In week 6, we finally determined the detailed theme of our project. As I mentioned in the last post, we can’t have the copyrighted music, then Jess and Nat was thinking to pay more attention on the visual part, like recreating the album cover by filming video or just simply taking a picture. Jess used the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road as an example, that she could imagine walking into the wonderland in an sunny afternoon, and birds chirping and whistling around, when she first saw the album cover. So, our idea is looking for twelve album covers that can express kind of emotion or narration, and then filming the first impression of each cover in a creative way. We pitched this concept to Darcy’s group, and he mentioned a quote ‘Judging by the cover’, which we thought was perfect to be the name of our project. They also wanted to do something about music, but more focusing on the soundtrack, because music is the key point to imply the emotion of a ‘neutral’ video. For their project, we thought the point would be the actual content — which part of Melbourne city is suitable to film and edit for this work, so the video itself is not that boring but still doesn’t have a particular mood. In all, I think our final idea should work, it is interesting that we want to include music but actually go beyond that. Jackson and Jess found few more narrative covers, and we quickly brainstormed how the first impression video would look like, and we also created a shared google doc to put all the covers in with brief filming ideas, so we could finally choose twelve from them.

In the following class, we went through the reading “Making with Korsakow” together, and analysed its six features. Our table discussed the meaning and usage of ‘spatial montage’. In those existing Kosakow films, we usually see a main video playing at the centre, and lots of stilled images (thumbnails) showing in smaller size on the same page, which is so called multiple screens. Different from the traditional film or television, it is common for Korsakow to have two or more videos play at the same time, and the reason of doing this is that all the clips don’t have the cause and effect relationship. Like our own idea, each video is independent and non-linear, so at last we can have three or four videos on one page to make it look like an album collection. Another representative feature of Korsakow, which is also its basic operation mode, is the keyword leading narrative. Based on this, creators can manage the clips in the way they want, however, if there are more than one videos under the same key word, audiences will be able to choose want they want to watch next because of the randomness, which means they can somehow build the film in their own way. We consider it might be better to divide these twelve videos by their music genre after discussing with other groups, so we can build connections between music in the same genre to include this feature.