Monthly Archives: March 2014

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Quite a few people haven’t filled out the form that lets us find your blogs, please do this asap, the form is linked from the post about the first class. It’s also a worry about how illiterate about URL’s many of you are. Several of the URLs provided are to the class blog (which isn’t your blog), to an individual post within your blog, to the edit screen of an individual post in your blog. The URL of your blog is the top level URL to the default home screen of your blog, so it is usually http://www.mediafactory.org.au/firstname-lastname. Perhaps a few minutes explaining the structure of a URL is in order, not understanding the architecture of domain names and pathways is a bit like not realising that you put a +61 to call an Australian phone number from outside the country. Not going to change the world, but you’re going to be a bit of a Paris Hilton not knowing it.

If you’re name doesn’t appear in the blogroll for the integrated blog, then I don’t have a record of your name and blog. The form, as said, is from the post for the first class.

Update from the Outer Trenches

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Been a bloody busy first week of semester. Still trying to subscribe to everyone’s blogs via RSS (had some OPML hiccups), add new blogs for the newcomers, sort out classes. Let alone all the honours students.

Anyway, no lecture Monday (ducks as whoosh of collective exhalation of pleasure courses by) but the making task is ready for week 2. And the reading.

This also means that in week 3 when we gather for the 80.10.17 gabfest it will be Tuesday 12:30’s (Seth) duty and honour to have developed the first lot of questions about the first readings for the gathered panel of Adrian, Hannah, Jasmine, and Seth.

Enjoy the sun.

While it lasts.

Reading 02

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The first reading was recent work that discusses what might be different about interactive documentary. We started here as we are working in the area of interactive documentary this semester, though we are more interested in multilinear networked making more specifically and broadly than interactive documentary per se. Interactive doco is what we will make, we will think about it quite a bit, but we’re making these doco’s as much because they let us quickly engage with other things than with just documentary…

So, the second reading. Let’s be explicit here, the subject lets us test ideas, and to explore new things. As was said in formally and informally, that includes the teaching staff. Here we bring in our current research and think, with you, about it. So, the second reading looks very interesting and is something I’ve mentioned in my own work regularly. It is the relation of Astruc’s concept of caméra-stylo and new technologies of making. Astruc wrote a long time ago, but the ideas seem to provide us with ways to think about what is happening now, while also reminding us that while a lot has changed dramatically, some deeper things have not.

Set Reading

Sørenssen, Bjørn. “Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s Caméra-Stylo: The New Avant-Garde in Documentary Realized?” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008): 47–59. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Sept. 2013. (Get it while it’s hot.)

Supplementary Reading

Sobchack, Vivian. “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime.” Mille 34.Fall (1999).. (This one’s still warm from the oven too.)

This second reading is interesting because it explores in a positive way what and why video on a computer is, isn’t, could be, and so on. Nice way to approach video online precisely not as wannabe TV or cinema.

Constraint 02

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The theme of the semester is ‘relation’, as in relations and the relational. The first constrained task, which really consisted of two constrained tasks, square and round is primarily about composition and so is shape as a relation.

The second task, for making during the second week of semester, is light. This is about the relation of light in the image (for the image is, intrinsically and deeply, only about light), and light to itself (shadow).

Theme

  • Make one six to ten second clip that is about light
  • Make one six to ten second clip that is about not light
  • Make one six to ten second clip that is about shadow

Technical

  • each clip should be six to ten seconds in length (if you use Vine they will be six)
  • editing can be done in camera, or after, or not at all
  • the video needs to be published into your blog (you can use vimeo, blip.tv, or embed them yourselves)
  • there should be one video clip per blog post
  • the source media needs to be available as H.264 video

Things to consider
Should things be the same shot scale (size in frame)? Why? If they vary, why? Are they everyday things or things that have some significance to you? Perhaps one film is personal stuff, another the kitchen? (And yes, this is an exercise in noticing.)

New Blogs

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If you didn’t have a blog, and sent an email asking for one, you now have a blog. You should have got an email with username, password, log in url to your student email address. If you haven’t please check your spam filter.

Enjoy.

Reading 01

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The first reading, which is a sort of scene setting moment, is Aston, Judith, and Sandra Gaudenzi. “Interactive Documentary: Setting the Field.” Studies in Documentary Film 6.2 (2012): 125–139. (You can find a copy of this in the shoe box.)

A supplementary reading is Hight, Craig. “The Field of Digital Documentary: A Challenge to Documentary Theorists.” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008): 3–7. (You can find a copy of this in the shoe box.)

Aston and Gaudenzi are two practice based researchers in the area of interactive documentary and two of the key people behind the very active and significant i-docs project. Hight is a near neighbour (New Zealand) who, with Kate Nash (formerly Tasmania, now with the i-docs crowd in Leeds), has been publishing work around interactive documentary locally.

Things to think about: what do the authors claim to be new, or different, about interactive documentary? What sorts or types of interactive documentary do they suggest currently exist? How are these different sorts described or defined? Do these differences appear to matter to makers? Audiences? Both? How?

Constraint 01

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wpid-DSC00118-2014-03-2-19-07.jpg

This is a constrained video brief. This means you do it as described.

Theme

  1. Shoot three x six second clips (so three different movies) using round things in your house.
  2. Shoot three x six second clips (so three different movies) using square things in your house.

Technical

  • each clip should be six to ten seconds in length (if you use Vine they will be six)
  • editing can be done in camera, or after, or not at all
  • the video needs to be published into your blog (you can use vimeo, blip.tv, or embed them yourselves)
  • there should be one video clip per blog post
  • the source media needs to be available as H.264 video

Things to consider
Should things be the same shot scale (size in frame)? Why? If they vary, why? Are they everyday things or things that have some significance to you? Perhaps one film is personal stuff, another the kitchen? (And yes, this is an exercise in noticing.)