1 From your studio, reflect on an aspect of two other students/group’s media work on the website in terms of specific insights they produced about a key idea addressed by the studio?
The aim of People + Places was to construct a story out of a character/location and to capture them in a documentary format, ethically and entertainingly.
One of my personal favourite films in the class was ‘Intoxicated’ by Charlie Stamatogiannis and Jaden Arendtsz. From everything we learnt in class, they executed impressively. Not only is their character and location great, but their editing, multi-media usage and sound all add to create a fantastic documentary. I think at the core of it all their subject, Sylvie Leber, has a really interesting life and story to tell. Even when I watched the work in progress without the editing, I was fascinated by the storytelling and structure of the documentary, and I was sad it was only 5 minutes. They did a great job of getting the core arrangement of the footage right and the editing only added another level of entertainment. We are really sucked into Sylvie Leber’s world with the cartoonish-images and sounds. You can also tell Sylvie is really comfortable and looks happy to talk about her life in the rock world as a female which highlights the studio’s idea of ethical work. Overall, I think the film greatly represents what we were asked for in class, a high-quality and entertaining film that takes us into the world of the subject.
Another film I really loved was ‘Bourgeois +61’ by Sabrina Hua and Ellis Lee. I think the work was really visually stunning. The camerawork pracs we did in class obviously did wonders for them. Every shot was in focus and well thought out. The lighting and mise-en-scene of shots really elevate the film to another level. Again, the interviewee looks very comfortable talking about her life learning to sew and her fashion brand, which shows that Sabrina and Ellis worked ethically.
Overall, I think everyone did a great job in creating a non-fiction film & I’m really happy I completed the studio!
2 Choose one other studio from this list (we suggest selecting a studio that you would not normally be interested in). Then describe a key idea that you think the finished media/studio work communicated with reference to two specific examples (i.e. particular individual/group works)
The studio I chose to look at was Poetic Video. I am not a great filmmaker, so these kinds of subjects are not something I’m usually drawn to. The key idea I believe from the two examples I watched, (“where it went wrong” by Abi Upson & Briana Richards and “spinning stories” by Claudia Floros, Rose Kavanagh, and Bonnie Carmichael) is to mostly explore the idea of narrative in film making. From what I watched, the short films seemed to challenge the idea that films must be cohesive and have a ‘start-middle-end’ structure. Though these films did make sense, the timelines of shots, stories and interviews were not in sequential order. I believe that this style of film, poetic video, adds an extra artistic and stylistic element to the work, as well as making the films really interesting to watch; very unpredictable.
In ‘where it went from’ by Abi Upson & Briana Richards the film follows a problematic couple from the first-person view of the girl in the relationship. The shots jump from different timelines in the relationship, from a drunken argument, to when they first met, to a date etc. I think this works incredibly well in the work, although we know the end result of the relationship (that it doesn’t work out), it is a rollercoaster of emotions watching the relationship through its extreme highs and extreme lows. I think also experimenting with first-person film creation was a great move, it put us as the audience into this turbulent relationship and experienced it ourselves.
The second piece I watched, “spinning stories” by Claudia Floros, Rose Kavanagh, and Bonnie Carmichael was really different for the first one in the sense that it took a documentary style format into it rather than fiction. This film though, as well had a jumping timeline and multi-media integrated into it which made looking at the life of a chaotic DJ a whole lot more realistic. I think both pieces were really excellent and tested this idea of poetic video making, I loved watching them and I think they had great final projects, they should be really proud of their work.