Monthly Archives: March 2014

Week 5 Lecture Notes and Thoughts Media 1

Experimental films are art for art’s sake- non argument. Beautiful things should be beautiful in themselves. It doesn’t need to do more than that to be valuable.

The value is in the perception of the viewer but it doesn’t need to have a distinct purpose. It will affect the way that people see things, even if only slightly and only for a moment.

Everything we do and everything around us has to give us something. What does the world owe me? Not the way to think.

Sell an experience not a product. What sort of experience can I provide here?

When making something you need to think about the experience it provides, this is what people are interested in now. Times have shifted from product focus to experience focus.

Documentary is future orientated.

Korsakow makes you think differently about your role as maker.

I’m excited about this. I want to see what I can do with the strange clips I’ve taken and how I will think about these in conjunction with each other. I want to see what I can do and be creative within the limitations of what I cannot do. Also, how will the medium of i-doc alter my thought process as a creator?

A close reading is not deconstruction.

Integrated Media Reading 4

I really agree with Bogost’s discussion about the way lists use, or don’t use, the language of literature. I think it is a refreshing break from the extensive and self-indulgent use of language in literature. Succinct and masterful use of language is necessary to form an eloquent and beautiful narrative though, to tell a story and to create the identification that was discussed in the reading. Lists are not better than traditional literature, though I’m sure they’re older and are perhaps used more commonly, but not for literary purposes.

I didn’t really understand where the Ryan reading fell into this though, as it merely explained what narrative and therefore gave us a clear idea of narrative is not. From this I am still not able to tell if lists would be classed as a narrative or not, because it contains some of those elements which Ryan proposed narratives must have, and it didn’t contain many more.

What I can take from these readings is how to write about the Korsakow readings. If I look at each clip in a project as a list, I can see how the lack of literature, or connecting language, makes these a representation and how they work together and what they do.

The aesthetics of sound

The FilmTV 1 reading was about Sound Design and as I have begun to understand and be fascinated by the significance of sound in media, I really enjoyed it.

Two major points that excite and inspire me are:

Narrative sound: the ways that sound can aid the plot and particularly the way that commentative sound uses sound to tell the viewer something about the plot that they can’t see.

Sound design itself: This idea that sound is constructed the same way that the visual scenes are constructed. That we can manipulate everything about it and use it to our advantage and to progress the plot.

Speed Clips and creative decisions

This week I’ve done something potentially limiting and may have made a poor creative choice. Unfortunately I won’t be in class to get feedback on it either.

However, as it stands I made the choice knowing it was unconventional and limiting, and made it anyway.

For the four speed clips, I have taken one, 1 minute long clip of my a friend of mine, and have used this for all four of the different clips and their different requirements. I did this by splicing and speeding up and slowing down sections of the one clip.

As a result all of the clips are almost identical both aesthetically and with their content. In each though the action of the subject is a little different, though in some clips I have used the same pieces twice.

Here is the slow clip, one shot.

Here is the slow clip, multiple shots.

Here is the fast clip, one shot.

Here is the fast clip, multiple shots.

It might have been a poor choice to have such similar clips for all four categories, but I made the choice because I wanted to explore the beauty and the aesthetics of the movement and expressions of the subject. As a result of having such similar clips I have really focused on these elements of the film and the way that the speed of the film alters our interpretation of these elements. And that’s what I wanted to explore and why I chose to do it this way.