewed as a little brought as there are so many kinds of emotions represented with so many different kinds of colours, it can be intimidating.

We’ve also been introduce to Korsakow, a software for us to enable our projects to be interactive, where the user dictates their own story and narrative arc. This opens up opportunities for us to discuss on the interface, how the user interacts with, not only the project, but with individual fragments. Do we use audio to cue certain emotions? Maybe a special way of editing the videos, since we’re throwing out the expectations of having everything to be polished like in cinema? Or maybe through camera techniques, movement, cinematography that is worth exploring for online screen production, that filmmakers in tradition screen media might think is a big no no.