Monthly Archives: April 2014

Week 08: Documenting

This week I wanted to write a post about the concept of documenting.

I love taking photos. A lot. My iPhoto library will back me up on that one. But do I, and those of my generation, purportedly raised by the internet, take too many photos? Do we forget to be ‘in the moment’ whilst we’re documenting the moment?

This is a very common thread of ideas, often spouted by older generations who talk about the time when they only have one roll of film to last them a month and you had to be scarce with your photo-taking opportunities. That’s great, and it worked for them. But I love that I have the power, technology, space (physical and digital) to take as many photos and videos as my heart desires. I embrace it as part of the culture I’m a part of.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t often stop and think about whether I’m taking more time ‘getting the shot’ than I am enjoying the surroundings. Whenever I go to a music concert, I want to be able to remember all of my favourite bands singing all of my favourite songs, so I will often take video footage of them. But sometimes, I find myself watching their live performances unfold through the screen of my camera or smartphone instead of looking directly at the action unfolding on the stage.

But I wouldn’t sacrifice the memories attached with having these photos and videos. I love reminiscing and being able to go back and relive the excitement from my prized moments of adventure again and again.

I watch a lot of YouTube, and some of my favourite vloggers often attend YouTube conferences, meet-ups and parties. With vlogging camera at (a flattering) arm’s distance away, then let you into their world and what they’re experiencing. But in there ‘performance’, are they forgetting to experience their surroundings simultaneously?

Around the same time I was thinking about all of this, one of my favourite YouTubers published this video:

I like how she talks about the connections and relations you make with people when you’re not worrying about the ‘post-production’ or ‘editing’ of these moments (both real and metaphorical). I think this relates into the conception of meaning-creation that we’ve been looking into this semester in IM1, but more importantly, I love how digitalised content can allow you to relive those moments of connection again and again… in full HD.

(Image via flickr)

Week 08: Meeting notes

Today Imogen, Ren and myself met for our first brainstorming session in the class lab for our final Korsakow project. We began by individually brainstorming our initial ideas and thoughts, before pitching five of them to each other and finalising a concept for our final project. Below are our individual brainstorms:

Emily:

  1. Contrast of business/urban life (buildings, roads, suits) Vs. natural spaces (parks, recreational areas, greenery) in Melbourne.
  2. Bicycles – different viewpoints as cyclists navigate a city. Difference between recreational riders and commuters (cycling perceived as dangerous in the city, but relaxed and leisurely in the suburbs).Could explore helmet fashion, or the politics of bike lanes.
  3. Weather, and how it’s going to be changing in the next four weeks while we film. Fluctuations in temperature, landscapes, clouds, skies, colder mornings, more heating, more blankets on beds, etc.
  4. The process of making something – not sure what (a magazine? A meal? A house?). Concerns about how this would translate into a multilinear non-narrative as it could be confusing if not presented chronologically.
  5. In focus – using depth of field to show abstracted images, objects and places before gradually shifting them into focus to reveal what it is. This will encourage the audience to look at familiar things in new ways.

Imogen:

  1. Creating environments without showing people in them. For example, a person’s happiest moment of the week (whether that be pub on a friday night, playing with their kids on the weekend, etc). Using recorded sounds and footage from the locations, along with short interviews with different people, to create atmosphere without ever showing them. Could also contrast with the worst moments of a week (waking up on monday morning, etc). A similar documentary is Body of Memories which asks people about their personal memories.
  2. Filming feet – a walk in someone else’s shoes. Using footage of feet to describe people by showcasing the movements of their feet, the footwear they choose, and the location they’re in.
  3. Noticing Art in the Ordinary. Seeing everyday art in things that go unnoticed, such as floral displays, baristas and their coffees, etc. Focusing on visually beautiful things.
  4. Ageing – Contrasting footage of old people, children, adolescents, adults, to question what it means to be a certain age. Also using challenges to stereotypes to get a wide picture.
  5. Habits – both good and bad. Capturing people fidgeting, procrastinating, nose picking, etc. Looking at body language and every person’s little idiosyncrasies.

Ren:

  1. Depth and distance through perspective. Using wide-angle shots, still frames, constructed angles in complementary and opposing ways.
  2. Movement – through vehicles, humans, animals, and imagery (such as wind blowing through the trees).
  3. Man and Machine.
  4. Speed – slow motion, fast motion, and time lapse.

We then discussed all of the options we had, and rearranged each post-it-note idea into piles which had similarities. We realised that we were going to be able to incorporate elements from all of our favourite ideas into one of two ideas. These were:

  • Man vs. machine (contrast between nature and urban life)
  • Footsteps (following the lives of individuals and creating portraits through their feet)

We settled on the latter idea, and began speaking about the possibilities this option could give us, and exactly how we would do it. We want to use low-angle perspective to document 60 individual’s feet to provide a glimpse into their personality without every showing their face. We think we will choose one question which we can consistently ask each person we film that will offer an insight into them. The more we thought about it, the more we realised how much you can tell about a person from their shoes.

To further focus our work, we set some preliminary constraints that each clip will be less than 30 seconds, will be a single take, and have brief voiceovers to explain an element of our ‘characters’. We agreed that we all like stylistic qualities such as consistency (where shots have a relatively easy to understand relationship with each other), and visually pleasing aesthetic shots. We decided to film all of our clips on our personal DSLR cameras. We foresee that our keywords will end up being about body language (grouping together all subjects with crossed legs. or all subjects who fidget, etc).

Seth and our classmates had come great comments about our idea, which helped us to further define our prompt. One person suggested that we will almost be creating a typology of feet, which was an interesting notion. One response was that it was going to be hard to find 60 different people and still have them be distinctive, however we think that this could ultimately contribute to the overall point of the piece. Someone else likes that it will get us out of our comfort zone to interview and film people we don’t know. In this way, it will be an exploratory process not only for the viewer, but for the creator as well. Seth thinks the fact we have strong, defined constraints will help us, but asked us to consider what the work as a whole will be doing – whether it is specifically about shoes individually, or more about the shoes’ relationship to the people.

We are now going to research some documentary examples which will align with our project and start thinking about a digital mood board on which to collate our research. We will aim to have some test shots ready for next week’s class to see if this will work.

(Image via flickr)

Week 05: Troubleshooting

This week I finally got involved with the Korsakow software and we had our first play around with it in class. I had a very steep learning curve this week, as I am one of those media students who knows next to nothing about file extensions, compressions, etc. Ironically, I actually enjoyed learning as much as I could about this, mostly from the help of Ren and Imogen, who I sit on a table with and who have both studied media at TAFE.

I was introduced to MPEG streamclip, and have been learning how to use this to compress my files (which are HUGE thanks to filming on a DSLR). I also found myself returning to Adrian’s Korsakow tips and tricks post on the IM1 blog for help. He also has a post here about what Korsakow is and what it can do.

A big realisation I had was that Korsakow is purely authoring software, and does not allow for any post-production.  It is for building, and joining things together and making relations between the individual assets.

Another tip we got in the lab was that it is most easy to try and use a descriptive name for the video and thumbnail files as this is what is displayed in the project window, and makes for easy building/SNUifying. Adrian has a good post on Korsakow workflow here.

I’ve been building up my Korsakow vocabulary and have decided to make a glossary of sorts which I will add to over the coming weeks. So far it stands as:

  • Fragments – the individual clips
  • Previews – the ‘click here’ options on the interface
  • Timeline – shows the length of the fragment with a playhead below the clip
  • Viewing window – the clip you view when you select it by clicking
  • Stage – the entire space you are viewing the K-film on
  • SNU – smallest narrative units (the fragments)
  • Keywords – Ins describe the SNU, outs describe what it’s looking for (using Boolean logic)
  • Interface – the design of where the previews, viewing window, etc. sit on the screen
  • Lives – you can set how many times you see a clip before it dies.
  • Assets – your media files
  • POCs (points of contact) – in-POCs and out-POCs, defined here.
  • Background sound – a clip which can play for the entire duration of the k-film

We must remember: Korsakow doesn’t save automatically. SAVE SAVE SAVE. 

We have to manage our files extremely well. You have to keep your media assets in the same place for the life of your project. You must nominate an exports file and only ever do exports to web.

I also found out that when you load a K-film in a browser, you are presented with the option to ‘continue’ or ‘restart’. So, if you are viewing for a second time, you can go back to where you left it. However, the whole idea of a non-linear piece is to have no ‘start’ and ‘end’, isn’t it?

Keywords are a really important part of Korsakow, because they will ultimately be what keeps an audience with your work. You want them to find relations, but not too obviously. They operate as if you are building a jigsaw puzzle. So before you decide them, think about what patterns you are trying to create and what relationships you want to make.

Week 08: Reflections

Constraints, constraints, constraints. The magical word of the semester.

What we discussed this week was about how formal constraints actually allow creativity. In fact, creativity can’t happen without constraints. For example, in music, there are only certain notes that you can use. And if you decide to write a pop song, there’s a structure you follow.

Image via flickr

Image via flickr

As young media professionals, we need to stop waiting for inspiration, or the lightbulb moment, and just make. We need to realise that we do have things to say and things to make if we can learn to stop, look, listen and notice the world around us. We must release ourselves from thinking we can only do this if we impose our will upon the world. We are so caught up in epistophelia – the obsession with explaining – that we take away all of the magic, poetry, mystery and responsibility as a maker. There’s nothing left. Our work will be didactic and dull if we think each clip has to explain itself. The clips don’t actually matter in themselves, but they matter by virtue of the relations which are formed. This is where meaning happens. Then, we are composing something.

We then spoke about the ‘essay film’, and how these too can be documentaries. Essays are filtered through the thoughts and subjectivity of the person making it – they are not trying to look at the world objectively (or if they are, they’re already failing). Essay films, therefore, invite conversation and dialogue. They invite the viewer to join the filmmaker as they think through and explore something.

Once again, it was drilled into us that our interpretation of a text has no relationship to what the author intended. Context can never be preserved – we read films/television/paintings/books differently over the years as our own experience and worldview changes with our environments. Intent does not survive anything – it’s the easiest thing to break. That’s why we have satire and parody.

We finished by discussing the fact that expression and exploration are tangental and multi-linear in nature. We think that linearity comes first and that multi-linearity is a new thing. It’s actually the other way round: ideas aggregate around each other and always have. This is the way we experience the world, through webs of association. Whereas linearity imposes order, hierarchy, priority. This helped me to clear up a few things which I was wondering about last week. 

(Image via flickr)

 

Week 07: Linear, non-linear, and multi-linear

It’s taken me quite some time to get my head around the concepts of linear vs. non-linear narratives (and non-narratives) throughout the IM1 course. And then there’s multi-linear works, which play off the way that our world is developing to become more and more entangled.
This is very foreign to my way of thinking, and it’s something I want to be able to understand, I just think it might take some grappling with.
Some things that I need to start thinking about are:
  • Chronology
  • Hierarchy
  • Primal order
  • Causality
  • Immersion
  • Memory
  • Flashbacks/flashforwards

What about Godard’s famous quote: “I agree that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order.” It reminds me of the Latin term in medias res – which translates to ‘in the midst of things’ – which refers to the act of starting in the middle rather than the beginning.

I think Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) is a good starting point for me to think of non-linear film. Or even the more modern Inception (2010) or Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004).

However, I’m not sure that there are any popularised versions of a multi-linear work that I can as easily relate to. Obviously, I have the exposure I’ve had to K-films and interactive documentaries in IM1 so far, but I wonder how it would translate in a more ‘mainstream’ media society.

I asked a few friends of mine, what does multilinear mean to you? Some of the things they said were:

I think it means when many story lines are all going on at the same time.

Another agreed with the above, but went on to say:

I think it’s also when those multiple stories intersect and interact with each other finally. Like in Love Actually or something.

I think that this way of thinking may be too time-based, and instead, how we should conceive of multi-linearity is more akin to ‘multi-tasking’. Essentially, it’s asking the brain to keep track of a few things at once, and possibly retain the information in case you need it later on to help make connections and relations. What do you reckon?

(Image via flickr)

Week 07: FOMO

I’ve been wanting to write this post on my IM1 blog for a little while. It’s going to be all about FOMO – the fear of missing out.

I don’t know if this is a trait I have always had, but I am a bit of a ‘completionist‘. I always have to experience and (attempt to) understand everything I encounter – whether this be crossing the road, where I have to be 100% entirely certain that I’ve accounted for all moving cars, objects, etc, or reading a novel, where I must have read every sentence in every paragraph on every page (yes, even the boring acknowledgements at the end). If I open a news article or (god forbid) a long-form piece, you can bet it won’t be exited until I’ve read everything on the page.

I recently got really into the world of audiobooks through the Amazon website audible.com. I would use these books as a tool to help me get to sleep when I was battling a particularly insomniac-like few months. But what would inevitably happen would be that I would leave a chapter on to play whilst I fell asleep, then wake up in the morning and have to listen to the entire chapter again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

What concerns me about Korsakow is that every time you view a K-film, you could have a different experience or a different trajectory. I know that this is one of the wonderful features of the software, which teaches us to think of media consumption in a new, fragmented way. But almost every time I’ve watched a K-film so far, I’m overwhelmingly concerned with the content that I might miss.

Because K-films are database-driven, there can be many relationships with many fragments because of the way they are pulled from the database. But they can also be independent and self-sufficient. The way you can build these ‘structures’ can vary immensely.

Sometimes I will see a preview that immediately grabs my attention and I know I want to view it, but if I decide to click another preview instead, it can take a very long time for the clip to resurface again (due to the key wording nature of Korsakow). Or, depending on how the author has set up the SNUs, it may ‘die’ and never reappear – denying me the option to ever experience and (attempt to) understand it, as I inherently do.

Something I picked up on early in the course is that interactive media, and K-films in particular, are designed to be grazed on. They are structured in a way that the user can leave and return as many times as they may want, and consume the content of a work in vastly different ways from the way we consume traditional media.

I’m not too sure if I’m ready to embrace this new method of viewing entirely yet. I’m all for it, but I might need to make some adjustments first.

(Image via shameonjade)

Week 07: Ceci N’est Pas Embres

In our lab last week, we took a brief look at Matt Soar’s K-film and discussed the following:

  • The opening SNU is all about animation, roads, setting of location. It is leading us somewhere.
  • Soar has deliberately chosen to establish a scene/the arrival.
  • The work is complex in terms of the multiple fragments presented because Soar has invested a lot of post-production in each individual clip.
  • There are sequences with animation added to them, some which use a kind of stop-motion with still photographs.
  • There is a lot of diversity/idiosyncrasy.
  • The main interface is seasonal, showing time of year and location. However, the K-film uses multiple interfaces.
  • This presents an almost bricolage effect, connecting the interface and the patterns that arise in the film – using images over the top of each other, interfaces which change shape and structures, and animation over real life footage.
  • Seth told us that the work is representative  of Soar’s previous careers (working in construction, design, advertising and animation). Therefore, the piece explores this creative processes at the time, making it an incredibly interesting self-reflexive piece.

You can find Soar’s film here.

Adrian also pointed us in the direction of this interview with Matt Soar. I really like reading about his response to issues such as “the edge spaces between, and around, established media” which he is currently interesting in. I also liked hearing him talk about his creative process (and how this intercepts with the commercialised world).

He also raised a really interesting point about how you display interactive works to large audiences (such as at a film festival where both himself and Florian Thalhofer have displayed their K-films), when they are traditionally created for audiences of one.