editing prac from Ellie Jamonts on Vimeo.

Le temps de l’amour performed by Françoise Hardy
Lucien Morisse/André Salvet/Jacques Dutronc
©1962 Vogue

Editing isn’t easy. This is my first real go at it (which I think is fairly obvious) and while I did find it satisfying to tie all those little segments together, even this took its time. I can only imagine how painstaking it would be to edit film by hand. It’s based around the theme of COLOUR so I went for a pretty standard approach: the gulf between the conservative elements of the 1950s and liberation of the 60s.

As I was going along, I realised how valuable paying attention to cues in the music can be. Watching my first cut something felt a little off and I realised that by swapping two clips there was a much better sense of flow. Transitions made a difference, too, and made it clearer that this vision of the 60s was literally a vision being had by the man driving the car. I did feel limited by the title — I think it looks kind of 2007 Windows Movie Maker — but it got the point across.

If I did this again there are a few changes I’d want to make. I’d prefer the colour clips to be more along the lines of the lady in red and perhaps change the song to something a little, well, less polite. I also would have liked to include a reaction shot of the black and white man before the car crashes to make it more explicit that he was reacting to the premonition of the 60s.

In doing this I learnt a valuable bonus lesson about saving my drafts, since I hit refresh and lost everything the first time I wrote this post.

The deliberate noticing exercise prompted me to think about a form of media that’s very nearly always within urban eyeshot: packaging. From where I’m sitting in the City Library I can see the label on my iced tea and on the packet of chips I’m eating, an apple sticker someone’s put on the desk, a Mt Franklin bottle and a packet of gum. Beyond food there’s stationary, computers (does the outside of a laptop count as packaging?), a bag from Zara… In fact, the only non-branded packaging I can see is a banana skin.

“I don’t actually drink full fat coke… here I am advertising coke for free just cos of a pink can.” (image by Hayley Hughes)

Packaging is powerful, as illustrated above by blogger Fashion Hayley, who only bought the can to match her outfit during a shoot. I’ve been known to save a good-looking, sturdy shopping bag and carry things around in it, partly because it’s practical and partly (mostly, let’s face it) for the aesthetic.

So if packaging means so much, what happens when it morphs into litter?

I gave friends and family, very informally, a hypothetical situation. Take two near-indentical products —  Fanta and Sunkist, for example — how would they feel if they always saw Fanta cans crumpled on the ground? Would it make a difference to what they bought? Honestly, my most common response was “I don’t really  think about it”, followed by something along the lines of “if it was common knowledge that everyone littered it, maybe not” and “I wouldn’t want to be associated with it”.

People reacted more strongly if they’d seen someone actually do the throwing away: “He threw a whole thing of chicken nuggets out of the car window. They went everywhere, all over the nature strip.” Had they bought nuggets since? “No.” It was an ugly memory, forever associated with McDonalds. My friend didn’t want to associate herself with the kind of people who throw rubbish out of a moving car.

A Torontonian anti-litter campaign: “Littering Says a Lot About You” (image via Feel Destain)

My investigation failed to reveal much, unsurprisingly. My tiny sample pool seemed to be more concerned with who was littering instead of what. That said, if they associated a product with a specific act of littering they did think negatively of it. That’s one of the downsides to distinctive packaging; you can recognise it, even when it’s tossed from a fast-moving car. The brighter and more attractive it is, the more it stands out for better or worse.

At the State Library…

Up High

• Will Smith’s giant head (film advertising)
• Children’s Book Festival flag
• V&A Inspiration by Design advert on scaffolding
• Statues (is that media?)

On the Ground

• my backpack (Fjallraven Kanken)
• 50 Shades of Grey being read
• Biscuit packaging

Kanken cult all over town

Mid-Ground

• Two people sharing a phone to watch something
• Free Tibet rally — flags, posters
• Tram advertising
• Man studying with laptop and notebooks
• Carrefour bag

Back-Ground

• Tibetan chanting, national anthem
• Construction site (noises, signs)
• Omnipresent Melburnian coffee cups
• Shop signs, promotions e.g. travel adverts at Student Flights

Foreground

• Group writing on worksheets
• Clothing brands e.g. Cheap Monday, Acne

In Your Hand

• The worksheet
• Notebook
• Text from friend: “A bird just flew into my f***ing eye”
• Mum called, had a conversation about this great butcher outside of Daylesford

On the process of noticing…

Deliberate noticing is something I enjoy – I love people-watching, noticing patterns (like the popularity of Kanken backpacks, which I admit I’ve fallen victim to), looking at the way they interact with their surroundings. That said, sitting down in the middle of the grass with a notebook and jotting down what I see felt forced. It was interesting and a little unnerving to see how saturated the world is with media, especially advertising, and I get the feeling that even though I saw a lot there’s even more that I missed. All I can say is that there’s a lot going on at one given time.

It’s difficult to write about something that didn’t happen. Since today’s workshop was silent I thought I’d write about (arguably) the most famous silence of them all: experimental composer John Cage’s 4’33”. The composition is three movements of an orchestra shuffling uncomfortably in their seats and not doing much else.

4’33” is the most elegant blend of idiotic, pointless artistic snobbery and deeply personal, genuinely moving work. On the surface, Cage’s ego in attempting to harness and eventually copyright silence is almost intolerable. It’s like that joke about an artist deciding a blank A4 sheet is art and going on to sell it for millions, simply because the artistic world was too afraid to be seen to not ‘get’ it.

On the other hand, 4’33” is incredible. Peter Gutmann, freelance music columnist and broadcast regulation and transaction specialist at Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, PLLC, says: “This is a deeply personal music which each witness creates to his/her own reactions to life. Concerts and records standardize our responses, but no two people will ever hear 4’33” the same way.” And Peter has a point. Silence is a deeply personal experience that we bring our individual thoughts, fears, hunger and discomfort to. 4’33” might be uncomfortable shoes to one person, mild tinnitus to another. If art is about interpretation then this might be one of its purest expressions.

None of this excuses the lengthy legal battle between Cage’s estate and Mike Batt, lead of a band named the Planets and composer for the Wombles (no relation to Gutmann’s firm). It’s an ugly story that detracts from the piece itself. Put in a vacuum — away from a musical community desperate not to miss out, away from later re-writes (I’m not kidding; silence was rewritten by Cage multiple times) — 4’33” is beautiful. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum; nothing does. I know now that whenever I listen to 4’33” all I’m going to hear is The Wombling Song. 

I’ve noticed the way I learn has changed over the last few years. I’ve always had a relatively weak attention span; there was this tree outside my Year 8 science lab that I knew better than anything I ever learnt in there. My focus has deteriorated now to the point where I can’t watch TV without being on my phone. It’s sort of pathetic. So it was interesting to read about it in academic terms, to give it its proper names: deep and hyper attention. It’s ironic that even as we were discussing our thoughts on the essay we couldn’t keep on track. I don’t know if I have particularly hyper-attentive tendencies; it’s more that I tend to get distracted. I can do a very specific nothing with great focus for hours on end. Still, I think it all relates.

It’s a valuable thing to learn about your own learning. I have a system to get through bulky readings; a little star in highlighter, evenly spaced throughout, to give me a little feeling of fabricated accomplishment. I never noticed the parallel between levels in video games. If I can understand my own brain, the ways its benefitting me and letting me down, and I can use that knowledge, I think uni (and life) could be a lot more productive. The difficult thing is knowing what to do with what we know.

First days are always exhausting and frankly when I tried to think of a “key takeaway idea” from yesterday’s workshop all I could come up with was pizza and kebabs.

Really all I know is that I have so much to learn this semester. That’s a start – at least I’ve figured out what I don’t know, and that’s apparently the hard part. It’s intimidating but equally reassuring. If nothing else, it’s nice to see that ideas are coming to me. I’m haunted by the thought of coming up blank. The trouble is going to be gaining the skills to realise them.

I haven’t thought too much about the mechanics of blogging before now. There are so many blogs I enjoy – women in Paris with tired eyes, long-suffering film enthusiasts, over-enthusiastic vintage hoarders – but I don’t really think about the people behind them. They might post pictures of themselves, at home, at work, but it’s always so oddly forced. I know there’s someone or something holding the camera up, deliberately framing the picture to be most flattering to its subject. They’re edited to be welcoming and bright, then put up with a few words on what a wonderful day the blogger had had. I’m always aware of how staged it all is and that distances me from the blogger as a person. They’re more of an actress or a set dresser than a human being.

Very still life (image by Elsa Billgren)

Setting up this blog has felt a little awkward and a little forced, which I think must be natural. Everyone wants their blog to look a certain way – you know, like this, but not the same, but with the same feeling to it, the same vibe. My feelings are on the small scale I know; still, the people behind the blogs I enjoy had to make those impossible decisions between fonts and colours and themes, oh my god; but more than that, they finished and left their computer to do something unphotogenic.

It’s a bit of a leap to connect “is this title a little bit too sassy and will I be resented for it” to a lovely Swedish woman who does hair and collects 1950s crockery. The mechanics and process are the same, though, so it’s interesting to get some insight to what goes on behind impractical vases of peonies and stacks of coffee table books.