Monthly Archives: March 2014

A new start – week 3

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here we are again, new year, new semester, new subjects. same blog. I’m back!!! did you all miss me? i probably should have done this post before my previous ones but oh well, we all know hind sight is a bitch (especially when it comes to captain hindsight – please enjoy that video) . but i’m here now so let’s talk!!! how have you been? good holiday? ok who am i kidding, i know no-one is reading this.

so what else is there to discuss? not really sure. we could do the lectures… although not much really happened in the first one except a nice little introduction to the course. at least now we know what we’ll be up to this semester (a lot of interactive video stuff from what i can gather, which is exciting to get to do). and then of course the lovely labor day meant we didn’t have a lecture this week so there’s nothing really to talk about there either. but i’ve been doing my best to stay up to date with the subject blog, checking out what adrian is discussing/blogging (i liked the feather video) and seeing what all the other students are up to on their blogs. not many have started posting yet (at least from what i could see) but i did really like Tiana’s post about the reading and it had a link to this really awesome site about the scales of everything within the universe. i’d Screen Shot 2014-03-14 at 4.45.15 PMreally recommend it, it’s a cool scroll through. although, that japanese spider crab is terrifying, especially how big it is compared to humans. if i ever saw that, i would die of fright before it would even have the chance to attack me.

anyhow, stay tuned… there’ll be more to come!

 

 

 

WWW – why, why, why? – week 3

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another week, another reading. another 5 hours down the drain. i’m not saying it’s a waste of time (well, not explicitly saying it’s a waste of time) but its the extra 4.5 hours that it took me to read it that felt like a waste of time. it shouldn’t take anyone so long to read so little. i can read entire books in that amount of time. the problem that i’m reading, just not absorbing. i can get to the end of the paragraph and realise i didn’t take in a single word. and that’s on the 6th try. and so by the end of the article i feel so emotionally drained, i can barely remember any of it anyhow. let alone enough to make a cohesive blog entry about it.

with that out of the way, lets get into the reading itself.  despite all the crazy foreign words like “Lageröffentlichkeit”, “plebeian Öffentlichkeit” and  “Gegenöffentlichkeit”, there was some interesting stuff in here. i liked most the discussion about the progression of the film/tv medium over the decades, starting with the earliest and very inaccessible film medium and ending with the highly accessible World Wide Web (WWW). Sørenssen discussed Astruc’s foretelling of the evolution of the various mediums that they would become more accessible, widespread and interactive. But it was interesting to read how this progression moved slowly through the 1900’s as film gradually found its way onto television yet was still not accessible to those without buckets of cash, and then to see how quickly it did evolve once we hit the 21st century and the internet made everything available, accessible and editable as the world moved from analogue to digital. it’s insane to think the amount of things that we can do with the tiny phones in our pockets compared to what people had to spend, do and use just to make a film 100 years ago. and insane to think how it’s going to be in 20-50 years from now. will everything interact or will we just have one big, new overarching medium that will be used for everything? guess we’ll have to wait and see.

the closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes

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another week, another set video task. and i know they shouldn’t be too hard but this one got me even more confused than last time. i guess it’s good i have the ole’ blog here to help me try and think these things out.

so, we had to take one 6 second video about “light”, one 6 second video about “not light” and one 6 second video about “shadow”. Simple!!! we use those things every day, it’s how we see and how why we don’t. and yet again, somehow, i’m just unsure. and i’ve taken u number of different videos and each one makes me more unsure of whether i’m filming “light”, “not light” or “shadow”. and again, one of my main issues as well is not really knowing how i’m going to be using these videos, how they’re meant to look or how they’re gonna fit together. we lost our class last week due to labor day so we have not yet had the chance to go through the tasks or what we are meant to do with the videos.

my problem with the videos I’ve taken so far was that to take a video that showcased some light, it had to be dark enough so that the light was obvious (we haven’t had much nice natural light lately coz of all the random rain) and thus the light created shadows and also consisted of dark. so no matter how much i tried to make it about “light”, it always seemed to also be about “not light” and “shadow”. for example, the video i’ve posted below:

Light 1 from lauren on Vimeo.

this is one of my experimental videos trying to work out what i’m doing. i feel like it is mostly about “light”, but it is also featuring “not light”. gah it’s all so confusing. maybe i’ll take some more videos later trying just to do “shadow” or “not light” rather than light and i’ll get a difference.

stay tuned

links make the world go round

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we all know how the internet works (ok, no-one really knows) but i do know that it involves links!! linking out, linking in, linking back and forth and to and fro and back again. so, to keep the links going and to expand our little online universe, here’s the link to this pretty awesome blog. it’s a good read and i hope you enjoy and spread the links and share the love around 😀

circles and squares – week 2

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our task this week was a simple one, take 3 six second videos of square objects and 3 six second videos of round things. sorry, i should say deceptively simple. i don’t even know why but this task stumped me. and it shouldn’t have. i mean, come on, 36 seconds worth of video… how can that be hard?

but for me i think it was the implications of these videos. what would they be used for? what if i don’t do them right? what if they don’t look good? there was the struggle of trying to decide what to film (should i literal?

Unknown

metaphorical? rhetorical? sarcastic?). Next came wondering whether i’m supposed to just film something straight for 6 seconds, like a 6 second photo or if that particular something should be moving or doing something or if the camera should be moving? what if the 6 seconds get boring? thank god they didn’t ask us to film a triangle shaped thing too!! coz i don’t think i have anything in my house that would fit those requirements and i would have stubbled even more! although, it is the Jewish festival or Purim coming up this weekend and we do eat these weird triangle cookies called Unknown-1hamentashens (don’t ask what they are or why). on the downside, my sister is on camp and she’s the baker of the family so we don’t actually have any around even if i did want to randomly film some.

but, despite my issues with the shapes, my overall struggle, as i’ve mentioned in a previous post, is that i still don’t fully understand the interactive documentary or the korsakow films. how are they structured? how do we make them? what do they look like and how do we view them? i understand that we took these videos to make our first film but i like to see a whole picture and know how it’s all going to fit together up front rather than start a task blindly, not sure how it’s gonna look at the end. I guess this is kinda what adrian mentioned in that first lecture, being able to put all the small pieces together to see the big picture at the end. i’m just not quite there yet. and i guess thats why i didn’t really know how to make these videos because i don’t know how they are going to look and work together when they are put together.

the interactive documentary

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this week’s reading, titled “interactive documentary: setting the field” by Sandra Gaudenzi and Judith Aston discussed the emerging (and now emerged) style of interactive documentaries or “i-docs”. now, this for me was both an interesting but difficult reading. while it was in easy to read format and did offer lots of explanations and examples, i just found it difficult to connect to what i was reading. i feel the biggest issue for me was that i have no experience with i-docs. thus, all the examples being offered and the different modes and their benefits or drawbacks often washed right over me because i really find it difficult to understand what an i-doc is and how it operates. thankfully, this is what this entire course this semester appears to be about so hopefully by week 12 i’ll be able to go back to this reading and go “oh! now i get that. so clever”. i’m just not quite there yet.

i feel as though right now, i understand the concept of what an i-doc is (ok, maybe. maybe just partially understand) but until i can experience, view or participate in one myself, i don’t think i will truly get what this was all about. but it was all interesting. about changing the ways audiences experience stories and media and information. although the first 2 of the 4 different modes of interactivity felt too similar (i’ll be honest, i couldn’t tell the difference between them) i did like the participatory and experiential modes as i feel that this is where all media will be headed in the next few years but it’s insane to see how some people have already been there making these kinds of things for years already.

the part of the article that i found the most fascinating though was the discussion of the “90-9-1 principle” which i have quoted from the article below:

“He (Nick Cohen) referred to the 90-9-1 principle, as cited by Jacob Nielson (2006), which suggests that there is a participation inequality on the Internet with only 1% of people creating content, 9% editing or modifying that content, and 90% viewing content without actively contributing.”

to me this perfectly describes the internet and myself as a user on the internet where those percentages represent my actions online as well as the actions of the online community as a whole. the internet is just so vast with so many (infinite really) pathways leading to different content and experiences, yet this content has only been created by the finest population of internet users. imagine how much there could be if the 90% of bystander users became creators. i don’t think i would ever be able to get off my computer (ok, so maybe it’s a good thing then that we’re not all creating, i do like to leave my house sometimes). if these new modes of interactive media and narratives and documentaries allow for and push more passive users to become creators then i feel that we will be heading into a really exciting and interesting future.