LECTURE [Week 5]

This week in lectures the focus was combining two ‘traditions’ of Portrait+Found Footage.

WHAT IS ‘FOUND FOOTAGE’?

Firstly ignore the wikipedia definition of found footage which often cites genre films like Cloverfield, Quarantine, etc. Here are some points to consider:

  • Pre-existing film footage appropriated by a filmmaker and used in a way that was not originally intended. Eg. Bruce Cronner as listed below.
  • Earilest examples are avant-garde experimental (1920s); revival in 1950s New American cinema.
  • Affected by technological developments – eg. video then digitalisation…means that ‘found footage’ has an evolving meaning. (A.Kuhn and G.Westwell, A Dictionary of Film Studies (2012) )

Found footage for our project has to be royalty free footage and can’t be stock footage. Below is a Bruce Conner movie where he has used clips of movies to form a story.

BRUCE CONNER movie

Some suggestions for project 3 was to try and show a contrast between found footage and portrait and to take risks with our work like speeding up the frame or slowing it down. Even to source animation or footage to add meaning to the work.

Some suggested websites are:

  • Oneminutewonder.tv/episodes/matilda-tristram/
  • shot of the week.com/channels/documentary/

One documentary from Gemma Green-Hope ‘Wreck this Journal’ shows the possibility of experimenting with form by using a real journal, animating within it and ultimately destroying it.

ON READING (AND WRITING)

What is an ‘academic’ publication?

Reading an academic employs a different range of skills than say reading a novel or a newspaper. You have to read for gist, scan, look for key phrases and evaluate structure and content. Here are some suggested ways of doing just that:

  1. Download and print the article
  2. Write notes and highlight as you go
  3. Don’t just start reading the beginning…to ‘read’ academic writing requires a different strategy ie. Reading key sections (abstract,intro, conclusion)’ looking at structure…before plunging into a beginning to end read.
  4. Skimming is a legitimate part of doing it ‘properly’.

GOALS IN TERMS OF ‘SUCCESSFUL’ READING

Write a brief summary of the main ideas of the text then evaluate the text considering the strengths and limitations of it. Comment on its relevance for your purpose (e.g. background research on an essay topic OR creative inspiration for a creative/technical skill you are developing). Why am I reading this? How does it apply for the topic of the week and how does it inform your practice? You can be critical – talk about the difficulty.

 REFLECTION

Even though I teach academic English to foreign students, this academic reading part of the lecture was in part useful, particularly about summarising the text. Seems like quite a bit of work.
Conner’s work on using found footage was illuminating though I do wonder how much footage I’ll be able to get for my project. I fear I’ll be stepping into a copyright conundrum as my subject is an artist.

PROJECT 2 – Self Portrait

Russell McGilton

Fear and Love

Russell McGilton PROJECT 2 RMIT MEDIA 1 from Russell on Vimeo.

In my self-portrait, I wanted to focus on the two things that are my greatest concern: my five-year-old’s well-being and my own. I hoped that this aspect of my project would reveal my vulnerability and thus show a part of me.

While becoming a father has been the most profound experience of my life it has, unfortunately, turned me into a worry machine! The unpredictability of what a child will do, that everything is a game to them, and will, without one thought of the consequences, do something that sets me off into a panic.

As much as this is true, I did, on the way, forget my own safety. Without ‘thinking of the consequences’ I was hit by a tram. My daughter’s response floored me: ‘How are you going to protect me daddy if you’re gone?’

So here, in my film, I wanted to show my on going anxiety, that the ‘adult playground’ is in fact not really for people at all and it is something I have to negotiate every day.

In terms of editing, I was inspired by the Kuleshov Effect montage by creating a repetition of the single portrait shot, and have tried, in part, to convey what seems disjointed visuals, but are in fact connected in a I kind of ‘alchemy’ to quote Scott McCloud (Blood in the Gutter). The text sutures these seemingly unconnected images and I think, even without text you would be able to ascertain a unifying meaning – anxiety over a child. You can see this with the rapid foot shaking, the clawed hands, the rapid cuts and the sound which increases with dramatic intensity towards the end.

Overall, I think I achieved what I set out to communicate. I think you get a sense very early on that it’s the perspective of myself as a father and my anxieties of the urban world for my child and myself.

On the other hand, perhaps I could’ve shown more fun aspects of fatherhood to give a sense of contrast but I let myself be dominated by the sound clips. In fact, sound has really told the narrative here – first it’s slow, then atmospheric and then mechanical and frenetic. I suspect, as I’m somewhat new to this kind of film making, have been led by the material rather than leading it.

 

 

PRACTIAL [Week 5]

Eisenstein, & the Soviet Montage

Essentially ever since cinema’s inception, there has been a great question about its complicated nature — answers to which have spawned an even greater debate among film theorists: What makes a film a film? One theory, formulated by Russian filmmaker and “Father of Montage”, Sergei Eisenstein, claims that the footage captured by a camera is nothing more than raw material. Not until that raw material is edited do you have a film — at least according to the Soviet Theory of Montage. John P. Hess of Filmmaker IQ breaks down the history of montage editing in the second video in their History of Cutting series. Check it out after the jump.

The practice of editing footage has been around since 1898 when British filmmaker Robert W. Paul cut together his film Come Along, Do!. However, it wasn’t until filmmaking pioneer and “Father of Film” D.W. Griffith began using editing techniques, such as parallel editing, that the practice became more sophisticated — a discernible film language that later became known as “continuity editing”.

As Hess points out in the video below, Griffith’s approach to editing was more practical, whereas Eisenstein’s approach was more intellectual. To put it another way, continuity editing is structural — it’s meant to get you from point A to point B without wondering where you are. Soviet montage, on the other hand, works to elicit an emotional response from the audience thanks to The Kuleshov Effect.

Check out Filmmaker IQ’s helpful video and learn about the history of Soviet Montage below. Here is a link that Robbie has suggested http://nofilmschool.com/2014/02/video-the-history-of-editing-eisenstein-the-soviet-montage-explained

LECTURE [Week 4]

MEDIA INTEGRATES THEORY AND PRACTICE

Adrian Miles proposed ‘What is the difference between thinking about what things are?’ Like a dog, a bat and snake are things but do they think? Well, they do but humans are set apart because we tell stories.

The_Thinker

As Descarte said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Our job, argues Miles, is to narrate the world, to give it meaning, or put it another way, to document ontography, that is, to be concerned with  the relationship between the environment and organic beings.

He posed this line of enquiry:

  • What do we know?
  • What we don’t we know?
  • Of what we don’t know what do we need to find out that matters
  • How will we find this?

This does read a bit like a snake eating its own tail and it would be interesting how he would apply this. It was like a friend of mine saying to his girlfriend in a bid to get closer to her, ‘Tell me something about me that I don’t know.’ They broke up.

Miles went on to say that ideas arrive yet he has no idea from where. ‘Ideas are things. There’s High Art and Low Art but when thinking is translated into action it becomes a ‘thing’.

This reminded me of the shows that I’ve put on like, ‘The Portrait of John Howard’. It was a reverse storytelling of the Dorian Gray version where the portrait got better looking and John Howard became more evil and disfigured. I have no idea where that idea came from or why that happened. Yet, I took this idea and formed it into a thing.

Mile raised a provocative thought that the media industry needs ‘in betweeners’. In other words, people who are able to function in a variety of roles or as he coined them, pejoratively, as ‘bottom feeders’. He explained that technology has changed so much that anyone can be an editor, cameramen. You need to specialise.

I don’t necessary agree with Miles on this point. Like any tool, it’s how well you use it. A good cameraman is a good cameraman and excellent editor is an excellent editor. But I will anchor the idea of uniqueness (I don’t, anyway, intend to be an editor rather a writer).

STORY

Lecturer, Liam Ward looked at narrative and non-narrative stories. ‘It’s the kernels that makes story important.’ So with that in mind he provided a set of ‘kernels’, cards in fact and told to make a sequence.

These were the questions in regards to our story.

What are the difference between the three sequences? What qualities, as a narrative, do they have? What sorts of content or fragments/sentences/paragraphs seem to work best as ‘movable’ parts? Why? What characteristics do these parts tend to have?

Then we were told to re-order and reduce the information on the cards. So it looked like this:

1st Sequence

  1. She woke up far to early
  2. She ate free food
  3. She spoke at parliament
  4. She went to media 1 lecture
  5. She went to bed and work up in a spaceship.

2nd Sequence

  1. She work up far to early
  2. She ate free food
  3. Turning point card – ‘She lost her voice’
  4. She spoke at parliament
  5. She went to bed and work up in a spaceship.

3rd Sequence

  1. She ate free food
  2. Turning point card – ‘She lost her voice’
  3. She spoke at parliament
  4. She went to bed and work up in a spaceship.
  5. Accidentally walked into a media conference

This was challenging but its easy to see how you can totally change the outcome of the story just by moving the sequence around.

WHAT IS EDITING? 

Editing, Ward instructed, is deliberately smashing things, filling gaps with meaning. A classic example of this is Stanley Kubricks, 2001: A Space Odyssey where the dawn of man throws a bone to the sky it fades to that of a satelite, thus condensing the evolution of humankind in a moment. This, Ward says, is the power of editing, taking us on a journey by showing us two images vastly separated by time leaving our brains to fill in the rest with meaning i.e. story.

Another good example is the 1920s film is the Kuleshov Effect. An actor looks to camera then follows a girl in a coffin. Ah, he must be grieving. But then, back to his face, same expression and it changes to soup. Now, is he hungry. So what happens here is that there is meaning here is meaning outside the shot, before and after.

Thus, we project a meaning for ourselves. This is something I will consider when I attempt the second project.

Furthermore, Ward went on to explain that things only have meaning because we give it to them. Take the Game of Thrones Chair.  If it wasn’t for the TV series (ie. given meaning) it would be…well, the most uncomfortable chair in the world! Instead, it is a symbol of power and authority.

game-of-thrones-iron-throne (1)

Furthermore, its also how often something is broken up can be culturally specific. For example, European films tend to have less edited frames than do American films, and less is explained in them, allowing the viewer to assemble their own story.

REFLECTIVE PORTFOLIO WRITE UP TIME

What stand out for me is:

  • the idea that story is dead. That we are the only species that tell stories (well, apart from Klingons).
  • images are connected depending on cultural relevance otherwise they’re just an ’empty’ image.
  • Space between images – the large the more artistic they can seem eg. Hollywood explains much more. Art films less.
  • Lastly, here’s a link which reminded of what Miles was saying about being not being a ‘bottom feeder’ (or inbetweener) in the contracted skills on Blade Runner http://io9.com/142-behind-the-scenes-photos-reveal-blade-runners-minia-1691950942 

PRACTICAL 1 [Week 4]

This week we were shown some experimental video to help us with our next project. Below is ‘Signer’s Suitcase’ or rather, exploding stools (glad I didn’t sit down for that one).  What is interesting in the form here, is despite the violence of the chair shooting out of the windows, there is a playful elasticity to it.

Likewise, in the second video, the obnoxious sound of someone snoring is given something it already has…amplification.

Robbie highlighted one of the student’s, Emily Mitresvski, blog, ‘Don’t show what you like, show what you’re like.’ Yes, a point to take note of. It’s easier to point out the things you enjoy but more difficult to demonstrate your personality.

In regards to our second project which is a one minute piece on ourselves using new footage. This includes sound and video.  We were advised to upload it up to vimeo and familiarise ourselves with the AV department. Sound footage is to be raw and experimented with.

A daunting to prospect. How do I portray myself within one minute?

LECTURE [WEEK 3]

MEDIA IS A PUBLIC PRACTICE

I was absent for this lecture thus I will make my comments based on the reading The ethical stance and its representation in the expressive techniques of documentary filming: a case study of Tagged Kay Donovan a Centre for Creative Practice and Cultural Economy, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology , Sydney.

tagged

This paper discusses the ethics of documentary film making. The writer, Kay Donovan,  uses her own film as an example: the 60 minute documentary Tagged about four young people over three years as they transition into adulthood. Donovan states that ‘we expect a documentary to represent in a fair and honest way somebody’s experience of reality’ and that ‘In doing this, documentarians make judgements about inherent right or wrong, goodness or badness, and they also contribute to our social discourse about what we value in our society and how we deal with it.’
Therefore, filmmaking becomes reflexive, that it is ‘checking in on itself’ as it tries to follow an ethical path. However, the portrayl of the subjects comes with the director’s own set of values and so can not be considered authentic but rather a subjective examination. There are dilemmas that the film maker must encounter from omissions of material, editing out truths to portray one that suits the narrative and the consent of the subject become a blurred proposition (i.e. how much are they consenting to?).
‘According to Nichols (1991), the key purpose of documentary is to create a representation of the historical world, which is focused around an argument that is being made about it and within that argument there is an ethical perspective.’ (Donovan)

Donovan goes on to describe that axiographic space that is ‘the Gaze’, ‘the observer and the observed’. When does the filmmaker intervene? We have seen this recently on the SBS program Struggle Street when neither the crew nor other subjects intervened to stop a pregnant woman smoking. Whereas, John Pilger in Land of Fear, actually stopped filming to help a boy that had become trapped in a trench he was digging. Pilger appears to be acting within his own and widely accepted set of ethics as opposed to the SBS filmmakers who were roundly criticised for their lack of theirs.
For Donovan, on her making of Tagged, concludes that it was reflexive one, that she took into her account her ethical standards and reflected those in her work with her subjects.

REFLECTION

Having made short documentaries, it is all too tempting to make subtle changes of ‘a truth’ of the subject in the filming and editing process. You can portray your subject positively or negatively simply with taking what they’ve said out of context or through gross omissions. I’ve always tried to make my subject to be put into a position to be judged unfairly. This aside, if we examine the famous documentary maker, Michael Moore, we can see that he has manipulated events and people to tell and push his own agenda. In a Canadian documentary Manufacturing Dissent: Uncovering Michael Moore (2007) about him, it was exposed that he had indeed had meetings with the head of General Motors when he had claimed in his own documentary Roger and Me (1989) that he had been continually rebuffed. Furthermore, there were scenes he had staged such as when he was at a shareholders meeting and the lights were turned off on him as he tried to speak. Apparently this never happened.
Anyway, it’s something to keep in mind when approaching a documentary making project in the future for we assume that if it is this genre then we assume it is documenting reality.

REFLECTION – PROJECT 1

This was much more difficult than I though it was going to be. Once the ‘selfie’ format had been ruled out it was down to examining myself. So I came up with elements of my life that have and are important to me: travel, adventure, theatre, love and family. I think you can get a good snapshot of who I am.

PRACTICAL 1 [Week 3]

Robbie showed us  Steve Reich’s Come Out (Original Version), thus introducing the idea of looping sound. It’s a bizarre, nightmarish effect.

Later, our tutor talked about using Edward De Bono’s Six Hats in regards to critiquing each other’s work. Here is a summary of them in terms of colour:

Yellow

A positive, optimistic response/something that works well

Red

Initial ‘feeling’ or hunch, immediate ‘gut reaction’.

Black

Something that doesn’t work

Green

Alternatives, creative ideas sparked by the work.

NOTES ON STUDENTS’ WORK ON MY TABLE

Maddy’s – wind chimes – delightful but annoying. Like the architecture in the images of her pile of books.

Rose – ‘false perspective’ under a sheet from a great distance made her look like she was a piece of tissue on a pavement

Jess – stop motion – travel articles – gave the work energy, movement.

Oliver – showed his eccentric character through the anachronistic group, LARP.

REFLECTION

It was great to see different perspectives on self portrait. I don’t recall her name but she took a polaroid of herself and filmed it developing. Brilliant!

Seeing other students’  work helps me to loosen up my own style and think in new ways of presenting creatively rather than relying on found footage.

Also, the ‘mind map’ that Robbie provided looks like an ordered way to congeal creative images and text.

Lastly, and which was really useful was Use ‘Lynda’ which is a website on how to use programs.

LECTURE [Week 2]

Media is not a ‘thing’ out there 

‘The media are not so much things as places which most of us inhabit, which weave in and out of our lives. Their constant messages and pleasures seem to flow around and through us, and they immerse most of our waking lives.’

Branston and Stafford, 2010, The Media Students Book

Yes, I often feel this on the train. People immersed in their media worlds, smiling to themselves as their read their tablets and listening to music or checking their phone. Nobody really wants to engage with is around them.

MEDIA TEXTS

Sites where meaning are generated through manipulation of materials and codes.

  • Do not simply ‘picture’ or reflect a reality where meaning resides

Dorothy Smith (1990) argues ‘textually mediated communicative action, social relations as integral part of al our social environment’.

‘We get passports…entered by technology.’

PRE-MODERN SOCIETY

  • Face to face interactions
  • Direct experience as an authentic experience

MODERN SOCIETY

Predominately were interact through media texts – maps, books, papers  – less authentic. We are moving away from this model of media. send – medium – message – receiver.

WILLIAM MERRIAN, 9/3/10

‘Studying me-dia: the problem of method in a post-broadcast age’ from his blog Media Studios 2.0 (see blog).

‘Post-broadcast…media ecology than ever before.’

Shibiya – social relations

PROJECT BREIF

We watched an excerpt ‘My Lobotomy’ Howard Dully Journey.

NOTICING

Media is everywhere.

‘Disciple of noticing’ Mason, J (2002) p 31.

‘As multisense beings, we are inundated with senses…’

We learn from noticing:

  • Intentionally
  • Consciously
  • Disciplined forms
  • Making and recording heightened forms of noticing.
  • Your blog is diary of noticing.

Even when there’s nothing to supposedly listen to, we listen. For example in John Cage’s masterful experimental work4′ 33″ (1952)  where nothing is played at all. But the audience, even though they were listening to nothing, hear everything else -ambient noise, people moving, coughing, traffic outside. It focused attention on ‘the other’.

We sat for some time in the lecture theatre repeating this experiment. We noticed:

  • ambient sound become louder
  • ‘Silence does not exist’
  • Anxiety of audience – not prepped about the concept
  • Silence of meditation
  • screens, posters, business cards, graffiti, hand outs, buskers, traffic lights, phone – goggle maps, packaging.
  • 3 lines of reflecting on process of noticing

TASK – FED SQUARE – NOTICING

Here we gathered at Federation Square and observed our surrounds. Traffic noise was the most obvious but as we walked around the square the video images of the Gran Prix took our attention. Then the running text on the Fed Square building advertising events and times before seeing the smaller things: signs to not cycle, no smoking signs, menus at restaurants.

asian man photo

13032015074aboriginal pole

not cycling signofficial signfed square neon REDUCED

 

REFECTION

Having made aware of noticing things, it of course affected my daily life and now I can’t escape listening to the smallest of sounds like my mother-in-law making these unusual popping squeaks when she’s cooking (no, she’s not on fire). I didn’t notice it before. Or the sound of the freeway near our house. I hadn’t really paid any attention to it before (is this a good thing?)

 

PROJECT 1 [Media Self Portrait]

The Importance of Feeling Earnest – The Evolution of Self

Adventure

Bibi-Ka-Maqbara with bike close up

When I was younger, I didn’t cope well with routine. An uncluttered, unpredictable and unplanned life was what I wanted. Cycle touring was a conduit for having an authentic connection with people. This photo conveys a sense of independence, a starkness but also a remoteness, a choice to cut off from others.  Yet, contradictorily, I strove for company and attention where ever I could find it.

 

Love

img015-3

I’d fallen head over heels for Rebecca before I left overseas.  Instead of imagined joys balmy India nights sipping gin and tonics  it was extraordinarily hot and the traffic was horrific. Eventually, after four months cycling and fighting, fighting and cycling, we went our separate ways. The sign in the image became an ironic reminder of what lay ahead.

 

Ambition

bombay to beijing side poster

I set myself the task of  writing a book ‘Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle’ at all costs – even relationships.  The book was published, a major achievement for me. More so,  was doing the one-show which I took to Edinburgh Festival.  For a sense of contrast,  I put my car keys in the shot. The cup and pen shows that I’m thinking of more shows to put on.

 

The Return

13032015074

Now, I’m not saying I’m like Bourke and Wills –  get lost, eat your camels and die (do you think they choked on a hump?) but I do relate to their quixotic project.  I often bite off more than I can chew and don’t always arrive at the destination I want to get to. I like this image of  Bourke, peering towards the light behind the Nicholas building, as if he is still searching, never satisfied no matter where he is.  Alas, a lot like myself.

5. Pepper Pigged

I’d always put off having a family for as long as possible.   I’ve included my daughter in my self portrait to show the arc in my life from independence to being someone with a dependent.  Also, she is a part of me and I am part of her – her silliness is mine. Or is that the other way around?

 

Daily Rituals

Coffee.  It’s a daily ritual for many of us. I chose this because this is what my life has become – regular, routine, mundane and something I apparently need before I begin the day. I like the way I’ve film this – coffee front and centre, leading the way, me chasing after it, completely addicted.

 

Rejuvenation

 

We bought a house recently and my partner and I, are a building a deck. Renovating seems to be the ‘normal’ thing that forty-something people do and is often a point of conversation.  I’m a little embarrassed talking about it. But there it is.  A pile of life, one shovel at a time.

 

Bamp!…Bamp!

I was watching a red-mohawked emcee try to whip an audience into a frenzy at the Brunswick Festival. I related to it having emceed before and struggling to overcome the inertia of a not-so-participant crowd. I could feel his pain.