Category / Past Work

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.

by jakekenner

“Crazy Cameras” & Ghost in the Shell (Week Two)

The Shane Denson reading for this week draws attention to the idea of post-cinematic affect. My attention was drawn to the idea that technology and camera apparatuses can alienate the viewer by creating a distance between what is diegetic and non-diegetic.

Denson explained that, “structural homology—between spectators’ embodied perceptual capacities and those of film’s own apparatic “body,” which engages viewers in a dialogical exploration of perceptual exchange; cinematic expression or communication, accordingly, was seen to be predicated on an analogical basis according to which the subject and object-positions of film and viewer are essentially reversible and dialectically transposable.”

The 2016 film, Ghost in the Shell, is essentially a case study in this reading’s argument.

“these cameras therefore fail to situate viewers in a consistently and coherently designated spectating-position.”

The original animated film seemed to be a human story, as human as it could be given that it focussed exclusively on cyborgs. The camera positions and cinematography are entirely logical for a human spectator. In this video (“How Not to Adapt a Movie”), Evan explains that the new film breaks all kinds of diegetic rules by placing the camera in impossible places, and presenting entirely un-human forced perspectives. If immersion is the practise of essentially forgetting ones own self for a moment and being taken into a piece of art then alienating cinematography is inherently distracting and makes the audience feel even farther disconnected from the characters within the film in a story that desperately needs to pull its audience in.

 

by jakekenner

Psychology, Immersion and Carousel (Week Three)

This week’s reading comes straight from our very own tutor, Darrin Verhagen. The reading addresses and successfully makes explicit what I think many artists attempt to play on; that which is unprocessed by the viewer. In my first post, I discussed the idea that psychological expectations are responsible for the way in which we consume information around us, in this reading Darrin walks through the idea that any sound that enters the mind via hearing is processed in any of three ways, “(i) sounds which it pays to focus on (ii) sounds which can be left to a subconscious subroutine/”Zombie Agent”, and (iii) sounds which can be completely ignored.” Of course, Darrin acknowledges that this theory doesn’t simply apply to sound. This also applies to vision as well. I think Darrin is principally responding to two things in the reading: Synthesis and Attention. The way the mind is actively creating meaning vs. the way the mind is ignoring things to create meaning from.

I personally, loved the idea that by using extremely familiar sounds or by familiarising the audience with a sound using another medium (in Darrin’s example motion graphics). One of the things I’ve really started to notice is subtlety in the creation of tension.

In the theatre show I’m working on at the moment, myself and the audio engineer created this beautiful sub-drone from low-passed rolling waves crashing on the shore. The production is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel which is set on the New England coastline in the late 19th century. The suspense it adds to the protagonists death scene is extraordinary.

The key was the ten minute fade in over the course of the scene. The distraction of the dialog on stage meant that basically the audience didn’t realise how tense the atmospheric sound was getting underneath the scene. Mostly it was just an excuse to use the ridiculously large subs we hired in for the show.

Immersion is very much that tension between attention and synthesis. The mind ignoring and filling in the gaps. As creators, we’re very much trying to interrupt the process imperceptibly wherever possible and that is I guess crucial to whether something is immersive or not.

by jakekenner

Immersion & Consciousness: Statement of Intent (Week One)

I recently encountered a Ted talk by neuroscientist, Anil Seth, in which he proposed, “we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it ‘reality.'” His reasoning was that our mind is simply conditioned by its environment to understand the impulses it receives from our senses. And that perception is really just a process of impulses being compared to previous experiences that subsequently form our expectations of the world (The video is at the bottom of this post). Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is a film that explores this idea (kinda). The protagonist, a linguist, by the end of the film is experiencing “reality” or dreaming (it’s not abundantly clear) outside of time because of exposure to an alien language that isn’t necessarily arranged or contained within any kind of temporal system.

Image recognition technology has advanced to a level that Facebook is now helping blind people see their families through intelligent descriptions of the contents of imagery. I have wondered for some time if a similar thing might be possible with music.

Seth in his Ted talk also described the process of experience from the inside out instead of just the outside in; the idea that we constantly experience not only the world around us, but also ourselves within the world. I know that could sound very simple, but I think immersion (at least in my own opinion) occurs when I forget the latter. When I forget that I exist within the world around me and for a brief moment, the world exists without me, or the thing I am immersed in takes over.

In the same way that something as simple as the THX chord can signal to your mind that you are heading into the world of a film, I would love to create a soundscape that is inherently musical, captivating and that still retains the physicality of a space, something that’s more than just music. To create a piece of music that at some level encodes a three dimensional space or a frame of video and yet still can be partially understood as that thing. (Goal 1)

I would love to create a video sketch that manipulates the feeling of consciousness within the audience. (Goal 2)

And finally, I want to create a media artefact that does both, that explores how music and imagery can combine to not only recode information from other formats that could be so alien, other or new that for a moment the audience might completely lose themselves in it. (Goal 3)

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

Final Old’s Cool Reflection

‘New Media Innovation from Old Media Techniques’, promised to be the the subject of this studio. Certainly the idea of evolving media is not a new concept, however, does media truly evolve or does it just become faster and simpler as time goes on. The digital revolution has clearly ushered in new processes and streamlined workflows but every one of these processes can be traced very easily back into the analogue world and in some cases, the analogue method is still preferred for aesthetic reasons. The question is whether or not New Media is really Innovation or is it just Old Media, evolved.

David M. Henkin in his journal article, On Forms and Media describes the historical process of media analysis in academic circles, “one could of course describe this traditional scholarship, as concerned with the forms that knowledge and information have taken. But modern media studies are often doubly formalist in the sense that they analyse the formal properties of media as well as the formal conditions of mediated messages.” Henkin suggests that the messages and communications that these media communicate, or their meaning is often separated from the formalist aspect of the medium itself. In the case of filmmaking process. A shot that used to be achieved using paint, film stock and plexiglass glass, can now be achieved in photoshop. The communication, however, is still identical, the outcome is still the same, one might argue, therefore, that only media processes are innovated.

At the beginning of this course Dan asked us to analyse why certain objects are media. Our group was given “doors”. We decided that doors are media because media by definition is a something that communicates something else. A door communicates people, if we change the mechanism by which the door opens, but the same person comes out the other side, is it innovation?

As much as new media isn’t necessarily always innovative, a few create entirely new ways of interacting with the media world.”From the iPod has emerged related ideas and terms in the new media sphere as well, including podcasting, which basically means producing and distributing audio files (not necessarily music) via the Internet for listening on computers or portable MP3 players.” John V. Pavlik in his book Media in the Digital Age explains, “Audiences are transforming into users in the digital media age. For most of the history of the media, the audience was characterized by pas-siveness—in the position of only receiving the reports published and broadcast by centralized news and media organizations. […] Through the advent of digital and networked technologies, the audi- ence has dramatically begun to reinvent itself as an active participant in the public-communication process.” These are certainly not new ideas, and I make an important point of that. But it does highlight that the form of new media is instrumental, not so much in the way meaning is constructed but certainly, and most importantly the way it is consumed and herein lies the innovation of digital media process.

It is difficult to extrapolate such a board idea and apply it to filmmaking. Certainly the creation of new genres and the ability for audiences to participate more easily in films is certainly a result of new media process. The accessibility of filmmaking techniques has made it easier for once passive audiences to not only participate but become creatives themselves. Pop films no longer exist on their own self contained tape, but they are constantly parodied and ‘memed’ by audience-come-critics.

In creating my final assignment for Old’s Cool, I set out with the intention of creating a very much more analogue outcome. Having explored the idea aesthetics, formality and materiality in my second and third assignments, I thought it would be important to add an old media feel to my new media artefact. However, in creating the piece I realised, as so often is the case that time restrictions in production and tight turn-arounds in post limited my ability to use older media. Digital media is faster, more malleable and quicker to experiment with. The conceptual change that the artefact underwent was significant and this was necessary. My focus changed from my initial awe and wonder at old processes like matte painting, “Wow, there’s a magnificent amount of time and effort that went into that effect.” to the more creatively open-ended question, “If I can achieve anything with digital technology, how far can I take the concept of mattes?” The result was an exploration of human form and media form. Media being a distinctly human pursuit, communication through anything other than speech, really, being a uniquely human trait. Expression is really what gets innovated by technology. New Media techniques are just evolved forms of expression, formality that is easier with deeper possibility.

Christian Schwarzenegger’s Exploring Digital Yesterdays – Reflections on New Media and the Future of Communication History delves into the idea that digital media technology is extremely transient and the line between private and public, the line between audience and producer is so blurred. “these are the challenges posed by digitalization, which is routinely said to be possibly one of the most important phenomena to have influenced Western culture over the last few decades (Jenkins 2006; Grant and Wilkinson 2009; Balbi 2011).” In attempting to make an accurate comment on New Media Innovation, I think what we have to ask ourselves as media practitioners is, “What are we ignoring that we have lost with new media?” Part of the difficulty of looking back on history is attempting to not taint it with nostalgia.

What I have learned across this studio is that to truly understand any new media process, you first have to understand its origin. In class someone made a comment about how they couldn’t believe that a record worked; that grooves on the surface of a piece of vinyl could produce music. I responded, “isn’t it more unbelievable that a laser would read ones and zeros on a CD and it make music?” but I suppose it isn’t really. In making our “Super 8” films (and I use the term Super 8 loosely), I realised how much of an impact that style of filmmaking had on me. I would never have thought that I would find myself learning from shooting with DV tape but there is something you learn, something that’s forced on you, in economically shooting, that you don’t learn when you have an infinite amount of digital storage media at your disposal. Each imperfection, each roadblock that old media’s legacy systems present, is really just a gateway to new media innovation. But I’ve learned to respect old media so much more over this course because now I understand its worth so much more.

Henkin, David M. “On Forms and Media.” Representations, vol. 104, no. 1, 2008, pp. 34–36. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2008.104.1.34.

PAVLIK, JOHN V. “INVENTORS AND INNOVATORS OF DIGITAL MEDIA.” Media in the Digital Age, Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 214–233. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/pavl14208.16.

Oggolder, Christion. “Inside – Outside. Web History and the Ambivalent Relationship between Old and New Media.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 37, no. 4 (142), 2012, pp. 134–149. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41756479.

Schwarzenegger, Christian. “Exploring Digital Yesterdays – Reflections on New Media and the Future of Communication History.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 37, no. 4 (142), 2012, pp. 118–133. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41756478.
by jakekenner

Madness – PB4 WIP 2

Having come to the end of the editing process for Project Brief 4, I can say that the outcome is nothing like I imagined.

Click here to watch video.

My intention with Sleep was to explore Matte Paintings, which kind of morphed into Mattes in general and in the end, became much more about the process of creating picture in picture mattes with my main character. Thomas was kind enough to offer his services as an actor, especially kind considering the script I gave him and it’s complete non-sensical nature. Unfortunately the venue we had to shoot in was not going to allow more than two hours for the day that Thomas was free to shoot and the script in it’s original form would have taken the whole day. It was at this point that I had to condense the idea and figure out how to achieve the lighting effects in far less than half the time. The solution was to use two LED panel lights to light the entire film. I balanced one light at 5600K and the other at 3200K to give the scenes a warm look and swapped the lights along the 180 degree line to indicate that Thomas was asleep.

This enabled me to shoot between the classroom location and Dominick’s daydream location quickly and because of this replicate shots and camera moves so that they could be matted later between the two. A great example is this shot:

Matted, Combined shot from both sides of the set.

The shot on top is a shot of Thomas at the desk lit in only 5600K from behind which has been Black matted over the bottom shot. The bottom shot is the inverse of him at the piano lit with 5600K directly above and in front of him, with 3200K filling it in. The shots were shot sequentially with the same lens at the same distance so that the image would overlap in the right place.

The process of editing was the most excruciating because even then, I felt really rushed. The shot that I had planned to use as my primary matte painted shot in the film didn’t really work out as I had hoped due to the short time I had on set.

Digital Painting on the iPad with an Apple Pencil

I wanted to bring a level of authenticity and old school to the film but the work I had painted on the iPad ended up being not only far too cartoonish (I’m not really an artist) but also would only have worked with the original shot I had been planning for the film and due to the rushed nature of the shoot, I had to improvise. Still, I managed to work in the moon rock and stars into the final video.

The mattes themselves took a while to get right. At first, I wanted to use a Screen blending mode (which would have been much simpler than the effect here) however, the screen blending mode was too weak and even slightly off-white tones were still rendered transparently. Linear keying Black also produced a similar effect except it desaturated the image too much and was laced with artefacts. The final effect here is a blend between a Luma Matte with a very high threshold and lots of Level compression.

I think, overall the video is a success. It incorporates and explores the elements I wanted to explore, the way I got there in the end was a little shaky and I desperately wish I had more time during production so that some of the ideas I had for Post Production could have been more fully realised.

by jakekenner

Mattes, Mattes, Mattes – PB4 WIP 1

The beginning of Project Brief 4 has been quite shaky. At the beginning of semester I wrote that I was fascinated by the idea of exploring matte paintings, knowing full well that that was next to impossible as the technique is basically never used anymore. The immediate question became what aspect of matte paintings can I use, how can I use them to inform my process in creating something that works.

In our studio class for Week 10 Dan linked me to a blog tribute to Golden Age Hollywood effects called NZ Pete’s Matte Shot (mouthful). I was extremely impressed by the fact that Dan knew of this obscure blog’s existence but also by the content on the page itself.

Many of the shots detailed on the blog were impressive but the one which stood out to me and the one which triggered my idea for my project was the shot with the incredibly large moon. It was actually sort of a call back to an image I had seen in conjunction with a song I studies in high school called Sleep by classical composer Dominick Argento. The song is for classical voice but my idea was to remove the vocal track and attempt to narrate the lyrics with visuals.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my [languish]1 and restore [the]2 light,
With dark forgetting of my cares, return;
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventur'd youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, th' [imagery of our]3 day-desires
To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

My concept is to build the song out of lyrical pieces with certain beats having certain actions associated with them. One of the hardest things about actually shooting this will be finding a space that makes sense to shoot it and how on earth to pull off the technical challenges of having a character fly with only one-two weeks to actually shoot the film.

For the mattes. I wanted to use still shots predominantly and use Visual Effects and digital painting to create the final shots. As the Old’s Cool course is designed to explore the dichotomy of New Media from Old media techniques. I thought it might be worth exploring new media techniques that incorporate the ideas of old media like digital paint process. I am unsure yet how to achieve this but I would love for the stars scene and the moon climbing scene to use actually painted mattes.

The next step is realising the human matte. My main character Dominick has several scenes that need to take place whereby the lighting changes very quickly and then the silhouette creates a screen matte for the background. This is very simple in the computer (much simpler than the film days though the concept of screening is again, much like painting, the same.) This is something I can explore in my final reflection, the idea that techniques may change medium or the process become simplified but we never really invent new concepts we just morph them into new ones.