Agent Carter VS All Men

Central themes of the superhero tales seem to be:
  • Courage in the face of adversity, weakness, the underdog, marginalised,
  • Heroic qualities
  • Goodness, selflessness, all based around ideas of courage.
  • These are reflected in the text’s treatment of both Agent Carter and Captain America
Soooo many archetypes:
  • In Captain America
  • The dial, the ridiculous amount of knobs that need turning as they do the Captain America make-strong machine thing
  • The wistful looks between Captain America and Agent Carter
  • Someone dies in the hero’s arms and his last words (although no words are actually spoken) are of inspiration to the hero
  • Car chase
  • On the roof, shoots bullets through the roof, Captain America dodges them
  • Hail Hydra, Hail Hitler
In the short:
  • Playing the innocent woman and walking straight through the front door
  • The cute music while people are getting beaten up in the background
  • Henchman turning up behind the protagonist as it looks like her quest is successful, just happens to be the biggest, baddest henchman. Like the boss level in a video game. Everything about him makes him look like some kind of monster
  • Witty quip as she leaves the building having kicked ass, Learn to count
  • Close-up self pride moment
  • The underdog wins moment
Kettle scream
  • The anonymous hats
  • The old school spy gadgets
  • Iconic image of the trench and the briefcase, the silhouette
  • Weeping over the body of her dead friend
(In the episode of Agent Carter) she becomes the femme fatale
She turns objects associated with oppressed womanhood into deadly weapons. Great symbolism. Knocking someone out with a stapler, getting people tea to get information, the great fight scene in the kitchen.
The male characters are all pitted against her, it’s sexism to the extreme. They are all characterised as fools, where she is wise and brave in the face of oppression. None of the characters are trustworthy except
But still, she’s the token female. In the scene from Captain America, she is the only woman to appear in the 25mins who wasn’t a nameless victim on the street. In the short she’s the only woman full stop. In the episodes of the four woman who have dialogue, Agent Carter is the only independent woman. Of the other three we have the innocent victim who dies after congratulating Agent Carter on finally getting dolled up so that she won’t become a spinster, the assistant at the call centre thing, a friend to the protagonist and the second strongest female character with only two lines, and the other a victim of sexual harassment who must be ‘saved’ by Agent Carter. I looked up the series to discover that every episode in the first season was directed by a man, all but one were written by a man and the majority of the show’s producers are men. This show isn’t even remotely concerned with gender equality.
The content of the show is feminist, but not quite. I’d like to see some henchwomen and some evil lady overlords. In the world of Agent Carter, congrats to her she kicks ass and whatever, but apparently she’s the singular woman in her entire universe who’s capable of looking after herself or sees herself as an equal to a man. Fuck the patriarchy and mainstream media.

Internet Celebrity, Project Brief

Mollie, Sarah, Matt and I have chosen to base our transmedia project around a fictional person who is an exaggerated example of modern young people who are obsessed with internet fame and online gratification.

This person will have been featured in the background of a viral video, this triggered their obsession with their online persona. The narrative will be based through her online profiles.

We have a few important factors decided, but of course have not

Protagonist– A young person who has grown up during the online revolution and is obsessed with the idea of celebrity.

Genre– Black comedy

Themes– Obsession with internet fame/celebrity, online gratification

Mediums/platforms- Text, image and video on Tumblr. Video through Vine. Image through Instagram.

Other motifs that will be tied in- The social currency of likes, the editing of reality to portray the best version of ourselves, convoluted social interactions, jealousy, possibly death, recurring irony

Sequence of events/plot- To be determined

To remember-

There must be a reason for the audience to go beyond the Tumblr

We’re thinking that the motivation will be wanting to understand the character, so we have to make their life interesting enough to warrant investigation into their life either before or after their death

Ideas-

We are thinking that a major plot point will be the character’s death, this could be the beginning or the conclusion

Entering the world of ‘The Matrix’

When I was very young I invented an imaginary world, called Exalfar I think, and I built the imaginary land out of sand in a small box with green food dye and sand for grass, and the people were sticks that I dug into the sand. I drew the people that lived in Exalfar and I day dreamed up stories about each of them. It lasted about a whole month, and it was probably my first introduction to (non-digital, basic) transmedia, although I didn’t know it.

My next would probably have been The Matrix. I loved it. I loved Neo and Trinity and my favourite character was Morpheus. I felt that I got it, and I got excited about it. I found the a few of the Animatrix films online and they were fascinating, they added to my understanding, but that was the extent of my journey into the transmedia aspect of the film and after being devastated by the second, I lost interest and didn’t see the third. I still love Hugo Weaving though.

I believe that Umberto is correct in his belief that cult films must be constructed from archetypes. They must be so familiar that it is easy to place yourself in the story, to become a character and extend the narrative. This is why I loved The Matrix, and why I created my own world from the story. It took the familiar, the world that I lived in and also the tropes that I had seen before numerous times in films. The martial arts, the serious guy in sunglasses, the long black jacket, the hand on the glass before Trinity was nearly hit in the phone booth.

I believe that the most successful transmedia objects would be cult objects. The expansion of a story into something like its own world, through different media and explored openly by fans of their own will, to great success, would make a fiction something of a cult object, as we can only assume due that it would become so beloved due to familiarity and simultaneous authenticity of the story itself.

“The Database” and I

Manovich’s text, The Database excited me for a few reasons. I’ve read this text before, over a year ago now, and it is great to revisit it with a fresh and changed mindset. I’ve always loved lists, though they seemed simplistic, and the idea of an arrangement of things as a sort of story itself is appealing as it adds depth to an otherwise lovely, but basic thing.

In effect, all stories are told through language (text spoken, written or otherwise), images or sound. Film is a hybrid of these, and the three mixed together create digital web pages through the organisation of singular objects. I like this idea of starting with artefacts without any kind hierarchy, each as important to the piece as the next, and organising them in a way in that gives them meaning. However, in transmedia, I also like the idea of having elements which are each given the same significance, that seem random on their own, but form a narrative as a whole. This I think is the way that I would like to go about my transmedia project, as a small database, a collection of elements which can be navigated through a digital collation, which form a story when together but are meaningless when viewed individually.

“I Love Your Work”

Screen Shot

(Source: iloveyourwork.net, screenshot)

Jonathan Harris’ digital documentary, I Love Your Work, tells the story of nine American pornographic actresses through the unbiased documentation and presentation of ten days of their lives. The work is a database, compiling 6hrs worth of footage that tells an impartial and honest narrative of the daily lives of the porn stars. Harris filmed ten seconds of footage every five minutes for ten consecutive days and amassed these into an interactive documentary through film and the interactive capabilities of digital media.

As a narrative, I Love Your Work, is untraditional. The lack of a desired outcome during filming and the almost complete lack of editing mean that the elements of story as outlined by Robert McKee in, The Substance of Story, are based on reality in this work. They are not imagined puzzle pieces that are created with a purpose, a cause and effect toward an ending. This in effect undermines McKees ideas of story completely, the concept that, “A story must build to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another” (McKee, p140) becomes defunct in, I Like Your Work, as there is no build, no climatic event and no resolution.

Generally in a story everything that occurs will drive the plot or story toward something. However, in I Love Your Work, this doesn’t occur. Due to this the story arcs are random, and depend purely on what was captured at what time and in what order the audience chooses to view it. There is no intent other than to portray what truly happened at each moment during filming.

Moreover, there is no protagonist. The audience does bond with the nine characters on a deeper level knowing that their story is true and unfolding before them. Harris also structured the documentary in a way that the viewer can choose to watch videos based on which people appear in them, making it easier to bond with a particular characters and create an alternative story, unified by one character. This is one of many interfaces with which the audience may choose to experience the narrative database.

Screen Shot 2015-03-13 at 1.32.50 PM

(Source: iloveyourwork.net/preview.php, screengrab)

 

This work might be thought of as a database due to the nature of the project. It is a collection of footage, rather than an edited body of works arranged strategically to convey a plot. As an interactive piece, the audience plays more of a role within the story than in a traditional narrative. The videos can be watched in chronological, linear order, through character presences or at random. In effect, this not only means that each viewer’s perception of the story will be different, the actual story that they consume will be different as well depending on the interface chosen by the viewer.

While Harris’ work is perhaps more similar to a database than a traditional narrative, it us up to the viewer to navigate their own through the database and create narrative, this is their imperative. “It is the task that makes the player experience the game as a narrative.” (Manovich, p222) It is the task, the “algorithm-like behavior” that takes the database of film in, I Love Your Work, and constructs it into a narrative.

 

References:

Manovich, Lev, The Database, Reading Week 2

McKee, Robert, Substance of Story, Reading Week 1

 

Word count: 522 (not including referencing or title)

What is Transmedia anyway?

Andrea Phillip’s short excerpt, “What is Transmedia Anyway?”, clearly explains the term in a way that someone could be confident that they understood the term after only reading the brief introduction, even having been unfamiliar with it beforehand. This was me.

The passage is exciting as it introduces the reader to an interesting and relatively new story telling method into an arena of well-used (although still very wonderful) mediums. This opens up the writer to many new possibilities and opportunities to enhance or just manipulate their storytelling and the experience of the audience.

I would think that it is widely and inherently assumed that each separate story belongs to one medium; a book, a movie, a TV show, a photographic essay etc. This is the way that I generally thought about stories before the reading. Even pop culture which utilises multiple forms is generally not transmedia, for example the Marvel films retell and alter their comic narratives more than using the two media to tell a single story. West Coast-style transmedia is similar but does expand on one story, but it is East Coast-style transmedia which is the most exciting, as it invites individuals to experiment with the method.

I am looking forward to experimenting with transmedia, and hopefully I will see more of the form this semester and learn how to utilise it well after an introduction that opened my eyes to possibilities that should have been obvious in the first place.