Isaac is a 19 year old singer/songwriter appearing on this years season of The Voice Australia. He got chairs to turn in his blind audition and chose TEAM JOEL! Check out his audition if you missed it, he is truly talented and one of my personal favourites to win the show.
Korsakow Film: More Updates
HI!
So, my groups K-Film is shaping up and looking pretty good so far, which we are really happy and excited about. Earlier this week we went to a dance studio and got all of our filming done. We shot a dancer freestyle, with the constraint being we could only film her below her waist. Aesthetically it looks really super great. We shot this on a proper Sony camera to keep the best quality we could. Then for the inner circle section of our film, we got heaps of random shots of the dancer going about her day as a dancer – these cups were fined with an iPhone, as we wanted the quality to decrease as the inner circle of our film is supposed to be grainy and real and raw. I’m really happy with how the footage turned out!
Now it is time to put all the footage into Korsakow and play around with actually making our film. I really hope the final product turns out to be as awesome as we have been picturing it 🙂
Week 11 Reading
This weeks reading focuses on discussion around documentary, data and the effect of the internet on such things in todays day ‘n’ age. It also talks a lot about the project film: We Feel Line. ‘Still live, We Feel Fine still impresses for its innovation and for its realisation, bringing computer science, data visualisation and storytelling to bear on content that is unlocked by tapping into the common metadata structure of blogs.’
As usual, here are some quotes and notes I took from the reading:
‘The affordances of networked connectivity offer the potential to re-contextualise documentary material through mobilising the enormous co-creative potential of human discourse captured in the web. The challenge in these marriages of mass media form and rhizomatic network is to find new ways of shaping attention into a coherent experience. To do so we have to re-invent the social praxis of documentary, creating new visual and informational grammars.’
‘In 1926 John Grierson defined documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. In using the term ‘actuality’ he was referring to a specific form; the newsreels – short film observations of topical events – that were shown alongside features in cinemas then. The snatches of self-expression which are Harris’s raw material, can be seen as ‘actualities’ of the Information Age, units of content reflecting the world which can, with a creative treatment, be fashioned into a documentary artefact.’
‘Documentary presents us with arguments about our shared world, propositions about the world that are made as part of a process of social praxis. ‘ – Nichols
‘Video content ‘of the web’, live to the affordances of networked connectivity, has particular attractions to the documentary producer. It has the potential to introduce different voices into a linear text, to offer in-depth investigation of particular sequences, and to re-contextualise documentary material through mobilising the enormous co-creative potential of human discourse captured in the web. It offers the potential for new ways to construct argument and bring evidence to bear in documentary’s attempt to shape our shared world.’
Week 10 Reading
Plotting The Database
So with this weeks reading I focused on the notion of Plot and the way in which it is used within a database interface. Below I have listed some of the statements/quotes that I found most interesting..
‘Plot arranges events to take shape in the mind as a single entity; a contemplative whole made of structurally related parts: cause and effect chains, points of tension and release, beginnings, middles and ends.’
The entire section on ‘entry points’ within an interface plot I found to be really super interesting and helpful, as it relates completely back to my groups Korsakow Film. This is reflective of the way in which a viewer is able to enter at any point (however constrained that point is by the creator) and bounce around form place to place within the interface, but also having it all related to tell a non-linear narrative. – ‘A user chooses when and where to exit a database narrative; where a user enters, as with most narratives, is usually through a designed portal. Certain types of networked, distributed or transmedia narratives do have multiple entry points, where an encounter with a narrative segment leads to a maze of other segments. But the opening interface to a database is a staged entry and may offer a broad, restricted or randomly generated set of files and paths. Entry points can establish narrative frames, metaphors for navigation , genre motifs, present views of data sets, describe elements of plot, character, setting or theme – or withhold any and all of these. However the interface is designed, the entry point prepares the user for interaction and most importantly the desire for interaction.’
.‘An interface is more than a map. It is a map that changes with the user’s navigation in time, offering multiple interpretive paths and levels of abstraction. But a plotted interface – to a database narrative or fiction, for example – withholds as much as it reveals. A plotted interface provides micro and macro views, but also limits and delays access to those views. ‘
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I apologise for the lack of clear intent with these reading blog posts. I write them along while I do the reading and just take notes on the things I think sound good or interest me. Sometimes it’s hard to find such things when I don’t fully get the main idea of the reading, but I just wing it and write about what comes to mind haha. So yeah, sorry, but enjoy!
So this video actually made me cry. Thruthfuly.
Here is a video that has gone viral! It was all over my Facebook feed for a couple of days in a row, and I just kept scrolling past it. Until now. I was slightly sick of it appearing all the time so I just decided to watch it, and I’m really glad I did, as it made me smile and laugh and cry just a little all at the same time. I can understand why so many people were posting it and sharing it and forcing it upon all their Facebook friends – it’s worth watching. Especially if you are a talent show fan, or just simply a fan of good music and songs with strong messages.
It’s is a video from Britain’s Got Talent, where two young boys who go by the name of ‘BAM’ audition for the 2014 season. Their audition is hugely cute, and they definitely do have a lot of talent. But it is the meaning of their song and the impact it had on me emotionally, and obviously on majority of the rest of the world, or at least my Facebook timeline world, that is truly inspiring. Worth the 8 minutes out of your time to watch, so I suggest you watch it 🙂
K-Film Update.
Yo, so this is just a little blog post to keep you (and me) updated on the progress of my groups Korsakow film… Today we presented our workshopped idea to the class, and i think it went well. I do feel like our idea can get a bit lost in the explanation,however, in our minds it seems clear enough and I think once it is actually filmed and edited and created, the audience will understand it. As always, it is not a given that the audience will interpret the exact meaning we intend the film to be portraying, but I think that with different viewings of the final product, the main concept or idea/theme will be pretty evident.
We start filming in a week and I’m excited. If it all works out the way we have imagined it, the K-Fim should be quite good and interesting.
K-Film: more ideas
So here are some more of the ideas we have had for our group project. I feel like these ideas are a lot more solid than what we had previously, and this overall theme of reality and discontent in life through the distortion of reality vs perception shown through a dance and a dancer’s mind is really interesting!
. Dancing feet – Music – no vocals, just instrumental. Dance is formalized
. Inside videos – life is not formalized
– inside a studio
– mirrors – happy/smiling – angry/upset
– putting makeup on/taking it off – mirror
– putting on dance shoes
– rehearsing – teacher yelling
– Girl crying
– Girl receiving flowers/getting congratulated
– Girl from behind – running away – down a laneway
– ‘selfie’ style in studio dancing
– young kids dancing – Abbey
narration: text and voice over. – Inside Dancers mind.
Week 9 Reading
Shields is a creative nonfiction writer, and this is a fantastic book. Why are we reading this? Because it is all about what in film is called editing, and in Korsakow might be thought of as linking via keywords. What Shields thinks of as collage. Could have been written for this subject. – Adrian Miles
So this weeks reading was a lot easier to read for me than the previous ones, however I have failed to grasp the exact meaning or intent of what the reading is supposed to be telling us. This is why I have placed Adrian’s explanation of why we are reading it above, as this has somewhat helped my understanding of the readings intent.
‘The law of mosaics: how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes.’ (317) – This statement was highlighted, so I feel like it’s kind of important. Once read along with Adrian’s comment about ‘editing’ and Korsakow’s keywords, the statement makes a little more sense. Then after reading further down through the reading, it becomes apparent to me that this reading is quite insightful into the way narrative and ‘collage’ style narrative relates to what we are trying to accomplish with Korsakow. It talks of rhythm and arranging material in narrative, and this plays in with the whole concept of Korskow and how a non linear narrative can still flow through rhythm and movement and pattern and relation.
Week 8 Analysis & Reflection Q3:
Blow Up is a 1966 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.In this scene we can see the choreography of the actors, camera, frame and focus. As covered in the lecture describe what Antonioni would have considered when directing the actors and the camera.
When filming this scene, Michelangelo Antonioni would have had to have considered the camera movement, angels, focus, and direction of the actors. He would have figured out the blocking of the scene, and gone through this with the camera operator to decide on when to do pans or tilts, when to follow the movement and when to stay static. He would have also had to let the camera operator know what kind of depth of field he was looking for in particular sections, allowing the camera operator to decide on when to change the focus either during shooting via a focus pull or in between shots. He would have considered the actors movement greatly in this scene, as their movement heavily enforces the camera movement.
Week 8 Analysis & Reflection Q2:
Out of the readings from week 5-7 I enjoyed most reading about film crews and ways of developing a film crew in the most effective way (week 6 reading). This reading stated that in a low budget film, the crew needs to be committed to the project, stating ‘a low-budget enterprise needs optimal unity because much will be done by few. Belief and morale really matter.’ (P.386) This really made me think to my own groups project and how we have all been working together, believing in ourselves and our film, in order to get things done the best we can. Another section of this reading I found to be interesting was the part on the Camera Department of a film crew, and especially the Camera Operator, as this is my role in my groups project. I have never really done any professional camera work before, so going into this short film project has been a little daunting to me, however I do really love learning and working with the camera. In this explanation of a good camera operator, the reading talks of how they are fairly quick to learn the signs for an actors movement, to be able to follow that movement smoothly. It discusses how a director views the scenes action in front of, or sometimes behind the camera, whereas the camera operator views it through the cameras lens, seeing it in its framed cinematic form. So this made it really clear to me that the director and camera operator have to trust each other and work as a team to capture the shots in a particular way. ‘The director must be able to rely on the camera operators discrimination,’ as the reading states. (p.396)