Integrated Media Essay–The People From Exoplanet
Gezhang Chen s3411768/ Ming Zhan s3428141/ Jia Li s3351624/ Chow Wing Kam s3384013
Link of K-film: http://themediastudents.net/im1/projects/thefoldername
Link of essay: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/ming-zhan/2014/06/13/integrated-media-essay-the-people-from-exoplanet/
Our Korsakow film The People from Exoplanet features glimpses into the inner world of autistic people. People with autism have unusual ways of paying attention and reacting to sensations and it is a struggle for them to survive in our brutal world. Our film is to let us normal people to delve into the mysterious world of autism. Our clips are generated around gloomy and repressive ambience with certain parts of human, objects and atmosphere of places. Some of the video clips are experimental because we are trying to portray the idea that the way autistic people think and how things make them feel are what we could see in our verbal vibrant world called art. Autistic children may be minimally or non-verbal with regard to their speech difficulty and impaired social function. Yet they have no less profound feelings and emotions than us even though theirs may be a bit more difficult to interpret since they do not express themselves like us. Told by personal narrative, our film offers insights into their minds as if people around may not even pay them the slightest bit of attention.
Interface
The interface of our K-film consists of a big SNU screen with three smaller preview screens below. The SNU screen takes up most of the space in the interface which is intimating. It magnifies the expression in the clips. The previews windows are showing the thumbnails of footages going to play. We have used black background with texts in white as additional description to different clips. The size of texts are relatively small compared to all the viewing windows; so audiences’ attention will not be distracted by the texts instead of images. The monochrome design in the first part is to create the first impression in calm setting in the case that autistic children are sensory overload. Colours stimulates emotions and feelings that are the video clips in the last part of our film. The transition is to show audiences that they enter into another space; from autistic children’s world to the normal people’s world.
Pattern
There are some patterns are used in our K-film. First of all, the “emotion” will be showed first, next is “behavior” and “communication”, make each part become more clear and easy to understand. Some landscape is shot to describe emotion, like the clip of toy bear, it shoot from the window, shows their desire. Another will be mentioned is shows their emotion, a girl sitting by the window and looking outside, it show she desires to contact with the outside world. In addition to that, some parts of body is showed in this part, such as the face, mouth, and hands, and clip of crying, is a description of emotion. In the sections of “behavior”, we show some actions they usually do, like jumping on the bed and arrange and assort something in certain rules, for example, there is a video of ranking candy. The communication part is presented by showing some people, it should be lively, make contrast with the behavior and emotion of autistic people.
In addition to that, we use color, black and white to describe our key words. The “ behavior” and “emotion” is showed by black and white, because the autistic people are very lonely and unusual. Most of time they can not live like the normal person, and they usually have the different experience in their life. Therefore, compare with other people, more often their life is lack of fun and boring. The “communication” is described by color, it shows that they envy and look forward to this kind of life, even they do not know how to show their opinion. There is a video of circling and shooting the people around, it describes the mental activity of autistic people, the outside world and people let them confused and a little fear, they want to involve but resist.
The similar shot and location are used to build another pattern. For instance, we use some circling shot to connect each video, like at the train station, is a symbol of the inner world of autistic people, they usually feel confused, anxious and fear. Especially when they communicate with others. The similar location is used sometimes in our K-film, for example, walking alone in the corridor, we want to show their lonely in this part, the corridor means their growth path, the wide shot and eye level are using to show the corridor, nobody here, highlight the lonely feeling. Using frame to create an oppressive atmosphere, the wall not only exist in reality, there is a wall in their mind to stop them connecting with other people. The line is showed as another pattern, like walking a straight line; draw some straight lines on the paper and so on. And in the emotion part we have a 3 clips series of aisles, and finally at the very end of our k-film, we set another aisle as the ending SNU. The last clip is colored not in black and white, through it only has two colors, after the communication part the aisle has two color, which calling back to the emotion part could be a good progress for the autistic.
The music of our K-film is very peaceful and slow, create a relatively sad atmosphere. This is a description of the autistic people, and it helps people to get into their world. The music is important to build up the mood in our film but not very strong, let people pay more attention to the images rather than the music.
Content
This Korsakow Film is mainly focusing on autistic children. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. The diagnostic criteria require that symptoms become apparent before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood. There are three parts in the content of this K-film, that is emotion, behavior and communication.
For the emotion, autistic children see things in a different way from normal people, and they don’t really understand normal people’s feeling. We are not really autistic even though we did some research for it. So we are not really showing what autistic children see the world or doing a reality documentary about autistic children’s life, instead of this, we present some different angles to see the normal things in our daily life, and try to lead the audiences being a part of the clips. In this way, audiences would feel being abnormal themselves, which is how autistic children feels everyday. For example, there is a video that water overflow from the glass. When we see this, we might just pure away the water. But when autistic children see this, they might feel very uncomfortable and don’t know how to deal with it, because there is no rule telling them what should they do. The text “It is hard to put into words…” helps the video to represent the feeling of autistic children.
The Second part of the content is behavior, we did some research before we started filming this part. The clips present some behavior that autistic children would do very usual. For example, in one of the video, there is a person who keeps folding each page of a book. This is one of the symptoms, called restricted behavior. That is, limited in focus, interest, or activity, such as preoccupation with a single television program, toy or game. They will only focus on one activity or action.
The aim of this K-film is trying to let more people know about autism and care more about them. So for the communication part, we not just show that autistic children have difficult to communicate with others, but also appeal that we should try to care about them. In one of the videos, a person is trying to hold another person’s hand vacillatingly. One side, we realize that autistic children have difficulties with communication; they don’t know how to communicate with normal people. On the other hand, it suggests that we should be open our hearts for autistic children. And the text “please be patient to me” represents this idea as well.
Relations
In our korsakow film, we try to make the pattern, interface and the content interact with each other in a simple and easy way.
As for pattern and interface, the design for the interface, the main SNU screen and the small preview ones are aiming at stressing one of a main pattern of the whole film – color. We made more than 10 different backgrounds in different parts, and all the backgrounds are in black with a sentence in white. There are three key words in our k-film, all the clips we have in ‘emotion’ and ‘behavior’ are in black and white, which in order to present how autistic people are feeling in their life. The color of our interface and the clips are interacting with each other in such a way.
Then as for the relation between content and interface, we try to use the very simple interface to present the non narrative clips about autism. Except the big screen of SNU, we only have 3 preview screens in a black background with a sentence. As we know that autistic people might have a simple and monotonous life, 3 preview clips represent this point in a nice way for they do not have some more options but only three.
While a narrative is a chain of events in cause-effect relationships occurring time and space, the non-line film can be accepted by audiences without a specific opening and ending. (Bordwell & Thompson, 2013, p.75) As there is not a specific narrative in our film, it could be a nice way to present the fragment of the life of autistic people. Lists refuse to connecting the power of language, in favor of a sequence of disconnect elements. (Bogost, 2012, p. 40) Though the clips are disconnected to each other, but they have the same theme about the emotion, behavior, and communication in autistic people’s life. Korsakow film is a perfect medium to prove this and express this.
Conclusion
Watching our K-film is like experiencing autistic children’s joys and pains as well as learning their way to express ourselves beyond words. You may not aware that it is a film about autism until the end because autistic children do have all features of normal ones but they just act and look things differently. Not knowing it as autism beforehand, we understand what everyday life is like through their eyes with autism without assuming that we are going into a space that is not the normal life. This is what we want to convey through our film, they are special yet they are still amazing and fantastic.
References
Bordwell, D & Thompson, K, 2013, Film Art: Introduction, 10th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Bogost, I, 2012, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University Press of Minnesota,. Print.
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV. 4 ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association; 2000. American Psychiatric Association.