Media Bodies Wk 4 – Running and Proprioception

 

A synopsis on ‘Coming Home’

This piece is titled ‘Coming Home’ and it focuses on the feelings of coming back to a place you one belonged. Emma hasn’t been home in a long time due to covid travel restrictions in the past few years. Now that Emma is back home, she is overwhelmed with joy as well as misplacement. Two totally separate feelings. She is joyed to be reunited with her parents and to be in her family home, however, as she walks the hallway of her childhood home, Emma feels different. Certain things have changed and been moved, it doesn’t feel as good as she thought, she feels like a stranger.

What did you discover about the experience of running and proprioception?

  • The speed of what you run obviously has some dependence on your physical body, however, it also has a lot to do with your mental state.
  • After listening to Kathrine Switzer’s first marathon experience, I took note of her motives throughout the race. She endured a number of different thought patterns due to external factors like crowd noises and attacks (a man attacking her and telling her to get out of his race).
  • Different mental motivations reflect to physical movement
  • ‘Runner 261’, (2020) Andrea Rangecroft, BBC Short Cuts – Series 22, Endurance [Podcast]. Place of distribution: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000fgdk  (Links to an external site.)  (11:22 – 18:50)

 

What worked well about your finished piece? What didn’t work so well?

  • What worked well is that I was able to incorporate a few techniques from the videos we watched this week. I focused on colour in the frame as well as individual movement. The main character wears blue denim shorts and a navy blue shirt. The colour blue isn’t necessarily meant to reflect the mood of the character but more so highlight their feeling of being out of place. Nothing else in the frame is blue, the character is made to look isolated. As well, in every shot, the movement of Emma is dominant as nothing else moves from its stationed point, not even her mother.

 

  • What I could have included in my work is the use of camera movement, just to bring something different to my piece. This is difficult to execute though, considering that I am in the video works myself. I also think that I could have been more purposeful with my colours by dressing my mum in colours that blended more with the place, e.g greens and yellows, so that my character would stand out even more.

What was one idea from the reading that you found interesting and/or that you might like to explore in your future work?

  • In this week’s reading, ‘Playing with fear: Parkour and the mobility of emotions’, written by Stephen Saville, I was left to think about the difference between feeling an embodied experience to observing another person’s experiences. It is a really fine line. The text speaks on the emotion of fear and how it interplays heavily with the risky activity parkour. However, I see parkour as a thrilling and freeing experience, empty of fear and filled with adrenaline. I have watched many parkour videos on youtube and have always been envious of the way their bodies move so swiftly from building to building. When I watch these videos however, I do not feel “free”, rather I feel “envious”. The traceur (a practitioner of parkour) would not be experiencing envy as they free run, meaning that I am not embodying their experience, but I am reacting to it. 

What was one technique you noticed in any of the media examples that worked to heighten the sense of the bodies shown in the space/s?

  • It was interesting to learn from the Every Frame a Painting video, ‘Composing Movement’, that a technique used by director Akira Kurosawa in all of his films was the movement of nature. He included some kind of weather in every shot, that being rain, fire, smoke, wind, water or snow. This technique was used to pull emotional triggers and keep visual interest in a shot. It would also highlight a character’s inner emotions.

What did you talk about in class around exploring using space in frame? What techniques have you used in your own media work?

  • In class we spoke about the use of negative space in a frame, meaning, space where there is no action or focus.
  • It was interesting to discuss the different ways that negative space can be used to enhance or create meaning to a scene.
  • Negative space can assist in showing the proportions of something/someone. For example, using a long shot to highlight how small someone is whilst next to a tall mountain. Rather than just using a wide shot with part of the mountain in the frame, a long shot is used to exaggerate the belittled experience that the character is feeling.
  • Colour
  • Removing clutter from the frame is a great and simple way of highlighting loneliness and isolation

What did you explore or talk about exploring using colour in frame? What techniques have you used in your own media work?

  • Colours within the frame can be a reflection of how a character is feeling. 
  • The use of colour can help to associate characters to places or vice versa.
  • It can be used to highlight status  
  • In my work for this week I used colour as a way of pulling focus to the main character and showing how they are slightly out of place. This is important in my work because the character is in the house that she grew up in but things have changed and she feels misplaced.

What was/were the theme/s that your classmates noticed in your work for assignment 1?

  • In assignment 1 my classmates could recognise that I had made all of my pieces very differently, they all had different storylines and different characters.

What theme/s did you notice in your own work? Or, if there were none, what are some themes or ideas that you’re interested in exploring in the media collection for Assignment 2?

  • I struggled with finding a common theme in my assignment 1 works.
  • For assignment 2 I really want to find an aesthetic that is unique to my works. That may be the timing, the types of shots, the music used, audio layering ect.

 

 

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