Daily Archives: April 16, 2016

WK 6 Lectorial and a bit about my philsophy

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The impulse to make narrative sense of our lives has always been at the back of my mind and after openly discussing it at the lectorial I’ve been silently debating its usefulness.

If I had to place a genre on my life it would be a comedy tragedy with hints of melodrama.

The problem with applying my life to the magical art of story telling is that I don’t know what my driver is. What is my motivation? Where is the beginning middle and end?

After some research I’ve found there are 7 archetype stories.

 

  • Overcoming the Monster
  • Rags to Riches
  • The Quest
  • Voyage and Return
  • Comedy
  • Tragedy
  • Rebirth

“Overcoming a monster” might be the most accurate if the monster is procrastination.

I’m not sure; as an optimistic existentialist the idea of clinging on to hope (like the protagonist of an action film) for the very sake of it sounds like a good idea to keep me occupied.

In the lectorial we also discussed cultural features of narrative. The first that comes to mind is: in asian film why does someone always die from a disease/ car crash? I grew up watching that stuff which may have added to my general gloominess. A stereotypical chinese film generally shuts down the idea of cause and effect we so often see in hollywood cinema because the love interest dies before the protagonist can do anything about it.

If I could choose a genre for my life it would be bollywood; where nothing can’t be fixed without a vibrant dance and electrifying chorus.

 

Surviving uni

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Working with a group was so much fun but now its time for the lonely post production. I found that organising the clips first was helpful. I did folders of locations and subjects. We had one long clip of Isobelle asking all the questions (which we shot last) , so I went through that and took out parts without laughing and errors. I used those clips for signposting the rest of the raw footage.

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Watching myself talk from an editing point of view was difficult as I rarely pause long enough to make a clean cut. I really didn’t want to have a whole clip of me rambling. My solution to this is to overlap some of the clips with Nicci so it would flow better and seem natural. It turns out we made some similar comments, so cutting our responses together was easier than I thought.

We shot our interviews in rmit connect to get a lively background. I think there could have been more light on the subject though.

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I’m a real fan of crane shots.

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So here is a test clip of the crosscutting-answer interview style.

highschool from vanessa wong on Vimeo.

The Mcgurk Affect- sound

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Week 4’s readings were surprisingly sciencey for what I thought was just a pure media course. But this diversity of this course has been delightful so far anyway. Film is made up of audio and visual stimuli (unless of course you went to Shrek in 4D at movie world*)

Because vision is our primary sense we perceive EVEN AUDIO through our eyes first. So behold the curious McGurk Effect!

ADD MORE FROM READING HERE

Back to the film side of it, a brilliant example of how visual and audio can work together to create a compelling effect is the sound edit in Jurassic Park (1997) directed by Steven Spielberg. After her daughter is attacked, her moth screeches. The soundtrack also swells with high-pitched whiney violins which help blend the screaming. This sound slowly changes into a train screech, as it cuts to the man yawning. We immediately join the sound to his open mouth as if he is screaming, even though the sound doesn’t how he would scream normally. This shows that visuals dominate our film experience, but sound can be used to trick us.

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*shrek in 4D: I’m terrified of horror movies so seeing the haunted house short film was borderline torture. The 4d aspect was quite refreshing literally as we were splashed with water when goop was shown on screen. And a sadistic tickle device under our chairs set off when we were shown creatures on screen.