Mondays media lecture was made up of a few guest lecturers.
We discussed the copyright laws in terms of how long copyright lasts, what is considered breaching copyright and how various media (photo, film, music) all have tweaked regulations in terms of what percentage of it can be used etc.
We also discussed some do’s and don’ts when working within the course.
Such as when shooting you should come 2 hours early. If you don’t disastrous things begin to happen and we were given various examples of this happening.
What stuck with me overall was the talk by Kyla Brettle. She discussed and shared with us the beauty of her works of audio documentary and encouraged us to get out of our comfort zone.
Documentary style work has always appealed to me, as it shares a different point of view. It explores reality, the extraordinary and has the ability to examine what is considered ‘the ordinary’. By doing so it exposes the fact that there really is no such thing as ordinary, in fact I often find the ordinary is often quite extraordinary. A similar concept is explored in the magazine Another Escape as it explores the unusual and extraordinary lives of people places and things, which is where much of my inspiration comes from.
Kyla left us with a short list of how to successfully create documentary styled works … what she titled as ‘entering worlds’
Explore something you don’t know
Observe on location
Observer yourself
Become one with technology
Let a story and subject evolve
Question motivations and assumptions
Remember that that is a live relationship
It has made me appreciate the fact that normality is a social construct of which no one can perfectly achieve. By documenting lives, places or things in such a way that Another Escape or Kyla has, exposes this point. These will be concepts I will consider in my own work when exploring documentary style media.