Today marks the final day of Exploding Genre and I must say the studio experience has been really interesting. One of the most noticeable features of this studio is the more theoretical and I guess, philosophical focus compared to some of the other studios that had a much more practical approach to studio work. Genre may seem like a rather surface-level area of study but in truth the concept is not only extremely complex, but also a little messy from an academic perspective. I guess, that is why Dan’s title, “Exploding Genre” is very appropriate, there is an attempt to break apart and conflagrate the genre system, to question it, to understand why it exists.

Though the course had a very obvious cinematic focus (as that is Dan’s area of study) but we were strongly encouraged to look at genre as a whole in other fields as well and this also aided us in understanding the ways in which genre interacts with the media itself.

If the studio were to run again I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the academic and theoretical side of media as a whole as well as anyone keen on cinema and filmmaking. It has certainly informed my practise and understanding to have consumed and analysed such a diverse selection of content over the course of the last 13 weeks.

Throughout this semester I have learned not only how the genre system came to be but also the historical and marketing precedence for a taxonomy like the one we have today and have had multiple opportunities to comment and question areas of it, not only through written work but also practical research in the form of the video/audio projects we have completed in class.

I’m really excited to see the work of the studio in the upcoming screening and hopefully get a sense of where my classmates Exploding Genre journey has led them. The class has been fantastic, a great bunch of people to share ideas with and I wish them the very best moving forward.

The following is a studio update during the semester:

A massive thank you to Dan for being a fantastic tutor and I look forward to seeing where the studios take everyone next.

The following was an exploration into the musical genre and it’s ability to tell very different kinds of stories:

All I can say after watching The Cabin in the Woods is, that was really quite strange. I love the idea of it, the concept. I was really hoping the zombies were going to be paid actors and that they were going to justify the film with some level of modern neo-realism, but, alas, the film dissented into satyr, nothing wrong with that. In talking to people afterwards, I found it really hard to describe the film to people who hadn’t seen it. What I was also amazed by was the production value of the film. For something that was so deliberately satyrical and ridiculous, the budget was astounding.

Here was the closest I got to summarising the film.

“Imagine the Truman show where the audience are actually all watching five college students on a trip to a cabin in the woods and they methodically murder them all one by one with zombies as a sacrifice to the ancient ones and then they escape and accidentally set every single monstrous thing in the universe free inside a massive subterranean complex and because the virgin girl wasn’t the last one to die, these massive God-like creatures are set free and they kill everyone. Credits.”

I think that was a great film to end on, the mother of all genre mashups. I think this film and Sukiyaki Western Django were the perfect bookends to a fantastic studio course. Thank you very much Dan. I look forward to seeing everyone’s final project briefs.

In 2015, I made a ten minute short for a local festival entitled Blind. At the time, I didn’t intend to be playing around with visual style and narrative tropes from Film Noir but I very quickly found myself embedding very noir-esque (look it up, it’s sort of a real word) ideas into the film in the very short time I had to tell a story. I personally, think it’s a shocking film and that is mostly because it was a first attempt to really organise a fictional narrative and shoot it. I had done previous non-fiction short doco work and live production but this was an attempt to really get a group of people together and shoot something cool together.

The premise is a young man who basically sacrifices himself in order to save the girl he loves from being arrested for a murder she may (or may not) have committed in spite of the fact that she doesn’t share feelings for him any more and lives a very different lifestyle. The narrative arc of the character of Gina, even in the very short ten minutes, follows the archetypal femme fatale in many ways, especially in the way she pursues the character, Tony. Though I intentionally played with the genre in a few ways, she is not arrested, or even punished for her actions, she is saved by a man she doesn’t care about and is given a second chance, she only has to live with the internal consequences of her actions as opposed to the brute force of the law. Of course in a modern setting, those kinds of stories can be told, where in heavily coded Hollywood when Noir was at it’s prime, those kinds of stories where the culprit escapes justice (even the idea that the culprit is ambiguous) could not be told. The visual style is also very reflective of the genre.

All this to say, I love the style of film noir, especially the way scenes are lit. I love how well it translates in colour and I love playing the conventions off against each other because there is always a story there.

As I outlined at the beginning of the semester, my goal in exploring the film musical is to understand the genre conventions and how these fit together. This week a particular focus in class was in the different genres that musicals can inhabit which leads me to believe the idea of the film musical is more complex than the taxonomy of Hollywood marketing would suggest as the musical seems to be able to serve multiple styles and stories. In class we watched the Australian film musical, One Night the Moon and scenes from both Les Miserables and Rent. Lastly listening to a rap battle from the new American musical, Hamilton. It becomes incredibly obvious how different an Australian dramatic short musical is from the UK produced sung-through integrated musical. Yet the contrast is highlighted even further by the gritty, very broadway Rent and Hamilton.

These are all, not only different styles of musical but also different iconic locations. Les Mis is most certainly a West End production in it’s original form and the film version has a very European style (as well as it’s inherant French setting) which contrasts with Rent which is as Broadway as they come. Somehow all these musicals end up in Hollywood and these places find themselves encoded into the art. By including Hamilton in the mix, the discourse opens up to even the idea that stage musicals and film musicals tell stories in very similar ways. This would suggest that the musical is less of a film genre and more of an all-encompassing storytelling art form.

Here’s a really interesting watching experience, not just because we had to be evacuated in the middle of it, but because the film is so open to interpretation I wouldn’t even know how to describe it in words. The film is a meta-cinematic horror film that moves very quickly from piece to piece. The difficulty for me was actually trying to put a timeline in place to describe what happens in the film, even just to try to extract meaning from it. This film reminds me of Holy Motors in the way it literally just tries to stop you from drawing conclusions. I’m honestly not even sure if there are conclusions that can be drawn. What the film was amazing at was drawing you into the environment of the sound studio through its unbelievable use of sound elements. The film contains almost exclusively diegetic music. One thing I did notice having been in rooms with that many racks of equipment is that they’re a lot noisier but horror is silence at the end of the day. I love the comments made by the film in terms of sound production and the way the film entirely exists within only the confines of the studio.

The torture underscoring is really apparent. Though the question is why our point of view character has such an aversion to horror as a genre if he appreciates torturing people with sound. I do really love the way this film harkens back to a historic hollywood era. The shot above really encapsulates the intrigue of the film, it would appear to be just a man just playing with his food, but the scene despite the lovely spread in front of him is very dark.

Here I am having finished Project Brief 2 and wondering what monstrosity I created. After a string of bad luck, I ended up with a  shortage of time with my friend Obed to actually practise any kind of original song for my genre sketch on the film musical, so naturally we improvised about current events, namely the ABS census which of course was a total non-event. We recorded a total of six different combinations of music and song, exploring different ways in which performers can break into song. This linked really nicely to my piece exploring Barry Keith Grant’s “Charmed Space” and the way in which it is constructed by characters and filmmakers. The charmed space essentially refers to this holy, seperate space that the performer, as a character is separated from the other characters via some dimension sometimes distance, sometimes time. The idea is that this separation creates a space for the audience to suspend disbelief. For our song about the census, the key was the way in which the introduction took place. For the recording I chose, we used the piano as a way of easing into song. The difficulty here is that without vision it’s almost impossible to distinguish which element of the diegesis the defining “seperate” factor for the charmed space, that is something I would love to explore in my final sketch. Sadly, due to the constraints of PB3, I cannot use the musical genre in PB3, but that can only result in a more diverse selection of work. I look forward to what comes next.

“The issue on the table” whether or not Aliens is in fact just a sci-fi film or something much more than that. Whether that is in reference to its genre or its societal poignancy, anyone would prefer the side championing it’s more-than-sci-fi-ness, but I was shoved onto the nothing-more-than-sci-fi side of the debate. We actually compiled a lot of research of what makes a sci-fi a sci-fi and it’s more complex than I originally thought. One of the main things that I had forgotten about the Science Fiction genre is the way it differs from fantasy in that a Sci-fi is the fantastic, explained by the mundane. In essence where a horror film or a fantasy would simply “leave the supernatural intact”, a sci-fi film explains it and it, in effect, becomes no longer supernatural (read a super interesting article that I stole that quote from here: http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/horroronline/scifi.html).

As a team we formulated an argument around the idea that if the aliens in Aliens are explained as a natural part of the landscape on FQ57568FI (whatever the name of the planet is), then the film is not really a sci-fi fantasy or a sci-fi horror film, it’s really just a sci-fi film. We also cottoned on to the idea that Sci-fi is inherently a bit of a mashup genre that consists of lots of other little elements that make up what a sci-fi is. It is inherently an action film or a horror film, it isn’t sci-fi cross action or horror, etc.

Whether or not I believe that Aliens is more than a sci-fi film for any number of reasons is irrelevant, we won! That’s all that matters.

It did make me think though that if Sci-Fi is just fantasy (or supernatural) explained, does that make Star Wars: A New Hope a space fantasy and The Phantom Menace a Sci-fi because midichlorians………….

In a class on genre, it’s only fitting that we explore my least favourite genre, Sci-fi horror. From the time I was a child, I hated every film with an alien in it, I just couldn’t stand it and the very minimal amount of the film Alien I had seen, I loathed, for whatever reason, I would be happier watching a normal horror film but when you add extra terrestrials of any kind, suddenly it gets a whole lot creepier. Aliens, on a more pleasant note, surprised me, I thought it was honestly going to be terrifying, but I actually quite enjoyed it. I liked the tasteful way it was constructed, obviously there were always going to be a few jump scares and some belly-busting action but Cameron’s film is really well constructed from a character perspective and there are a few moments of actual respite in the film, even though they pretty much immediately turn back into non-stop crazy action.

In class, we discussed the film’s significance in terms of not only gender characterisation but also it’s place in the genre of sci-fi whether that simply meant it fell into the Sci-fi genre or was in fact something more (and what that meant). The reading for the week on gender was really interesting, the way it used language to describe the visual language of the film very viscerally but more importantly, discussed the significance of the female characters in the context of the time in which the film was made. In the case of Ripley, we discussed the idea of “the male surrogate”, as I was watching the film, it never occurred to me that this could have been the case or at least the way it was written. At the end of the day, I’m not entirely surprised that there is so much of this in Hollywood especially, as there are many male screenwriters working in the industry (Cameron included).

Catch up camera workshop and part two of the same workshop down, and wow was that a thorough workshop, it was cool to have my hands on the EX3, it’s very similar to the FS7 in many regards, Sony definitely like to maintain their continuity across their products. One thing I took away from this that I had genuinely no idea was that Zebra patterns can be set to percentages and that 70% is generally acceptable caucasian skin exposure. Who knew! Also love the easy way to check with colour bars (of course this is only helpful with cameras that have a colour bars function, and zebra for that matter) definitely cool.

The Miller tripods are fantastic and super easy to handle, I’ve worked with a couple of broken ones in the past and have found them a little frustrating. I am surprised at how much of a step up the kit is from the cameras we were using in Media One however I am still undecided as to whether I should choose to shoot with one of the EX3s or borrow the FS7 from work for my final genre sketch.

We also got to take a look at the Sennheiser shotgun microphones and boompoles that can also be borrowed from the illustrious tech humans and received some really great training on how to properly operate a boom. What I took away from this is that when it comes to boom operating, there are really not that many rules other than:

1. Don’t use it side on, point it down
2. Move it when someone talks
3. Try actually be comfortable at the beginning of the take, don’t try moving half way through.

Today James Thompson (who also happens to be my tutor for “Popular Cinema”) was in for an editing workshop. This workshop was very thorough, which I appreciated. I loved how much of an emphasis James put on media management, something I’ve tried really hard to work on, on previous jobs. I did appreciate the explanation on what “Scratch Disks” actually do, because I have wondered for a long time but just never really investigated. It is super handy to save internal hard drive space for basic read/write cache and preview storage, although, I wonder if the limitations of external drive speed would throttle the editor. It was also really interesting hearing James’ feedback to many people in the class after watching their edited “test” projects. I really appreciated his explanations on why cuts should be made and artistic explanations on why certain edits are effective and recommended in specific circumstances. It is always fantastic to observe someone else’s workflow and what works for them especially with Post-Production. I found it really helpful to see how James handled ingesting media and organising it neatly on hard drives. I was really impressed with how quickly he was able to find things because he knew where they were.