What a great end to the semester, it was amazing to see the span of works presented as part of the ‘And-Scene’ festival. I was left really inspired and motivated to continue as a media practitioner, and having the opportunity to share my own work with my group was really special.
I hope that the screening of our major work Operation Super-Star engaged its audience with entertainment value, thought-provoking writing laced with comedic relief and the sheer spectacle of our production, the result of a handful of rock-solid weeks of teamwork and dedication. I believe our work communicated a key concern of our studio that is to ‘think of comedy as a mode within and beyond genre, form and media’. Firstly, in our choice of the satirical mode of comedy to tell a coming of age story, this merging of ideas and hybridisation of modes/ genres was where our work truly shined and gave it a unique flair. Our work looked past juvenile concepts of comedy, in truly weaving the practise into our screenplay in a way that meant it didn’t rely heavily on comedic policy to be entertaining, but rather utilised it as an assistive narrative garnish that also validated the surrealist elements of our piece.
I plan to keep working on Operation Superstar, treating our final product as a draft of sorts, or a pilot for a longer film or series. After a well-deserved break, Jaden and I plan to head back into the edit suites to touch up some VFX, continue tweaking the audio for clarity (though we have already spent countless hours perfecting what was salvageable of some very crusty takes). We also want to try to create a version of the film that was faithful to our original aesthetic conception with handmade crafted graphics, though I think the graphics for the media factory version were highly effective – I can’t rest until I see our original vision come to life. We will also continue to build the soundscape in some scenes.
Reflecting on two other student works from our studio and how I think they produced a key idea addressed by the studio I will discuss ‘Trip Up’ by Angus Alexander, Ben Smith, Giorgio Curcio, K, Saskia Christensen and ‘Rogue’ by Bobby Nguyen, Chloe Stelling, Zoe Anderton, Anna Duong, and Oscar Allen. Trip Up was a great examination of comedies insertion and application, not just in dialogue and visual aspects but in the construction of narrative itself. The writers did a great job at revealing the actuality of a non-linear plot line as it’s own joke which I thought was very smart. Rouge displayed an exceptional use of hybridisation in applying both parody and satire simultaneously being both a hilarious take on the tropes of the spy-genre and a commentary on the modern age.
Lastly to discuss another studio, I really enjoyed the work from the Together in Electric Dreams studio. The studio was concerned with a question of how we can emphasise the strengths of human collaboration when learning about AI assisted media and the synthetization of media and how we can replace labour intensive elements of the production process with AI. I was particularly fascinated by the short film ‘Re-generate’ by Emily Cox, Bella Cook and Margot Bishop. The film was an experimental documentary and installation about memory and nostalgia. I thought the film balanced human specific topics and psychological phenomenon with the use of artificial imagery very well. I was pleasantly disturbed by the atmosphere and uncanny nature the group was able to foster through their visuals and music choices. It was interesting to see how to use of AI generative animations from their personal imagery would have reduced the effort to make the film, and even for something so artificial it gave the film its perfect essence to communicate the poetry behind it.