Ryan, Bogost, Ernst

Ernst

  • Considers attained knowledges as being entwined with the act of telling. This provides a narrative sequence as facts that exist in their own right are interwoven into a contextual reality.
  • Chronology may provide an order in the form of sequencing ie. “one thing after another” but it does not provide patterning or an explanation of narrative as “one thing because of another”.

Ryan

  • The term “narrative” = the combination of story (the action/sequence of events) and narrative discourse (the events as represented)

Bogost

  • Ontography: A description of the nature or essence of things.
  • The rhetoric of lists: listing can be a practical way of reading and understanding film.

Critique of past student work: “Kitchen stories”

‘Kitchen Stories’  was a narration of recipes that ran alongside a series of colour coordinated images. I found it to be an interesting arrangement with a nicely organised progression of images which were arranged by colour. I didn’t find the documentary all together engaging through. The background music that ran throughout sounded too much like elevator music and kind of lulled me.

 

Notes on reading Bordwell and Thompson

  • Causality, Time and Space as central to the understanding of a narrative.
  • Parallelism: a similarity among different elements (eg. Dorothy’s 3 Kansas farm hands are parallel to her 3 companions in Oz
  • Invites us to compare and contrast the various elements at play.
  • Plot and Story: We often infer events that are not explicitly presented. We make assumptions based on cues.
  • Story: presumed and inferred events; diegesis Ithe totally world of the action)
  • Plot: The explicitly presented, nondiegetic material
  • Cause and Effect: spectators seek to connect events by means of cause and effect: we look for causal motivation.
  • Time: spectators construct story time on the basis of what the plot presents
  • We are active audiences in navigating through a films manipulation of order,duration and frequency and constructing chronology.
  • Space: The physical space of actors as well as the visible space on the screen (screen space)
  • Patterns of development (plot progression): change in character knowledge, goal-oriented plot,
  • Experimental film: wilfully nonconformist
  • Abstract, Associational forms
  • DOCUMENTARY film: 
  • Categorical: aims to convey information in a simple fashion
  • Rhetorical: Filmmaker wished to make an argument or convince the spectator.

Objects of definition

I drew the curtains because I thought the darkness would cloak the content a little, leaving things in shadow and thus meeting the brief’s call to show only “parts”  of things. But in hindsight this video is a little too dark.

Self Assessment Criteria

I’ve been sick all week and as a result have missed most of my classes. Right in the midst of assessment-frenzy too!

Anyway, this is my updated criteria for my self-assessment. I will fill this out every week and post it to my blog under the category of “self-assessment” so I create an archive of all the weeks and easily grade myself at the end of the semester.

By giving myself a mark out of 5 every week, I will be able to calculate an overall average at the end of the semester so the grade I give myself accurately reflects the amount of work I have put in.

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