Monthly Archives: September 2018

As I said in my very first blog post when I chose Priming, I defined it as the exposure to one stimulus which influences a response to a subsequent stimulus. Seeing priming through this lens, I set out to prime the audience to react a certain way upon seeing my film, Disruption.

I think that the stationary wide shots lull the audience into a sense of calm and invites them to explore the scene. Our minds are always trying to find things to notice, to give meaning to. And these shots really get the audience to strain their focus and search for meaning. Of course, there really isn’t any and when the audience is in a state of intense focus, it’s completely shattered by the trains. The purpose of this project was to create that feeling in response to priming, but it evolved into something more. It, I would argue, forces the audience to sit back and take in the mundane. It explores the relationship of humanity and the natural world we reside in. Are we disrupting our own ability to notice so much of the world by continuing to push forward with technology and industry?

This assignment taught me the passive nature of noticing. This is one of the reasons I wanted to prime the audience to be disrupted and confused. I wanted to try and push the audience to explore their own notions of what is is to be in the act of noticing. The film forces the audience to actively decide what to notice in film. The genre of nonfiction is much broader than I initially considered, and lends itself to such a wide range of experiments into human nature. Before this project If I heard “non-fiction media” I would simply think it a synonym for documentary. But there is so much more to the genre. Easily the most interesting part, in my opinion, lies within experimental films. Exploring what it means to notice, and what it means to prime your audience to garner a certain reaction and delving into non-narrative film making has really sparked several ideas that I’m keen to explore in both my final assignment, but also beyond this class as a filmmaker.

To refine this experiment, I think I should have more than one shoot day. I got some great clips, but having more footage would have made for an easier, more flexible experience in the edit. For next time, I want to explore multiple spaces. I want to delve into a similar juxtaposition of nature and man but really explore the feeling of light and darkness. I think going to multiple spaces lend itself to that, because you can bring the audience from one completely separate environment to another. I think this would also lend itself to widening the scale of the project. I could really get in depth and explore each space. Expanding the run time mightn’t have worked in this case, it may have lost its impact if it was much longer. But if the audience was being moved from space to space and the feel of each is vastly different, I think that would give the film some legs and allow me to push the duration out further. This would allow me to deeply explore noticing and priming.

So… I’m nearly there! For my final edit, I am really continuing to focus on absolutely nailing the ending. I think it is easily the most important part of the piece, and I’ve really trimmed down the fat from the rest of the piece to be able to double the ending in length.

I want to add a bunch more strange audio clips I’ve got saved on my computer as well. Some stuff I just recorded around the train station will help to disrupt the audience’s concentration and create that sense of confusion I am going for.

A reading from several weeks ago by Peter Cusack (edited by Angus Carlyle and Cathy Lane) helped me to reflect upon the audio in my piece over the last day or so. It argues that field recordings give a great feeling of “spatiality, atmosphere and timing”. This is really important for my piece, because in order to get the reaction out of the audience that I am aiming to achieve, I need to not only disrupt the visual elements of the piece, I need to completely tear down that feeling of spatial and atmospheric uniformity that the recordings have conveyed throughout the piece. The scenery has a calm, tranquil atmosphere and spatially places the audience in that area, distant from any civilization. The train clips rip the audience away from those areas, but the audio still provides an atmospheric and spatial relationship. Those clips place the audience right beside a train. So in order to break that I need to make the audio throughout the end of the piece much less discernible, and much more complex. This will help to completely drop all of that away and leave the audience completely bereft of anything to notice other than the entire collapse of the film itself, and leave them confused and their attention completely disrupted.

Reference

Cusack, P., 2013. On Listening. Devon: UniformBooks

Another exhibition down. This time with the entire class and 2 guest industry speakers. The main take away from my presentation was MORE. The ending just needs more. It needs to be longer, it needs to be louder, and it needs to be more chaotic. I definitely agree with this, because if that ending doesnt work and isn’t effective at really disorienting the audience…then I think the whole piece will fall flat.

The video I used for the presentation

On the positive side, the nature/scenery shots were all well shot. The juxtaposition of the long shots with the quick transition into trains flying by certainly create that disrupting effect I’m going for, and I think it will all work really well if it’s tied together with a strong ending.

The audio was also brought up a lot, I think it needs to be amped up for the final edit. If I really want to disorient the audience and truly interrupt their ability to focus and notice I need to bombard them both visually and with sound. It’s definitely the most lacking element of the piece and I really need to add a lot more sounds/disjointed clips of audio at the ending.

I think for the final piece ending, I will cut together some really rapid cuts between the trains, the scenery and black screen. I will completely disregard the uniform time constraints I have built up throughout the film at the end and have it just completely collapse on itself until it suddenly cuts to black. Hopefully this will really enable me to get that reaction from the audience that I have tried to prime them towards.

In wednesdays class we had a little mini group presentation and gained some feedback from Hannah and a few of our peers. This unfinished video is all I had to show because I needed to do a lot of reshooting the day before and didn’t have time to edit it into the piece. But I got some incredible feedback about how to end the piece from hannah which I think will really tie it together. She suggested that I end the sequence by completely uprooting everything. Make it as chaotic and unintelligible as possible. I think layering the videos and toying around with the opacities will help out with this.

I also showed the group the video that was in my last blog, and the layering/opacity effect in that film seemed to be a positive mentioned by a few people. So I think that effect will definitely play a part in that final sequence of my finished edit.

On top of this, I think I need to work on keeping a uniform time for each wide shot. Originally I was going to just import them and leave them unedited, but to really create that cohesive feel between the shots of nature, I think I will edit them down to all be exactly 30 seconds. Hopefully this will help me to create a sense of uniformity across the piece that will make the complete lack of such a feeling at the end feel even more impactful. I’d also like to experiment will really playing around with the sounds at the end of the film. I think creating that completely confusing, dissaraying sequence visually will disrupt the audience’s attention and ability to notice, and throwing in random train station sounds and clips jumbled together will bring it together.

So for this piece, we used 4 different film techniques to create a quick edit with the footage we collected. I’ll go through how these techniques were used and how I intend to implement them.

Metric Montage

Obviously this one is massive for me. It’s really important that my piece has a very steady, even flow throughout those wide shots. I like the way, in this piece, everything is exact and even, it creates a great juxtaposition with the disrupting nature of the actual content.

In my final piece, I really want to play with this. I think its going to help the pacing a lot to have those steady, 30 second intervals of quiet shots. That structure, hopefully, will help with the break down and complete confusion at the end of the piece (more on that in my next blog post!)

Superimposition

This I hadn’t really considered at all, but I loved the effect in this short. I think it helps create that confusion because the audience don’t know what to notice and what to focus on.

For the actual short film, I think I will gradually introduce this into the film and ramp up that effect as it gets closer to the climax of the film to help break down that structured format I will set up throughout the first 2 and a half minutes or so.

Colour Adjustment

Although I love how this effect, I don’t think I will use it because it channels the audience’s attention. It gives them something to focus on, and I definitely want to avoid that. I want the audience to really struggle, and have no idea what they are meant to focus their attention towards.

Graphic Match

Similarly to colour adjustment, I think matching movement/shots graphically helps the audience too much. It works in the long still wide shots, but other than that I’ll probably try to avoid this. I don’t want any technique that aids the audience by channeling their focus to one specific point.

So before filming this coming week, I wanted to touch on why I chose to shoot at Royal Park, and then also discuss Scott Macdonald’s work and how it impacts my film.

As I said in my previous post, I chose Royal Park for my assignment. I did this because I think it has the perfect scenery surrounding the train station. There is a big park, a golf range and lots of green/leafy trees to shoot. There are also some great views of hills/cliffs/looking back at the city that could really add to the piece. Convenience is also pretty important in case I need to do reshoots, and its only 1 station away from my house.

Something we talked about in class today also quite struck me. In Macdonald’s “Avant-Doc: Eight Intersections” he talks about the lumiere brothers and their “City Symphones”. This is sort of along the same lines as my assignment, and something I definitely continually think about exploring for my next and final assessment. Exploring city life through avant-garde filmmaking is a really interesting way to document a society. Rather than just producing a standard documentary talking about the city and its history, thinking more creatively about how you represent a city, town, suburb or anything can really help to build a narrative behind your film. Why are you cutting here, why are you including that shot, why is this clip important, why is that sound integral etc. Hopefully my piece can build upon this, and reflect something greater about the area its depicting. Its obviously reflecting upon the nature of industry/man imposing itself upon the natural, but I hope it also says something about us. It invites the audience to actually notice nature, something I think we really do these days, and it shows the man made trains as harsh agents imposing themselves upon the audience, limiting our ability to notice anything other than the trains themselves.

Reference

MacDonald, Scott. Film Quarterly; Winter 2010; 64, 2; Performing Arts Periodicals Database pg. 50

I designed this recipe with one main goal first and foremost: Replication. I wanted it to be incredibly precise, easily understood and easily reproduced. Since I am trying to focus a lot of my shooting around techniques used by James Benning, and trying to let my camera and filming constraints do a lot of the editing for me (in order to remove some subjectivity from the piece) I wanted to make sure the shots I collect could be done by anyone. And that if another person went along to Royal Park Station (which by the way is where I have decided to shoot) they could come away with very similar, workable footage.

Visually, its very straightforward. Every shot is timed and there will be plenty of footage to work with (fingers crossed, the shooting is happening this week over the mid sem break). I think these shots will all ensure I get the kind of feel Im going for. None of the wide shots will include any of the station, I will get a combination of greenery and sky shots which will be a nice contrast, and I should get plenty of rapid left to right and right to left train movement to use for the quick transitions.

In terms of the audio, I want to make sure I really capture the elements around the train station because I want to embed them throughout the piece, very quietly, in order to just give the slightest hint to the audience of the location, but have it be quiet enough that it might just sound like background noise. So I’ve made sure to put in that I will capture all the man made noises that would occur there…for example the myki sounds, the loud speaker talking about train run times, the noise the green button makes when you press it for information etc.

This is the first exploration into the themes I have been exploring with this piece. I chose a very quiet street juxtaposed with a loud main road just nearby. I’m just beginning to piece together the idea of my project, I want to prime the audience to feel confused and create a very disjointed viewing experience. I used exactly 20 second shots throughout the first part of the film, and then the last few clips are all 1 second in duration. I like the incredibly sudden shift in tone from slow, long, wide shots to rapid, quick cuts. The jump in sound really sells the change in feel as well, I had to edit down the sound of the wind/atmosphere of the wide shots, so a better shotgun mic is definitely worth using for the final piece to cut that stuff out. The quieter those shots are, the better the transition will be.

I think for my final piece, I’m going to do a nature vs man element. The long, wide shots will be of something natural (scenery etc) and the quick cuts will be industrial. I was given the idea of using a train station for my location, which I think is good. Having the trains also imparts that movement shift that is present in this video from the cars which I think also helps transition from the slow to rapid cuts. I’ll just need to scout around for a good train station that has scenery, because I don’t want anything in the long wide shots that would hint at the true location being the train station. I think all my shots will be facing away from the train station to achieve this. And I think the use of the tripod for my actual piece will really sell the feeling in the wide shots. I need those shots to be perfectly still so using a tripod for those will be very important.

For this assignment, I’ve chosen Priming as the word I am going to explore noticing through. For me, Priming is the exposure to one stimulus which influences a response to a subsequent stimulus. I think I’m going to focus specifically on the audience for this task. I haven’t really thought through the process yet but I want to focus on priming the audience to feel a particular way throughout my final piece, namely discomfort or confusion.

Something I want to incorporate into my film is a shooting technique used by James Benning in his film Los. Filmed around Los Angeles with a stationary camera/tripod, all 35 shots in his film were exactly 2 and a half minutes in duration. This idea of letting the camera do the editing for you is very intriguing to me. Along a similar vein is an exercise we did in class today. We had to do 5 shots purely duration based (we did 10 seconds) and then we had to do 5 shots where something within the frame dictated when to start/cut (we did when someone began walking up the stairs).

For my assignment I think I will use a bit of a middle ground between the two (our piece and Bennings’) and shoot for around 30 seconds per shot. Obviously I’ll need to refine the duration constraints once I’ve established what Im actually shooting, but I’m definitely intrigued by the idea of constrained shooting.

Benning and Silke Panse in their interview “Land As Protagonist” also discuss this notion of disregarding the idea of a subjective narrative in order to “see something that is not them”. I’m definitely drawn to this idea and, like Benning, will use a tripod with static shots throughout my piece and in those longer 30 second shots. Perhaps juxtaposing that with rapid quick cuts in order to create that sense of unease in the audience that I am aiming to prime.