Month / August 2017

by jakekenner

Cinema Groups

In the process of trying to audit cinemas as a group, I have been struck down by some kind of influenza, thanks very much, friends.

My idea of studying atriums and foyers of cinema spaces became quite difficult. As I sit down to collate my very not-exhaustive notes on my own audits I realise that having others insights would have been an excellent asset. The difficulty was finding a time to go to the cinema as a group as every time the group was available, I had classes. In the end I contracted some sort of sickness which meant that I wasn’t able to go to uni, or the city. Now I’m piecing together my post-sickness adventures.

The inclusion of Crown was something I touched on in the first blog post I did for this assignment, although I didn’t so much intend for it be such a crucial part of the evidence for artificial lighting. One of the things I realised was that Crown is a great example of the intentional psychological manipulation of the participant. The whole purpose of excluding natural light is to confuse the spectators and help them waste hours and money. So in that way, the immersive qualities of the space were not only extremely fascinating to explore but also how spectacularly artificial the whole space is. The manufactured opulence, the materiality, even the style of the music choice all help create that feeling of awe. The same can be said for the cinemas, though Eastland and Nova lack the size of Village they pull another draw card, the candy bar and they both do this extremely well. Eastland using sheer number of choices and the Ben and Jerry’s brand and Nova using the nostalgic American cinema vibe which reminded me so much of a cinema I went to in northern California.

by jakekenner

Cinematic Sensorium: Beginning Project Three

With half an hour to go until the opening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Knox Village Cinemas, December 2015. The DJ was pumping, Chewbacca was hugging everyone and the feeling as you entered the rather grand foyer of looking up above the escalators to the lanterns and the lightsabers excitedly waving. At other time, the cinema is hardly as lively but still illicit a particular feeling, for me, personally, of home.

Village Cinemas Knox City

What that means to different people is obviously varied. I think the main idea is how does the architectural qualities, and sonic qualities, begin your experience in the cinema. Why would you choose any particular cinema over another, especially a nice cinema, that costs more than a cheap, dingy cinema, when you’re paying for the same film.

Crown Melbourne Foyer

The entrance to the Crown premises, similarly, is there to prime you to spend money. The show of opulence to encourage you to spend money. These spaces are designed to be immersive spaces but each message they send is particularly targeted and specific. The technical design of this space is particularly impressive, the use of projections, lighting and sound, completely surround you.

I aim to explore these relationships between immersion and space/place. The design of these immersive spaces and how they vary significantly in the way they prime you for the experiences they offer may they be artistic or otherwise.

by jakekenner

Colourful Sound & Music (Assignment Two)

My instinct and guiding principal was to try to draw that out with musical elements and also create a layer of depth that would progressively draw the audience in.

With reference to Darrin’s reading in week two, he describes synchrosis as “the tight structural alignment of a successfully fabricated audiovisual relationship (Chion 1994: 58)”. With reference to that, the soundscape and score I created was essentially designed with the principal of syncrosis in mind. Every cut of the video is synchronised with a sound event. These, along with other stimulus, help to make the sound almost feel like location sound, even though in some cases, it wasn’t my intention to just design a foley track.

I wanted to address the themes in the video. To me it felt like the climax of the piece was the cut to the exhibition building at the two third mark in the video. The video was (according to Dan), the most colourful of the videos available to score. My instinct and guiding principal was to try to draw that out with musical elements and also create a layer of depth that would progressively draw the audience in.

The basic soundscape is based on a sound effect that I had previously created for atmospheric for a short film I made, containing lots of birds and really ugly wind. I ran a highness on those to basically just keep the birds and added some rustling leaves and very distant wind. For the cuts to the more foggy, deep shots, I chose to use more wind and accentuate the low end.

One of the wind atmospheric tracks with an extremely simple EQ just avoiding the footsteps at 600Hz

 

The footsteps progressively get faster and softer as the clip progresses to the midpoint was a decision I made to really draw attention to the rising tension and cross-cutting between the foggy, almost rainforest like shots and the floating ground shots. This sound was particularly hard to create because it sounded far too sharp in the initial edit and so I added the sound of mud being stepped in just softly underneath to beat it up a little.

The entire video felt like a sort of poetic (A – B – A – B) journey to the exhibition building so I wanted to herald that arrival with a something big, bright and colourful (like the video). The decision to use strings (which I composed in Logic) was relatively simple. I toyed with the idea of using lots of synthesisers and very synthetic textures but not only were most of my classmates doing that, they were responding to very different videos (at least tonally). I didn’t want to score a video that was entirely shot in nature with digital, fake instrumentation.

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.

by jakekenner

On Being Uncomfortable with Horror (Week 4)

The Ndalianis reading is perhaps one of the most unsettling readings I have ever read. The way in which the mutilation of a character’s eye is described is quite possibly more graphic than watching the film itself. Naturally when stakes are high enough in a film and protagonists and clear and well crafted, the audience become almost surrogate protagonists and start to feel the sensual experiences of the character. I think this is what Ndalianis is suggesting that film has the power if not the intended purpose of sucking its audience in (which I think is why the zombie analogy is quite poignant).

Disgust, she argues, “reminds the living of what they will become—the dead.” This, I think is really profound because of its implications. Certainly I think disgust is transcendent, there is something alienating about horror because every audience member knows consciously that their lives are not actually in danger. But the feeling that horror generates when the brain’s checking system is bypassed (like in a jump scare) is certainly terrifying. For a moment, your fight or flight response is activated.

I think however, that this could be applied to any emotional responses that are brought on by cinema. All of them are transcendent experiences. Just feeling something on behalf of another character is transcendent. If I’m really sucked into a story, I genuinely find it difficult to move after the credits roll. The process of coming back to reality is almost a chore. I think immersion transcends the audience member and if successful the artist can transfer the the audiences consciousness into the characters on-screen.

This of course doesn’t just apply to senses it can also apply to thoughts that the characters have. When a story is genuinely immersive and well constructed the audience and the characters on screen should think the same things at the same times and skilful screenwriters frequently write the audience’s thoughts uncannily. This is why genuinely well constructed, relatable characters are so important, you can’t be immersed in the life of a character that you don’t care about.