Traditional documentary or what is commonly known as documentary is essentially a collection text information with visual as supporting materials. This is to solidify the knowledge that it is attempting to transmit to the audiences. While there is nothing wrong with this format of transmission, to the audience of today’s standard entertainment become a key element to keep their interest to continue watching. This is a by-product of online media being widely available on multiple platform or different kinds of audiences, contents are free, therefore they becomes disposable, if the point of interest does not line up.

Political documentaries can often be seen as propaganda, but sometimes it is merely a method of mobilizing the public towards a certain direction of development. As policy is not always on the governmental scale of a country, it can be applied to as small as an individual or smaller if there it is something that can be ‘governed’. In this following video shown below is my 3rd production of this semester, a conceptual attempt to create a documentary solely based on sensations. By the modern standard, pieces that are not ‘entertaining’ are often ignored by the majority, however when the audience have no choice but to consume it, that would be out of the calculation. Leaving the ‘entertainment’ element on the side and focus on the essence and the essence alone.

This documentary piece can be seen as a suggestion of simply slowing down or upon further investigation it becomes ‘modern meditation’. “Modern Meditation has materialised from people seeking a more flexible and contemporary practice than traditional meditation can offer…The result is a highly individualised practice that meets the needs of those practicing it.” (Jeff Cannon, 2015)

Being poetic in a way that there is no need for texts to guide/babysitting the audiences. As perviously stated, this piece is solely directed by sensation, the complete opposite to rational audience, this documentary is addressed to real people, people that are not complete rational simply because they cannot be rational all the time, so might say “follow the guts feeling…” or at least that’s how I remember it.

Thus the construction of this piece is made by having the “problem” being in the 1st act creating a chaotic sensation, frustration, pressure and all those common anxiety of the modern practice of workflow. Then present a couple solutions to the audience by having this section being unusually long, meditative, and calm with a much slower pacing to depict a suggestion of ‘meditation’ or simply ‘slowing down’. Although it is expected that the latter would be the more common version of most people’s understanding, it is all the more rewarding for those who have figured out the B story behind the piece, in a way is much like tasting the Tam part of Tim Tam.

The choice of music in the second act in some way suggestion religious meditation, despite the song is originally made for a play with nothing to do with religion. This may not be a huge part of the documentary, but it is indeed suggesting that direction if the audience is willing to accept this version of the message.

It is on purpose that this documentary does not give a clear message. Each individual’s path is forged with their own hand, even if that path is given, it is ultimately their choice to follow or not follow, therefore the intention of this documentary is to mobilising people to start thinking about how to create their own counter-measure to this constantly enlarging disadvantage of expected unreasonable efficiency of the modern society.

Perhaps it may be another Great Depression bubble that we are simply unaware of? Assuming it is of such nature, one of the best tactic is to avoid it by co-existing with it, assuming the trend of development is still mainly focusing on efficiencies.

Reference:
Jeff, C, 2015, The Simple Truth to Modern Meditation,, blog post, updated on 02/20/2015 11:10 am, viewed 22nd May 2018,

Here is the script written by myself and used during the video, I know there is a few typo here and there, I also changes the script on the fly a lot, so if something don’t match perfectly, that’s why.

Script:
At the very beginning of the course, I thought this is all about symbolism, using certain elements to deliver a suggestive message to the audience. Since I wasn’t able to attend the 1st week as I was in Japan with minimal resources to complete documents and so on, I wasn’t able to do the 1st assessment properly, things starts from the 2nd here.

In the 2nd assessment, I went to my partner’s familiar location, the Royal Botanist Garden, attempting to notice something everything 10 min during my stay. Although this is not the 1st time me paying the garden a visit, I still managed to find a few interesting bits surround the garden, such as the tram stop where all numbers leads to the same destination…to be honest I wasn’t impressed or I should say noticing things out of the blue.

1 week after my visit to the garden, we gathered ourselves in the class as we are supposed to as students. We had a look at all of the video that we’ve taken in our unfamiliar location, again I wasn’t exactly impressed, but of course I made myself look a bit more interested to keep an ever so slightly positive mood. From what my brain have gathered, all of her videos suggests a pattern, blindspot, areas outside of our/camera’s field of view, which apparently became her project. Meanwhile, I was thinking of structures and movement, without realising that I’m walking into a swamp full of mist.

In the 3rd assessment, I was very tunnel visioning in making time-lapse, a form of media that fits both themes, structure and time. As I was going all-in with time-lapse, I wasn’t trying new things, I wasn’t trying to make something that might look bizarre yet interesting looking media, I was just doing what everyone is doing on the internet these days. At the Pitch presentation, I made an inside joke by naming most of editing documents with “The Pitchfork” which I thought was obvious enough for everyone to figure out, turns out, it was quite the opposite.

After the Pitch presentation, I went back to the “drawing board”, re-thinking what and how would work for assessment 4. So what’s better than looking at some of the examples from the learning resources, then proceed to refurbish something from my past works, perhaps I can find something there.

And as it turns out, I did, looking at some of the photos that I’ve taken back when I was in year 12 doing Art class, I’ve paying attention to shadows itself and things that emerges with it.

I figured that James Benning’s work alines with mine the most, and so I proceed to do something similar, although the technical part is only as complex as complex as putting a camera on a tripod and leave it there for a longer than usual or necessary amount of time. In James Benning’s examples, he uses planes as a human elements that separates itself from the mostly nature imagery.

In my own work however, I used mainly pedestrians as the moving component to suggestive that this is indeed a moving sequence. I also used urban elements as the majority of the frame which is clearly the opposite to the example my trials are based on, the shadow projected by the trees to suggest how minimal natures are in the city yet it remains apparent, meanwhile have shadows that are clearly projected by man-made structure yet it remains difficult enough to tell what exactly it or could be.

That was a brief summary of what I personally did during the course, I’ll let the sequence play until the end of this probably not too meaningful video.

End of the Script

Here are the links to my pervious Blog posts, if you’d like to look into it in slightly more detail.
M4A2_Prompt
M4A2_Noticing
M4A2_Reflecting
M4A2_Refining
M4A3_Experiment_1
M4A3_Experiment_2
M4A3_Experiment_3
M4A3_Refining
M4A3_Pitch
M4A3_Pitch_Reflection

After the pitching in class without any unnecessary artefacts (eg. slideshows), I took the presentation to a more direct approach which comes with the tradeoff of “flavourless” meaning if this was meant for investors this won’t go well. However, since I’m dealing with people who are not looking directly at wealth gain, I decided to take the more honest approach. I chose to not use a cheat-sheet that apparently everyone but me used it, so that I am more than a reading machine, because I mean if I am to read a block of texts I might as well just read it myself, hence there is no point of having a presentation (by the way, this also applies to slideshow with slide contain more than 20 words that are not quotes).

Usually I’m not one for long speech of something that could’ve been explained in a few sentences, so I’ll continue that “style” here. (eg. making Coke not so much of a potion made of 90% sugar, but a day-to-day drink)

That aside, the pitchforking was…well half successful and half unsuccessful, I made the main points fairly “clear”, but too scattered which creates a few clouds in the air due to not confident in presenting. The idea of using the sense of speed (Method) is delivered, however, the “Meaning” was not, the judges sees my works (I think) as not methodologically creative with a meaning that isn’t exactly clear to understand without textual/vocal explanations (hence failed attempt).

So the direction that were suggested are to “try to use/experiment different methods to potentially declare the meaning more effectively” which I added to the pervious post “M4A3 – The Pitch”. From that I figured that I was too tunnel vision for the subject which limited me into thinking that I have to time-laps everything for task 4 without realising that using difference might help me achieve my goal more clearly or purposefully.

After the pitching, I looked at others works (Especially those who came after me), and found something rather outstanding. Sometimes I see the judges puts more thoughts into their project then they do, which is ironic no matter how anyone look at it, specifically those ones that do the basic of basic works to just pass the subject/task. (No offence to them, but nevertheless it buggers me a ton).

After the refinement from “M4A3 – Refinement”, I figured my theme for Task 4 (M4A4) will be “To further explore the difference between humanity and nature” and/or “Have we really separated ourself from nature”. This is a continuation from the questions from Task 2 (M4A2) where the focus was mostly on visual elements, to answer these 2 new questions, I will explore the matter not only by increasing the speed but rather slowing. As for the video I used for the quote on quote pitching, it’s in the recent post “M4A3 – Refinement”

The slowing portion will work in a very different way as oppose to fastening. This can be explained by numbers, lets say the speed of humanity is 10 meanwhile nature is 2, the effect of time-laps is 2x and slow-mo is 0.5x. The result is very simple as below.

Humanity (Time-laps): 10 x 2 = 20
Humanity (Slow-mo): 10 x 0.5 = 5
Humanity (Difference): 20 – 5 = 15
Nature (Time-laps): 2 x 2 = 4
Nature (Slow-mo): 2 x 0.5 = 1
Nature (Difference): 4 – 1 = 3

As we can see from the (difference), Humanity reacts to a simple manipulation of speed much more than Nature do, the difference (In scale) between Humanity and Nature remains the same, while with the greater the magnifier the easier it is for the audience to notice the difference as seen in my pervious time-laps experiments. As for how I will get the slow-mo portion work, I’ll be using iPhone due to my camera isn’t made for slow-mo. Yes, you heard me right, an iPhone, incase you haven’t noticed already, there is a misconception of using “better” equipment, no matter how far the technologies have developed, if the content is meaningless, those fancy equipments are nothing more than a “burden to budgets” or “waste of resource”. The advantage the iPhone provides me is obviously the mobility and budget since I already own it (Which will otherwise be ridiculous).

With all those being said or written, to put it in a simpler form, my main focus in Task 4 will be “Difference between Humanity and Nature”

I took quite a bit of inspiration from a Taiwanese graphic novel (#childhood_memory #Still_own_a_copy_myself) “Turn Right, Turn Left” or “A Chance of Sunshine” (After translated to English) from Jimmy Liao. Where the novel talks about how people lives so close to each other in the city, meanwhile have minimal communication and the need of a chance encounter to start one. The novel often feature mysterious creatures in the background to creates a sense of mysteries surrounding the world, often time rabbits. Highly recommended!!!

While this may not be much of a refinement, but more of a reassembling the pieces, including works from years back when I started doing time-laps.

By clamping the 4 pieces together, I noticed/realised that the buildings that we human made will eventually becomes or maybe already is a part of nature in a world where we don’t exist as human anymore. The speed difference between the human element is multiplied under the effect of time-laps as expected. This depicts the nature of how we human are typically rapidly developed only to die down fairly quickly not long after, meanwhile nature is much slower in development but typically have a much longer lifespan/duration.

PS: The pitchfork was just a tiny joke for me to remember what this is about, instead of the standard “The Pitch” I prefer something like “The Pitchfork returns” or “The Complete Pitchfork Act II” adding a bit of life to these 1/0s.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2NKca8wTnlBS09BUmZtUmNYNXM

Experiment 3

Changed to the use of a slower time-laps by decreasing the time gap between shots from 15 sec to 4 sec, this increases the speed of the movement not by too much but just enough to notice that nature (In this case, the clouds) does move and changes quite a bit over 2 hours.

Experiment 2 (Side)
50,000 by 18,880 pixels. Before any explanation, the question here is “Does the 2 triangles line up each other?”

PS: Recommended to download an view offline due to the file size.

By adding a dot in between, it was suppose to make it easier to judge if the 2 triangles lines up, however, instead of providing that, it makes us to doubt if they lines up. The massive size is to create a bigger negative space to distract the audience.

Q: What did you learned about making media through noticing that you could apply to future project?

A: In question form (I know I shouldn’t answer a question with more questions, but I’m doing it anyway)
1: How does media use movement, timelines and structure (Can be Cinematography) to create blind spot for the audience to notice the symbolism that might implies important reference?
2: How does media use outside information to influence their audience to think in a certain way.

Q1: What are the difference and similarities between what you expected to notice and what you recorded?

A1: It was fairly different from what I was expecting to see, probably because of the lack of lecture during the visit, the lack of someone constantly giving out information about certain subjects and the lack of constant focus on one subject at a time. It became more of a park rather than a outdoor museum of plants, like the garden wasn’t even there, people walking past people just like any average parks. There were also some private properties inside an open public garden which was a slight bit of surprise to my tiny mind of mine. On my way to home, I also discovered that some of the tram stops in that area all leads to Melbourne University as their final destination, and no, they’re not the same tram line.

Q2: How do you think your partner’s way of collecting media differs from yours?

A2: I think her way of collecting pieces was more generalised as I might have mentioned in my last post, which is pretty much the opposite to my tunnel vision way of collecting. The end result of hers is a few of big information chunks or to put it in Mason-reading’s term, a huge list of items/events, meanwhile mine was a number of scattered fragments which is similar to the Patrick Pound’s exhibition way of collecting, probably due to my photography background (During year 10 to year 12, I was a full-time photography focused student).

Q3: How has making this work lead you to understand key ideas of noticing in relation to reading, exhibition, discussion?

A3: Throughout the activities such as reading, exhibition and discussion, everything follows a similar line of logic, scattered fragments of informations (In any shape of form) that might or might not be related, and from these information, people generates ideas of what the event might be from their own perspective. Regarding reading and exhibition, lets take novels in general as an example, the reader reads a line of texts, and imagine an image of the event, sample action like “Person A punched Person B” the word “punched” can possibly implies many ways punching, was it a low-blow? Was it a direct hit? Was it…etc, this is typically bends to the reader’s perspective of how most people punch people. Regarding discussion, this is a multiplied version of “reading” and “exhibition” where multiple perspective combine their common ground into one, however, in doing so, this will hides some of specific portions which tides to one’s mind but not the others, let’s take movies as an example, “You know nothing, John Snow” what does this line implies? Does John Snow really knows nothing about the event? Is he an idiot? Or…is he pretending to not know the event? While I’m no Game of Throne fan, follower, or cultist…etc, I’ll say this should be enough to get an idea of what I’m trying to say here.