Tag Archives: interface

Week 11: Reflections

This week seemed to give us an arsenal of knowledge for how we can think about things as filmmakers. Below are my observations.

Interface design is incredibly important in Korsakow. Think of it as mis-en-scene. You are composing a visual space, which you will use to direct people. Don’t underestimate your audiences by showing them everything. You’re creating a world which you want to invite someone into, so that they can explore on your behalf. Don’t signpost everything, because there is poetry in absence and presence. It’s about seduction and reward: that’s what exploration is.

When thinking about how you curate your k-film, you have to think about what you include and exclude (because we all know about the politics behind these actions, right?). You have to think about video, sound, and if there will be layers in the piece? You also have to consider which software/medium is right for your message, such as whether you will used a participatory form of creation or a closed database system like Korsakow. Decide what kind of linearity it will follow. Start sketching. Think about the indexing, key wording, themes, patterns and taxonomy you are creating as you go along. Think, using granularity, about your fragments as individual units – what do they look like? How long are they? Consider remix, and how they are going to be put together, combined or recombined.

As a filmmaker, let plurality and multiplicity happen. There will never just be one relation, and you won’t ever get to decide what the relation/s is/are. Listen to the content and the meanings behind it. Don’t subscribe to the colonising idea that we treat our media according to what we want it to do, instead of thinking about what it can do. Don’t invest so much in the notion of conclusion – this is not a trait that bestows quality on your work. Make a film that lets the viewer have an experience that they want and like. It’s all up to you as a filmmaker.

(Image via flickr) 

Week 06: Troubleshooting

This week I had to learn about making thumbnails for my sketch film. Seth has a post of a few ways to do this here, but after trying a few methods I decided to just screenshot as this is easier for me to do.

I also had to learn about FTP clients and uploading our sketch film. This was a very new topic for me and I was very nervous to do it. However, following these instructions I actually found it surprisingly easy.

The rest of my ‘troubleshooting’ this week has mostly been around the film essays we wrote for last week. We had to address the content, interface, and pattern of a past student K-film project. I chose to write about ‘Eulogy to Suburbia‘ and you can find my post here.

I had to make my statements clear, make my content easy and efficient to read, and stick to the word limit (which is always a struggle of mine).

I started by thinking about what pattern is and what I wanted to talk about in the film essay. Pattern is all about the relationships which are created through recurring themes/categories/sub-cagetories/keywords/repetition.

I had to stay mindful of the difference between content (the parts and their existence within a structure) and form (which is a little closer to pattern, and all about how it’s structured).

When analysing the content, I had to think about subject matter/what it’s about. What did I notice? Are there ‘groups’ of clips that keep appearing together?

For the interface, I had to look at what was being presented to me and think about how and why it has been designed that way. Are there multiple interfaces? Does the interface change shape and structure? This post on the IM1 blog really helped me to think about the thought processes that go into designing an interface, and what to look for.