return to norm – week 9 lecture

things are finally getting back into the swing of things. that break kinda threw everybody but it’s starting to seem back to normal. at least for now anyways. who knows what it’ll be like in a week.

this weeks lecture was all about the k-films as people start preparing themselves for the major project. to start with, adrian had a lot to say about cinema being visual, not language based. which makes sense. you think about the first films, they were silent. these could be viewed, understood and enjoyed worldwide because images can be received by everyone. yes, we have sound now, but language was never our first port of call for communication. long before there were ever words and language, their were drawings. even in our k-films, we use the still thumbnails as a port of communication to tell what is coming next. people look and see before they read and hear. another example adrian gave was the idea of grammar. in language, a sentence cannot be out of order. the wrong grammar means it won’t make sense. but you can take any series of film clips and put them in any order and they will still make sense. maybe not the same sense that the creator intended but they can still be understood. again this is where korsakow thrives, because it can exist beyond the realm of linear storytelling.

one topic that has been of a lot of discussion has been lists. and an interesting point in the lecture was whether lists can create infinite possibilities. there were some different answers to this question, about it depending on what kind of list or who is listing. but when you think about it, i guess any list can be infinite. it’s like being given a constraint, like what was discussed last week, the constraint allows you to think not just of what you would normally think of but of what else there is out there. and what else can be infinite. there was also the idea that when a list only presents a sample of what is available, then whatever is left can have infinite possibilities. but the part i thought was most important wasn’t about what is or isn’t on the list being infinite or finite but the relationships between things on or off the list being important. because anyone can write a list. but the relationships take thought and time and can have infinite possibilities depending on the individual who is making it. similar to films and especially with k-films, it’s the relationships between clips that’s important, not the clips themselves.

a tiny respite – week 6

there were no constraint tasks this week. i suspect this is because we were all doing our very important k-films. this means i cannot complete one of my contract clauses which said to discuss how i went about achieving the set task for the week. instead, imma talk about how i actually found making the k-film because i guess that was really the set task. and it links all the others together.

what i found the most interesting about making my k-film was that when i was made to put all these mostly random videos together to form one cohesive entity, i began to find patterns and similarities between these videos, even when i had not intended any of them. how does a clip of a tree branch relate to the sun setting relate to a photo mobile spinning in my room? on first glance, there are no connections. but as humans and as story makers and readers, we find meaning in everything we receive. this stems back to the active audience theory that we are all the creators of our own interpretations regardless of what the intended meaning was. i had not intended any meaning in my videos apart from fulfilling the given brief. yet one put together they formed connections. they required keywords, ins and outs, and these needed to make sense. because connections and relations are how we make sense of the world that we live in. nothing is separate, everything is connected. so when i was making my k-film i surprised myself by how much these videos actually connected to each other.

the more you know eh?