Author: yasintagrosser

Yas’ reflection 🙂

I hope that the short film my group created for our final assignment, can successfully combine a variety of media skills and plot ideas to highlight our main themes. For our final project my group created a short film that centred a papier mâché ladybug as the main source of focus and followed its journey through both natural and man-made landscapes in the city. Through using an object or character for the main scenes of our film to centre around, we aimed to draw in viewers and give them someone to root for.

The main purpose of our film was inspired by Anna Tsing’s “The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in Capitalist ruins” specifically the idea surrounding the art of noticing. We homed in on the idea that geologists have begun to call our time the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human disturbance outranks other geological forces (Tsing, 2015) highlighting the ways which human presence proves to add a sinister factor and obstacle to the lives of smaller beings in the environment. We aimed to begin our film displaying the ladybug interacting with its surroundings positively and curiously exploring a natural ecosystem. We then edited the film to take a jarring and dark horror inspired turn when introducing the ladybug to objects such as litter or life from a up close and uncomfortable angles.

Scott McDonald states in the text Ecocinema Theory and Practice that “Recent decades have seen the development of a tradition of filming that uses technology to provide cinematic experiences of being immersed within the natural world”(McDonald, 2012)  This tradition of Eco cinema, looks at immersion in the natural world to fosters mindfulness, directly relating to outdoor filming. Aiming to capturing the beauty of nature in a way that encourages viewers to reflect on their connection to the earth and environment. My group wanted our short film to capture the peace and beauty of the natural world in a way that led our audience to calmly enjoy the flora and fauna being displayed. Once this had been achieved, we wanted to hastily insert darkened fast paced and unsettlingly close camera angles and shots, paired with loud abrupt sound to shake viewers to life and allow them to recognise the dangers of becoming complicit with man made destruction.

Looking at the text “The work of Terrance Malick: Time Based Ecocinema by Gabriella Blais” for my individual research. I discovered that the text commented the ways that individuals reflect on their ethical responsibilities in relation to the environment and encourages critical reflection and a call to action and the ways in which humans relate to the more than human world and to their environments, be they real or virtual… (Blais, 2019) This relates closely to the aim of my groups final short film as we strive to draw attention to the little things that humans don’t usually notice and the one off actions that can cause landslide effects on smaller creatures sharing the same eco systems.

A problematic issue we faced when creating our short film was overcoming our go-to filming techniques in order to follow through with our plan to use horror type filming styles. I myself lean more towards peaceful calming scenes of nature and natural colours in my filming works, but for this particular project we wanted to push our creative abilities out of our comfort zones. This proved to be much harder than we thought and even with our finishing product presenting our audience with jarring uncomfortable sound and editing, I still feel we could have pushed ourselves a little further in relation to how we set up our shots to present sinister vibes.

I feel that our most successful part of our work was the audio. The way we edited our final film was done in a way that viewers at the exhibition could listen carefully to the different wildlife sounds and enjoy the peaceful natural audio of the focus area. This was then abruptly contrasted with loud unsettling audio of the city (for example, pedestrian crossing noises and car engines). The audio allowed us to encompass an uncomfortable and lingering sense of wariness. Overall, our audio to me was the star of our piece and was a success.

If we continued to work on our short film media piece, I would hope to really flesh out the scenes. Removing some of the black images with white writing on them would be integral to create more flow between shots and allow more time for viewers to tune in to the audio. Something I would also be keen to look more at in future would be the effects of audio and the way different sounds can promote different emotions in people.

I found the class of Invisible Environments this semester to be thoroughly enjoyable. Although at moments I felt a little uncomfortable I found that those moments helped me to grow as a person and improve my ability to make new acquaintances and work with different classmates. I found that collaborating with other students helped me to stay focused and interested in what I was learning and prompted me to try my best. I genuinely will miss some of the people I got to work with in this class which is a new thing for me as someone who usually liked to go to class then leave to get home.

 As a nature lover this class has helped me grow in relation to discovering new ways to represent the environment through media and sparked a new passion for me to create new eco-conscious media, perhaps even my own short film. I look forward to what the future holds for me in relation to Eco cinema and am so glad I chose this class.

 

REFERENCES:

Blasi, G. (2019). The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048541515

Rust, S., & et al. (Eds.). (2012). Ecocinema theory and practice. Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203099627

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400874334

https://www.mediafactory.org.au/yasinta-grosser/2024/10/25/process-portfolio-4-creative-tests/

 https://www.mediafactory.org.au/yasinta-grosser/2024/09/18/week-seven-initial-ideas/

https://www.mediafactory.org.au/yasinta-grosser/?p=151&preview=true

https://www.mediafactory.org.au/yasinta-grosser/2024/10/25/146/

https://www.mediafactory.org.au/yasinta-grosser/2024/10/25/process-portfolio-3-presentation-reflection/

INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH.

I looked at The work of Terrance Malick: Time Based Ecocinema by Gabriella Blais for my individual research. This article commented the ways that individuals reflect on their ethical responsibilities in relation to the environment and encourages critical reflection and a call to action. This relates closely to the aim of my groups final short film as we aim to mainly draw attention to the little things that humans don’t usually notice and the one off actions that can cause landslide effects on smaller creatures.

Scott McDonald states in the text Ecocinema Theory and Practice that “Recent decades have seen the development of a tradition of filming that uses technology to provide cinematic experiences of being immersed within the natural world” This tradition of ecocinema, looks at immersion in the natural world and fosters mindfulness, directly relating to outdoor filming by capturing the beauty of nature in a way that encourages viewers to reflect on their connection to the earth and environment. This relates to our short film plans as we aim to first peacefully introduce our audience to natural environment images before quickly editing jarring uncomfortable shots and audio into the film to shake viewers from their peace and remind them of the dangers of turning a blind eye to the damage humans inflict on the world around them.

Other media works that I looked at mainly consisted of nature documentaries of the sort. I found it interesting to consider the ways that making ecocinema can be detrimental to environments, especially during the filming process. This made me consider the ways that ecocinema can actually be the cause of environmental harm if not undergone carefully.

 

Blasi, G. (2019). The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048541515

Rust, S., & et al. (Eds.). (2012). Ecocinema theory and practice. Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203099627

 

Our rough cut represents a couple clips of our final project mashed into a small video. Our main rough cuts can be found in our footage folder on the class OneDrive.

Due to our group filming our video rather late in the creative process our rough cut really was rough! Having footage to work with was helpful in aiding our ability to compare both our more sinister shots with our more positive shots.

The example of the rough cut I inserted into this post demonstrates the lighter visuals we aimed to have in our work especially for the beginning of the film.

Through the filming process our group began to see more clearly how we wanted our project to look and come across to viewers. The filming took place in Carlton gardens in the CBD, and this proved to be an excellent location for both our positive and negative shots. The gardens presented both gorgeous natural garden areas and spots that were largely littered with rubbish or under construction.

As a group we came up with different ways to incorporate our ladybug into scenes and where it both stood out against the morbid backgrounds or blended in with the beauty of the area.

We found that we were able to successfully find the locations we wanted to film in and capture our ladybug amongst but struggled to execute the correct shots to tell the story we wanted. We struggled to get a large amount of our more sinister shots.

Through the editing process however, we were able to cast darker shadows over shots and through uncomfortable editing create a dark and evil feel to the human aspects of the film.

Overall, through the filming process we discovered how to adapt to the location and use it to get the scenes we wanted for our final film.

 

For my groups creative test, we decided to present a more tangible example of our work.

For our short film we created a papier-mâché ladybug made from masking tape, newspaper and paint. The ladybug aimed to demonstrate the innocence of smaller creatures that usually go unnoticed in the natural environment. We aimed to use this ladybug as a way of catching the eyes of our audience in our short film and pushing them to consider creatures that are usually too small to notice in the work around us by enlarging the creature and morphing it into a hard to miss format.

The risk we faced by showing our papier- mâché ladybug instead of a two-minute short draft of our work, was the lack of vision we were able to instil in the minds of our classmates. It required a lot more explanation and due to the time-consuming process of making the ladybug, we lost filming time which added a little more pressure to the creative process.

We received a large amount of positive feedback on our tangible example, and some concerns about our ability to add the horror aspects we were looking for to our work. This allowed us to consider more closely how we wanted to approach the darker aspects of our film.

By the end of the discussion, it was clear that we needed to begin to make conscious choices between the shots we might want to take for the short film because they were more comfortable and familiar shots for us to take, and the shots that provoked more of a reaction from our audience but were ultimately trickier for us to take.

Although nerve-racking to try and find ways to push myself out of my usual creative comfort zone, I look forward to collaborating with my groupmates to see how we can take our example of the ladybugs innocence and twist its surrounding through filming to leave a strange mournful feeling in the minds of viewers.

In week nine our final project groups got together to prepare our project pitches. This proved to be a challenging task but also a great way to get feedback on our ideas and ways we could improve our final assignments.

My group of three split our PowerPoint slides three ways to share the workload and engage positively with our audience. For our pitch we aimed to strictly stick to answering the main questions highlighted in the pitch outline and back up our answers with research.

I found this process to be helpful in gaining a better insight on the topics we aimed to cover in our final short film and a great way to narrow down our main topic questions and what we actually wanted to say in our film.

We collated all three of our works int0 a short video that served as a type of trailer for our final assignment. After completing our project pitch, we received some insightful advice from the panel which highlighted ways we might be able to improve and patch up holes in our idea.

Our trailer demonstrated to the panel that our work was quite wholesome and light-hearted whereas, the idea we were trying to pitch described a dark horror inspired work that unsettled the audience through sound and confronting visuals. The panel suggested that we find ways to step out of our usual media making comfort zones and explore the dark and uncomfortable natural aspects of the environments around us.

Listening to the other groups work, especially a group that planned to focus on photography aspects and different contrasts between environments inspired me to consider how to interpret contrasts more strongly in our short film.

Overall, I found that the project pitch was a great way to push myself out of my comfort zone through public speaking.  Learning to count on your group to all complete their tasks, give honest feedback to each other and comfortably share their visions and ideas for the project is an essential part of teamwork. I’m excited to brainstorm ways to improve our final short film.

1. How does climate change appear from a non-human perspective.
2. Through the use of immersive eco cinema through sound, changes in saturation and different extended and edited shots.
3. We aim to cover the destructive noise pollution and litter in largely populated areas of the city and how this affects smaller non-human species.
4. We aim to form our work into a video which could be displayed in the media portal for the show case on a screen.

Above are the answers to brainstorming questions found on the discussion space for class. When discussing how my groups previous works could influence our final project we looked at ways we could incorporate our usual bright /cheery and peaceful works into the film whilst also combating those vibes with dark/spooky and unsettling vibes.

The brainstorming activity on butchers paper in class was helpful in allowing us to pinpoint a couple key topics we wanted to touch on and create a type of research question. We looked at the impact humans have on the world around them, specifically looking at bugs and other animals that must learn to adapt to the environments that humans destroy.

By the end of our brainstorm,ing my group had a fairly solid idea of the direction we hoped to take our assignment in.

A reading we found we were inspired by was Anna Tsing’s Arts of Noticing. The ideas in this text such as the question “What emerges in damaged landscapes, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin?”(Tsing 2015) This quote really prompted the direction we aimed to take our final project in

 

EXPERIMENT #6 sensing change

 

Staying with the trouble ex #5

Attending to what’s left… ex#4

INVISIBLE ENVIRONMENTS-> Experiment 3

Week six focused on the ways that human impact has negatively affected our choice locations, and how the natural environment copes with/ and adapts to this damage. 

 

The Bellbird parklands was my choice of location and at first I thought I wouldn’t be able to find any human damage in the area due to the amount of signs warning visitors to stay away from the protected areas of native bush, but was quickly surprised to find that the location was littered with rubbish, caution tape and ugly piping.

I tried to focus this particular experiment on the wildlife (birds) in the area as they navigated and adapted to their new environment. When I watched them I tried to figure out if they were suffering and unhappy in their new environment. I was surprised to find that the animals were quite content in their habitats even with the litter and human impact. This reminded me of this weeks reading and the way “We have been lulled by films, and other sources of images, to believe that our future is going to be grim” (Hurley 2008) and how media tends to portray the world be live in as ‘beyond repair’.

The reading inspired me through highlighting the importance of “reclaim[ing] our ability to image socially just and…ecologically sustainable futures”. (Hurley 2008) Something I’ll take away from this week is the way I approach damage and how to take on a positive outlook when coming across human inflicted damage. I want to adopt a cautious and hands on attitude.

REFERENCE: 

STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE.

This week we looked closely into the importance of not only witnessing trouble and environmental damage, but staying with this trouble and questioning healthy ways of change.

For this weeks experiment, I decided to consider the ways that human impact and interaction with the area caused significant damage and environmental distress to the surrounding vegetation. For my video I tried to mainly focus on how litter and human presence had polluted the Bellbird park area. I tried to incorporate overly saturated but dark videos into my work and include uncomfortable scene cuts with jarring music. Although the video encompassed parts of what I was trying to capture, overall, the video did not quite turn out exactly as I had wanted it to, which was disappointing but also a good learning experience.

This week’s reading looks at how to “stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth”. (Haraway, D.J 2016) This reading sparked a new way of thinking for me and encouraged me to analyse the way society tends to write off environments and other parts of our beautiful planet that are damaged. We tend to consider broken things as unrepairable instead of ‘nurturing what might still be.’ (Haraway, D.J 2016) I took this into consideration whilst exploring the human made damage of my current location (Bellbird park) and was drawn to the areas of trampled vegetation that humans had planted young plants in, in hope of rebuilding the damaged area. Signs asking visitors to stay away from specific native areas were also present which I found interesting and overall a positive start in rebuilding and caring for the damaged parkland.

Haraway, Donna J.. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780