Film and TV1 reading reflection

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

Millard, K. 2006, Writing for the Screen: Beyond the Gospel of Story, Scan Journal, Vol 3, Number 2.

Reading Millard’s text felt a lot like learning about Grammar to me. Where she highlights the cliches to avoid and the rules to follow when writing for the screen and then goes on to advocate breaking those rules but only when you know how to. Like ‘Never start a sentence with Because or And’ etc.

To me it seemed that Millard was trying to convey the invaluable quality that cinema affords the creator in it’s ability to capture magic. Millard quotes Pomeranz (2006) in saying that “Cinema has certain qualities, and it’s the image. Sometimes this image has its own breathing or tempo. It has to linger, and will linger because you want to have more”. From my understand Millard is highlighting that part of cinema is rolling the camera and being available to capture as much as possible; that you can craft the perfect script and exercise maximum control over every element of the shoot, but that if you are not open to lightning striking and moving with the unexpected to discover new things, you wont be doing your art justice.

As someone who aspires to create art in some capacity I don’t think i’m alone in finding it difficult to relinquish the notion of control lest it means also relinquishing the sense of ownership to the work that I am entitled to feel. Millard confronts that impulse in me, and encourages the rational understanding of the potential benefit of fresh eyes and random influence and collaboration whether with other people or just with running with the real life interruptions to planned activities.

Millard also quotes McKee, and if i’m honest i’m not sure I have a complete grasp of Millard or McKee’s assertions. McKee is quoted with “While the ever-expanding reach of the media now gives us the stories to send beyond borders and languages to hundreds of millions, the overall quality of storytelling is eroding… The art of story is in decay, and as Aristotle observed twenty three hundred years ago, when storytelling goes bad, the result is decadence.” (1997)

I am not sure whether ‘The art of story is in decay’ is a comment on the decline in quality of story, or if it is that artfulness is found by exploring the grittiness of life. In fact, I have discovered through the help of my friend wikipedia that I have had a very limited understanding of the word decadence to mean indulgence and excess and never appreciate it’s origin being decay. I am going to have to think on what this quote means more… It struck me originally and I took it to be a comment on an overexposure to stories, leads to an overexposure to bad stories and we as a public are conditioned to accept and expect stories to follow these poor models…

I’ll return to this, I’m not convinced I understand exactly what Millard is intending with this quote yet.

 

 

 

 

Jasmine’s Screenwriting Lecture

 

Jasmine spoke about screenwriting as writing with an exterior focus, something that needs to be mindful of the visual quality necessitating characters to react outwardly. This is something that challenges me because I am quite an introspective person and the old adage “write what you know”, whether I like it or not, does come into play in my writing style. I am not a particularly visual writer nor reader. Meaning I don’t form vivid images of how characters look or the world of a story when I read, despite my ability to get lost in stories. I think I am more drawn to the interior world of the characters.
That being said as an audience member I can fully appreciate the necessity and value of the visual component of story telling film and television affords us. As I write this I realise one of my story ideas was completely interior and while I could visualise exactly what it would look like, I sensed the gap between what the interior world of the character is, the beautiful quality of the environment it would be filmed in and the divide in how the visuals could communicate the interior- I should have revisited the lecture before working on the story ideas!
Jasmine also talked about narrative; the three act structure and the protagonist/anti-protaganist, status quo interrupted etc. I have taken creative writing classes in the past which has alerted to me of the norms of scriptwriting and classic story telling so this wasn’t a particularly revelatory moment for me, I do continue to feel cheated that I can recognise these sign posts of creative writing in works that seem so original to me when lacking an analytical eye.

Film and TV1 – goals and desires.

 This semester I would like to gain better experience with the technical side of production as well as follow through on writing and have the courage to actually apply proper effort and not shy away due to a fear of failure. In Particular:

Develop my proficiency using a camera

  • take time to conceive and frame shots/ consider white balance and focus and maximise the potential of a shot.
  • if someone else is responsible for the camera be mindful of what they’re doing rather than  denying myself a passive learning experience.
  • actively involve myself in the areas I feel less competent so I can learn.

Don’t allow lack of effort to be an excuse to fail, or even to not succeed to the extent I would like to.

  • Dedicate an appropriate amount of time to play with ideas and give my imagination room to move
  • write proactively so as not to end up doing a “rush job”

Recognise when I need to work to achieve other people’s vision and engage in that and enjoy the process. 

LOOKING BACK

I have really enjoyed Film and TV1. I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been able to enjoy the technical aspects of film. I appreciated the consistent attention we gave to learning skills in the tutorials and lectures. It was great to have the opportunity to revisit things the next week to solidify the process in our memory.

I think I did a good job with taking the opportunity to learn about other roles than my own by observation. I would have liked to learn more about lighting and editing but with the lighting it was a case of needing to let people do what they had to to get things done. The editing was poor time management and, my experience so far has been that for the most part it’s a one man job. We weren’t very productive when it was an edit by committee situation and Kai did a fantastic job of bringing our film together. I’m hoping next semester I can be more involved in that aspect.

I have really loved this course but it has been a bit overwhelming in terms of workload. I think I burnt myself out a little bit so that by the time filming was over I didn’t have the energy I would have liked to have to put into post production. That I think is probably just a reality of the course, that a lot of work needs to be done combined with my not knowing how to alleviate time pressures else where to give myself the proper time to work on Film and TV.

Going forward It would be nice to have a more comprehensive list of the assessment and due dates for everything that needs to be done through semester. I found on several occasions this semester assessment pieces/deadlines took me by surprise and it was more difficult to give things the attention I would have liked to because I wasn’t able to map it out in advance.

 

The Russell Brand Conundrum

Russell Brand troubles me.

I don’t find his comedy that funny, but I get the impression he’s incredibly intelligent – it just doesn’t seem like he uses his intelligence for good (jokes). Clearly he’s achieved exceptional things through his career and whatever he’s doing is working for him so maybe I need to stop being such a comedy snob. There’s a market for his jokes and he’s definitely capitalising on it.

Anyway after Amy Winehouse died he wrote a beautiful blog post about Amy and addiction. I read it at the time and stumbled across it again yesterday, I then continued to read more of his blog posts and was heartened. He’s got good things to say and potentially has an audience where he’s not just preaching to the converted but actually can exercise his influence to achieve more tolerance amongst his fans.

 

Unsymposium Week 10

My main takeaways this week

The 80/20 reading gives us a mechanism to understand how networks develop. It shows us the evolution from one node to an infinite number of nodes. These connections have never been random but they are not ordered either; power laws come into play and that’s why hubs count, they are vital and they are surrounded by infinite nodes.  Being a small player, or one of those infinite nodes, isn’t a big deal in the network because it takes so few links to get to those hubs. Just like Kevin Bacon is an achievable connection for all of us within 6 degrees.

Jasmine felt that the reading offered the idea that even though we’ve got these hubs that accumulate over time, new nodes can still flourish. Likewise over time hubs can become less important and be replaced by newer ones.

This discussion as a whole helped me to understand how blogs thrive online and that if we’re not linking to other people we’re not even trying to maximise our audience reach. It also shows how we can all help each other out by linking amongst the “little guys”  to help the long tail get some attention.

I feel like the remainder of the unsymposium was spent exploring the notion of technological determinism vs cultural determinism. It seems like we all have an obsession with the role of the author and authorial control. After once again exploring this notion yesterday I think I understand why we keep coming back to it.

Adrian has said several times that the Author doesn’t have complete control, we are subject to the technologies we use, the cultural influences on structure and communication and even the limitations of language itself. (I have no notes of the exact phrasing so I won’t claim this is an exact representation of what Adrian has stated on the subject). I don’t think anyone (or certainly not most of us) has too much trouble understanding that there are limits to the control an author has because of technological determinism and other factors like the subconscious mind vs the conscious mind and which one is representing us/offering insight into our minds. I think the reason people protest the notion of there being no authorial control is because there is some implication in the statement (whether intended or not) that to accept technological determinism and no authorial control as an absolute truth, means that the author doesn’t matter.

Sure, all the great authors have operated within the confines of their selected medium, and in that way they are subject to technological determinism. But it matters that Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities instead of Sarah Palin (or to be fair and less extreme, it matters that Dickens wrote it rather than Victor Hugo). Authors have an impact on their work, they produce something that in all likelihood wouldn’t have been produced as a carbon copy by anyone else in the world, and because of this I think we can claim that we get a taste of who the author is, even if the characters in their book in no way reflect them personally we get to see what their mind is capable of creating. Once again I’ve fallen into the trap of using literature as an example. But I guess literature is the area where we feel most license to interpret and project our own experiences onto the interpretation of an author’s intent so that’s why we keep coming back to it.

So I guess, even if I am representing only myself in this statement I would like to say that I understand technological determinism’s role in life. I no doubt am more able to articulate that role as a result of the discussion/debate through networked media. But I feel misunderstood in my protest against the notion of authorial control because I protest it as an universal truth with no grey area. Maybe this is because I’ve mistakenly taken Adrian’s assertions as absent of a grey area where the author matters but I feel frustrated to be returning to the subject over and over as if I don’t comprehend that there are restrictions within which we operate.

 

Unsymposium 0.5

In this week’s symposium one of the questions asked was in a long tail society, would a hierarchy of recommendations occur and would that be bad. I think my reaction most aligned with Brian’s if my memory serves me correctly.

I don’t know that it particularly changes things in a negative way. If we think about it conceptually, in traditional distribution forms there was a dictatorial recommendation hierarchy where distributors and producers were essentially making their recommendations by which artists they chose to gamble on in producing and distributing their work. There have always been critics who, depending on their support base garner the power to recommend with more weight than your neighbour would. Through this niche interests have always persisted and minor players in the game’s recommendations have been heard by their specific audience so I would suspect things would improve rather than worsen in that the smaller players will have a greater chance at their voice being heard.

 

From one social network to another

Today, like every day, I logged into my facebook and aimlessly scrolled through my newsfeed. I defiantly blocked ads from a product I have no interest in and continued to read. At some point I came to an article posted by a guy 4 years my junior, from a place I’ve never been in middle America; who I met through my brother’s best friend from Kansas City, who lived with my family for a couple of months a few years ago.

Anyway he’d quoted an article from the new york times which discussed the social impact of health. That people tend to put weight on/lose weight in clusters, are happier in clusters, are lonelier in clusters, are smokers in clusters/quit smoking in clusters. This introduced me to the concept of social networks pre-facebook days. Anyway it was a very interesting read and another excellent of example of networks and nature and the interconnectedness of our existence. I highly recommend reading it, you can find it here.

The Long Tail

The thing I took from this reading was encouragement. Having just attended an Australian Cinema lecture dedicated to the difficulty of receiving funding, the inevitable decrease in funding under the Abbot government, and the demand by funding bodies for genre film, it’s easy to feel deflated about the pathways available to me in any creative fields.

The Long Tail however leads me to hope that products that cater to niche markets have a better chance of thriving now than they ever did. Networks have enabled us to remove the need for tangible, geographically bound distribution; where pre-networks a film(or any other product) may have had a 3 person market for a store’s local reach, can now realise it’s potential (and much larger) market because geography and shelf space no longer is a factor.

Of course we will still need to ponder the magic equation of pricing, maximising our supply and demand balance and profits and how to source funding and go on to produce a product. But also that we may get more differentiation back into popular culture. That funding bodies wont so adamantly shy away from risky projects because it’s not actually so hard to turn a profit when you’re releasing online.

The Long Tail offered three simple rules:

#1 Make everything available

#2 Cut the price in half. Now lower it

#3 Help me find it.

I spent last year living in the United States and got to  become hooked on Netflix. Having seen the effectiveness of luring our taste down into the Long End by making connections between our watch history I was able to discover films I would never have accessed before. Having seen the process at work and appreciated the process, I hope this tendency of distribution can only mean good things for the industry going forward.