Category Archives: On class content

Film and TV 1 Reviews

The Chase

Extremely well shot, loved the colour grading, sound, actors and range of shots and choreography of actors was all really well done. The tension was built really well but the story lacked. It ended before anything had happened. Also I feel like the decisions that the girl made in that situation were unrealistic. I highly doubt many young women would run into a secluded alley if they felt they were being followed. It would have been more powerful if it was shot at night, and then that might have made more sense. I liked the suspense, but I think the ending would have been better with closure. It felt like the entire thing was leading up to something big, and then it just ended. Really well shot and cut together though. This team worked really well with moving shots, angles and perspective.

 

Budgerigar

Budgerigar was really funny. I liked it. The colours were fantastic and the way that tension was built and the fast cuts were used was fantastic. I particularly loved the brave use of dramatic lighting, it came out really well and wasn’t unnecessary or showy, it just fit the scene. Didn’t like the twist of him being in love with the brother that was like himself.

 

Sliced

Cutting the scene with the girlfriend was a really good decision. I loved the symmetry of your shots. It was really well shot. The script could have used some tightening on the details, and some tiny improvements, but so could most films. It was really good, it was genuinely funny, the story was clear and well told, the shots in the supermarket (despite the unfortunate placement of the bread haha) and the dramatic outdoor shot of him taking the bread out of a baggie were superb. I do think ‘White Bread’ was a better title though, kinda emulates ‘White Powder’.

 

Shelter

I liked it, but the story was a little cliché, and seemed more like a small scene from a feature film rather than a short film, that wasn’t really an issue I’m just not sure if that was the intent.  I thought it was well shot and the space was used really well. The sliding door thing was really cool, and the use of light was great, whether done in post or during the shoot. I didn’t get the vacuum nozzle gun and the calculator wall thing though. The film didn’t seem like a comedy so to have those rather novel props in there was just confusing rather than humorous. It detracted from the storyline, distracted the viewers and killed the tone of the piece a little.

 

Milk

I really loved Milk. It was relatable and funny. It had a shaky start though, that first scene didn’t really flow well. The cuts of the second housemate were a little confusing; something didn’t fit together well there. However, from the moment that the non-empathetic-pickle-eating-housemate says there is no milk, the piece flows. Some of those moving shots are insanely good, but one was a little too shaky. That one shot might have been better with a stationary camera. The ending was great though and loved the “ethnic kid stole my scooter” thing. I love comedy that picks on racism itself and how stupid it sounds rather than any particular race or person. The story was perfect for a five minute short. The film was built up really well and there’s nothing like an ironic ending. I can’t really remember that well but I think the audio could have used a little fine tuning.

 

Week 9 Class and Organisation

Organisation of our Korsakow project.

We’re really on track with our Korsakow project. We each have given tasks, so this week outside of class we will each conduct 5 different interviews, each consisting of 4 questions. That gives up 60 clips in total. We decided to shoot on our phones, horizontally, and all will be framed the same way.

Then by next week’s class we will have a draft put together to show in class. Then we will work more on the interface design and key words of the Korsakow during that week.

The week after that we will work on the essay. We have already decided that we will each write 600 words on a different topic. I will be covering the content of the piece.

We have all this information tracked in a Gant chart.DSC_4813

33 Objects

DSC_4794 DSC_4796This week I went to visit the NGV, and check out the new works there. Something I noticed was there is now a lot of media art on exhibition, whereas a few years ago it was mainly paintings and stills.

One artwork that seemed relevant to our media class in particular was Charlie Sofo’s video piece, 33 Objects That Can Fit Through the Hole in my Pocket.

This arwork showed the artist’s feet and random objects fell out the bottom of his trousers after shaking his feet. It was list-like, in that the objects were random and were connected by their ability to fall through his pocket. It also reminded me of our Korsakow projects because it was extremely abstract.

When watching these random objects fall out of the artist’s pocket, I had no idea what it meant or what the artist was trying to do. The description of the artwork states that it “raises questions about perceived and actual and resourcefulness or artists, humorously critiquing criteria that claim to separate treasure from trash.”

This is an interpretation that I would never have guessed at, and I think it is an example of how ambiguous media list-like works can be, and how this does not devalue them.

Week 8 lecture, Media 1

Korsakow clips mean nothing on their own, they gain meaning through their connections to other clips.

Filtered through the subjectivity of the maker. Doesn’t have to be grounded in reality. It’s all about the voice of the filmmaker. The essay and its relationship with experience. Documentary is all non-fictional cinema. Essay films are a category within documentary. Not so much telling you what to think as an invitation to think with the creator. Exploratory as it is a thinking through of a … who knows what.

Style and genre differ. Genre has specific qualifiers that make it a specific genre, styles have different elements that are similar but can fit into different genres. Genre is more about content than how you make it go about. Style is about what it is about. Our Korsakow films can be any genre, but the style is important.

We cannot know what our intent is. Intent does not survive anything. Parody and satire undermine intent. Intent counts for nothing.

Lighting Class, Film 1

I am really excited by the fact that the lights are easier than expected to set up and operate. As a videographer who uses natural lighting for all of my work (as a low budget events videographer must) I was used to making do and working with what was there. The idea that I can manipulate lighting, and quite easily, is really exciting and opens up so many possibilities. I know that soft lighting is really dreamy and easier to work with, but I really like the theatrical possibilities of using direct, hard lighting. Films such as Sin City and The Graduate did it so well!

Lists as Art

In order to compliment this week’s Media 1 reading, I looked into the art of lists, or lists as art. As mentioned in a previous reading, lists are considered naïve compared to traditional literature because they lack narrative and story. However, this doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable or beautiful.

I read this article about artists and their lists, unrelated to their art

And this list of artists who use lists in their art

It was interesting because the lists say so much about the people who write them, and in my opinion are more personal even than a story written by these artists might be. This because they are true, they are not fiction. Lists are compiled by what is chosen to display and what is chosen not to display. You can tell a lot about a person, or an artist by what they choose to list and what they do not.

Behind the Candelabra

I watched this movie almost by accident, I had nothing to do and was procrastinating wildly when I found it on my housemate’s hard drive and gave it a play.

I belong to Gen Y. A generation that is so used to hypermedia that we refuse to pay attention for more than two minutes to anything we stumble across on the web. So naturally, I found myself skimming through the movie.

I watched this semi-non-fiction, fictional narrative, in a non-linear way. It was an interesting way to go about it. Completely different to the Korsakow project that I created and the ones we viewed. Those were not narratives, they were lists. The interface guided the user between objects on a list, whereas in the movie I guided myself between different stages of a story. It didn’t matter that they weren’t in order.

This I think would be the only way to effectively tell a story through a Korsakow project. Rather than trying to tell a narrative, take different stages in a story. It needs to be a story such as the exploration of the deterioration of a relationship, where the cause and effect aren’t necessarily the most important thing, more rather, the beginning status and the end status are important and different events that show how the protagonists got there.

I now have an idea for a Korsakow fiction project where it explores one person’s life through a diary. Each clip having a date but the viewer not having the opportunity to watch them in order, only relatively randomly. So you can explore someone’s journey not from start to finish but from random state to random state and piece together their personality gradually. I think it’s a great idea and could work fictionally or non-fictionally if you were to use a real person and a real visual diary, or to create a person and their story through fiction.

Week 7 Classes Media 1

Because I enjoy doing it.

You’ll never really excel at anything- to the best of your ability, unless you enjoy doing it for the sake of doing it. No exterior motivators will motivate you as much as the pure enjoyment of doing that thing.

 

Group dynamics are important.

Try to establish who enjoys doing what.

 

When brainstorming, don’t filter. Judge later, not initially. 

The Korsakow project is more about telling a non-linear story than the content. This is hard for me to get my head around. I try to think of really clear meanings and stories rather than the abstract types that Korsakow needs. Brainstorming for this will lead to some weird possibilities.

Week 3 Class Notes

Reality:

Must have verisimilitude- it can be verified. It is of this world, and not a world (eg. fiction). In interactive documentary we make claims about reality. Between the user and the artefact, claims are made about reality.

The tools that we use have limitations. Take these limitations and ask ‘what can it do?’ The limitations set the groundwork for what cannot be done, and also help you to understand what it can do. Therefore we enhance our creativity.

Simplicity is best.

It is difficult to negate in film. In some media forms, like film and picture, it is easy to show what something is but not what it is not. In something like a documentary it is possible to negate what something is, thus creating a multi-dimensional point or points of view.

Relations

The over-all theme for our Integrated Media mini-clips is ‘relations’. I feel like this is basically meaning ‘connections’, which comes up in my academic blogs posts all the time. It also came up in today’s Integrated Media lecture, where Adrian Miles commented that everything is related and therefore the world is a mess (obviously paraphrased). It is also discussed on the media blog here.

Everything is related. In the clips we are looking at the relationship between different things and the camera, and the frame, and itself. So far I have made six clips, three are already up and three will be uploaded to the blog tomorrow.

In these I have had to relate light, not light and shadow to the medium of the 6-10 second clip. Here’s a little info on my thought process:

Light: Here the frame is dark and the only parts of the frame that are illuminated are illuminated by the artificial light of an iPad. This is deliberate use of space. It casts light on the user, who is reading the iPad. He doesn’t move, in order to keep the focus on the illumination and the aesthetics of the light in the frame and not on him as the subject. I chose the settings on my phone in order to emphasise relationship between the light and the frame it is within.

Not light: This is similar to the first clip because it also has an illuminated subject but uses time and not space like the first clip. There is only darkness for many seconds until a light flashes revealing the subject for a moment and then flashing back to darkness. The sudden flash of light reveals what is there in the ‘not light’, or darkness. The relationship is between what is in the not light, and the curiosity of the user. It relies on this curiosity to be surprising and interesting.

Shadows: This is relatively simple in that the shadow is large and grows larger until is fills the frame and casts darkness on the entire frame when it becomes engulfed in shadow. The relationship is between the light, the shadow, the frame and the user, as the user is eventually engulfed by the shadow, when the light disappears, as the frame becomes dark.