This semester, I investigated a series of questions, and I haven’t yet fully linked them into a whole leading question. However, in no particular order:
1. How important is context?
2. At what point does a piece of media break down?
3. What is montage?
4. Can you fully remove the human element from a piece of media and still have it function?

I began the semester with an eye to properly exploring the studio as it was named ‘Ways of making’. Having spent a lot of time getting intimated with the industrial processes of the television, film and academic industries, I was very excited to find a new perspective on media work and my own ways of constructing a piece of art. After all, it’s only when we examine things in detail, pulling them apart like a watchmaker pulls apart a watch, that we can begin to fully understand them.

To continue the metaphor, I knew what a watch was, how the cogs worked and how it told time, but I wanted to really rip it apart and perhaps find the place where time is created, or in the context of the studio, find the place where things are made and media is somehow conjured from the dross of the tangible.

In hindsight, I may have taken the studio name a little too literally.

However, I jumped straight into philosophy and began examining where and how things are named and created, and devoted myself to reading up on the natural sciences, trying to find a third way, or a means in which the natural sense of an idea, place, object or person came through, without the extraneous discourses of meaning, context and media being imposed upon the subject. I wanted to create without interfering, and this idea was to infuse the rest of my work throughout the semester.

I was also fascinated by how meaning is semiologically constructed through not just visuals, but through music, audio or the absence thereof. I made montages and applied different sorts of audio to them, hoping to find the points where media and new forms of media are built through interpretation.

However, after discussing this with Paul, I realised I was trying to find the poetics of situations and places. So rather than trying to find out where a piece of media is broken down, I tried to prove the opposite, find where a piece of media is created. By examining the frameworks of my house and the surrounds, and then editing it together with and without human interference, I began to gain a sense of just what a human brings to a piece of work. Although I had not identified where media is created, I had begun to sense just how powerful the invocation of anthropocentric discourses is.

It was here however, that I became stuck, and I began to investigate montage as another means of making meaning. Rather than having the meaning emerge organically, I would try to construct a logic puzzle on film, and attempt to extend linear time into a relative, distorted infinity.

Why I thought this was a good idea, I don’t know. It certainly dominated the last half of my semester and became more trouble than it was worth. However, I found some really interesting insights into both practical filming and the nature of inspiration. To wit, it doesn’t always work out.

Indeed, at the tail end of the semester, I found myself at an impasse. I had little work to show for my efforts, or so I felt, and little to demonstrate at the end of semester presentations. My recreation of Escher wasn’t working as I hoped, my attempts to make music from ambient sound had not turned out well, and I was having issues with my exposure. However, Paul mentioned something that turned it all around. He suggested that I investigate the poetics of the stairs in still shots, and return to what motivated me at the beginning of the year. This was a great idea, as the romantic nature of the location was what had inspired me in the first place. The angles, the metal shine and banisters, the steep triangular drop and the corridors that spiderweb away from a central hub. Yes, I would have needed a crane to properly see my dreams implemented, however, still shots gave me control over the space in a theoretical sense that my camera and motion did not. Indeed, this was the revelation that I will keep with me as the years go by. I had a working knowledge of the importance of narrative and time, but what I didn’t appreciate was the idea of space, and the importance of location in a narrative, media and semiological sense. The place is just as important as the people, they are in a symbiosis that adds up to a piece of media.

I found that perhaps you can’t destroy media, as it is formed at the site of interpretation, and context is key here. However, what I did find was perhaps a way to create, make and examine media in a distilled or purer sense. I have a greater appreciation for the variables and the difficulties that go into the creation of argument and art. That alone, despite my failures, has made it worthwhile. Anyway, I’d prefer to fail interestingly than make something predictable.

Throughout the whole semester, the class was fantastic, although everyone had individual projects, and there wasn’t as much industrial collaboration as sometimes happens in a studio, the sense of community, friendship and intellectual bonhomie were worth working for. Everyone was keen to discuss ideas, especially because we were all on our own individual journeys and investigations through media and finding our own personal ways of making. This combination of independent work and colloborative meet-ups was an absolute delight.

That being said, working alone was awesome. I understand the value of collaboration at university, and it’s always rewarding, however, I really enjoyed having the mental and physical space to go chase my own dragons. I didn’t slay them, but I can’t imagine anyone else really wanting to come on the hunt.

As a further point, we all helped one another technically. It may seem as though the studio was entirely theoretical, but this is not the case. My work in a practical and industrial sense has improved beyond sight over the course of the semester. My camera work, lighting knowledge, writing skills, capcity to think about media and my editing work have all been helped by the intensive and rewarding nature of this studio. Paul in particular, has been a great tutor, and I’ve really enjoyed his input over the months I’ve worked with him.

Here we are. Final edit. Five minutes. No prisoners. What have I done? Why did I do it? Much like the 30 second cut, I expanded on the things in the semester I was most proud of. However, unlike the 30 second cut, I left my work in chronological order for the semester. It basically functions like an extended cut of my 30 second screener, or perhaps my 30 second screener is a truncated version of this.

Most importantly, I managed to recover the footage from the first day of shooting through a nifty tool in Premiere called ‘camera warp’. This stablised the shake of my camera, and through its smoothing process, actually leant the work a languid and dreamlike quality that I would have found impossible to achieve without mechanical assistance. I love computers.

This let me attempt to recreate the stairs in a way that seemed more pleasing to me as an editor and viewer. I also leant heavily on the glitch effect discussed in an earlier post and used it to facilitate cuts and changes of direction throughout the piece. As stated earlier, I really wish I’d had the time to glitch it to the next level and overlay many Justins into the same footage, recreating the Escher effect more effectively.

To give my footage one final spin, I lifted a track called ‘Wizard Motor’ from a band called Mogwai. I really like the song, and although I’m bringing external influences into my work, and distorting what people interpret from the piece, and I’m not sure whether this will affect their enjoyment, I really wanted that introspective vibe hanging over my work.

I’m pretentious like that. It’s art, and you will watch it as art.

However, it was while I was constructing this edit that my mind returned to the philosophy of media, and where meaning is constructed. I had spent some of my semester attempting to find where media breaks, and how distorted something has to be in order for it to become noise. I realised that invoking this musical piece actually resulted in some noise, in that it distorted my meanings, and this was a small insight that helped me reflect on my work over the semester as a whole.

Simply put, anything in the wrong place can be noise, but the right place is anywhere, and the wrong place is anywhere. Context and interpretation are half of any media artefact. Making it is only part of the battle. Perhaps we need a ways of deconstructing to go along with the ways of making.

Does this mean I believe in the death of the author? Yes and no. It all depends on the context. Everything is a process, and everything is a liquid. An ever-changing yin to yang and back again. We are so trained by culture and our own instincts to find patterns and narratives in things-they are everywhere, that we instinctively fill in the gaps or imbue a piece with meaning. However, our culture is like that because that is what we do. We watch, we learn, we adapt. We make. We make because we are compelled to.

Any piece of media is a schism in reality, it’s a distortion in the fabric of what we all agree is mostly real. Art and media help us make this fabric, but letting them into our minds and hearts also places us somewhere beyond the immediate and tactile. The author takes us somewhere new, with views we had never considered. We watch cinema with our dreaming eyes, and our collective unconscious processes everything, spitting out more art in an ever more referential yet increasingly subjective process.

So yes, I really want to find the maths under all this. There must be some predictable factor that I’ve missed. Facets of anthropology, psychology, sociology, media theory, physics, chemistry and every other discipline and human perspective. The things that tie us are the things we are made of. There is a greater shape to everything, it’s meaning all the way down. The way we see media might be the way everything is expressed. We obey the same natural laws that the universe does, wouldn’t our creations mimic the things we are made of?

Is art resistance to natural law, or is it acquiescence?

Perhaps its like energy. Art cannot be broken, it is merely transformed. And if art is like energy, there is a science to it. There is a meaning to it. There is a way we can make it.

The most difficult thing I’ve had to do this semester is construct this 30 second video. This is partly due to my own hangups over my work, and also the fact that I had spent a lot of time thinking, and perhaps not enough time making. However, I have made it, and there’s a lot of stuff in there worth reflecting on.

So, Initially I faced with some troubling questions. What should I do for my 30 second cut? How could I make this work? I honestly wasn’t sure where to start, especially given that anything being screened in a public arena makes me exceptionally nervous. I have real problems looking at my own work on screen, especially if I’m unsure about its quality. However, you’ve got to start somewhere.

I had been musing on the nature of time and movements through time over the semester, and I felt this was a great opportunity to really explore this in a technical sense. I decided that mathematical cuts between segments were the right approach, either in an exponential sense or in an equal sense. Initially, I divided it into 3 segments. The poetics of the stairs, some footage of the stairs, and finally the poetics of my house. I had decided these were the 3 segments of my semester worth showing and talking about, both in a personal and narrative sense.

However, I needed something to tie them together. 30 seconds is both a remarkably short and long time. I needed propulsion beyond quick cuts, especially if I wanted something mathematical. Music sprung to mind as the obvious choice. Its dictated by timing and gives shape to things that are sometimes a bit flabby. Rather than using an established piece, however, I decided to try some new things.

I had a host of ambient sound lying around from recording earlier in the semester, and I really enjoyed the mechanical and abrasive nature of a lot of the sound I had acquired. Of course, I wondered if I could cut this into something simulating movement and pace, and then overlay it over my 30 second cut. It would be a marriage of my audio and visual efforts over the semester, and I thought it would work out.

Who’d have thought that music is actually really difficult to make? And that you can’t just cut random noise into a 30 second piece over the course of a couple of afternoons?

Well, I thought I could. To be completely honest, it turned out okay. It was far from what I saw it ending up like, but I genuinely enjoyed suffering, listening and combining elements of stuff I gathered round the city in the simulacrum of music. I managed to make it reach a crescendo through speeding it up, but I didn’t have the right sounds or know what to do in order to hit the feeling of tapering off after the fact. I have some further thoughts of how to achieve that, and I really want to spend more time with ambient sound and noise in the future, I think its a really good way to explore properly representing and marry what appears on screen with a soundscape that fits and enters the piece. Using established music is often just too dangerous.

Despite this, I spent ages in the edit, matching cuts of visuals to the ambient sound that slowly increased. I hoped to marry tension between the two. Once again, it didn’t quite work out. The cuts weren’t right, and the beat hadn’t matched up properly. Better call Paul.

After consulting with Paul, I reversed my video. Yes, Justin ended up walking backwards throughout the whole thing, but this also leant a more organic feeling to my work. It started with photos and walking, and lead into the more theoretical aspects of my work. This also meant that the music started slow, and the cuts were fast, with the two components eventually meeting and switching speed, with the cuts slowing as the music sped up.

I really liked this effect, and I wasn’t unhappy with the end result. However, I really want to go back and try to glitch out my footage outrageously. I think there’s something to be found if I overlay Justin over Justin over Justin, each seconds apart, walking up and down the same set of stairs in the same shot. It would really have helped my 30 second cut to have that particular effect in the edit, and it’s perhaps my biggest regret for the semester, that I was so close to the next cool thing, but didn’t get a chance to show it.

Of course, there’s always something else.

I haven’t spent too much time this semester talking about influences. I examined fantasia, and why it had such an impact on me as a child, however, I haven’t considered the auteurs who have influenced me as an adult and film-maker.

At the risk of sounding outrageously boring, I really have to talk about two filmmakers in particular, Christopher Nolan and Stanley Kubrick. Now, I know that these are far from the most inspired choices for any aspiring film-maker. They’re safe, recognisably good, and popular on the internet.

However, Nolan approaches films in a mathematical, puzzle like fashion. He sees them as things to be solved, investigations into form and function. The Prestige, for example, functioned as a magic trick unto itself. (The book was better). No popular film-maker working today understands the potential of film as both puzzle-box and illusion generator. After I had started to investigate the stairs, I realised I had seen them attempted before.

Firstly, this is the kind of shot and feeling that I hoped to create for myself in the stairwell. In hindsight, I really had no chance at all.

Inception is a fascinating film, not only for the metatextual ways in which it deals with narrative and story, but also for the manner in which it recreates the non-linear and unsteady nature of dreams. This distortion and twisting has obviously been percolating in the back of my mind for some time. I love the nature of film and the ways in which a film-maker can manipulate space and time in such a way that total fabrications feel completely plausible for the audience. Why recreate reality, when film is fundamentally unreal? Like most human ideas, it can be anything.

Interestingly, inception deals with the nature of ideas too and how they are planted, grow and change. Perhaps it planted this idea in my head in its own way.

However, it’s not just Nolan that has subliminaly influenced my work this semester. I was doing some research on mathematical framing, as I’m fascinated by it, and I realised that Stanley Kubrick did this all the time. He had a grounding in photography, and loved to construct elaborate, geometrically precise shots.

The video is a little fast and tacky, but you get a sense for his framing and the means in which he had patterns and mathematics that he hung films off again and again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW2HJSOeAkw

This second film breaks down the frame a little more, and this approach extended through all his work. Obviously, I can’t do a lengthy comparative breakdown of all his work in this blog, but it serves as a reminder of how important maths is when you construct a film. Angles, focal length, exposure, framing, composition, movement. Everything in the frame has a basis in science and maths, and to ignore these vital components is something that I feel to be folly. I mean, you find the best work when you marry art and analysis. You need to know your tools, so why ignore the physics of the frame?

I decided to watch Inception again. I’ll admit it. This was after Paul and I discussed attempting to glitch the footage using techniques I discovered online. These techniques were fascinating and remarkably easy, and allowed me to invoke the flavour and distortion of pieces like inception without spending months on shoot.

The first technique is really simple. You just throw a really quick motion blur over the footage in premiere. Adjust as desired, overlay sound effects as required. Boom.

The second technique I explored involved duplicating portions of the footage, changing its opacity and then ensuring it was slightly out of sync to create a ghosting effect. Once again, synced up with distorted sound.

What does this distortion mean? I’m not sure, apart from the fact that it was cool. Obviously, it lets you draw attention to certain movements of the sequence. I used the distortion at precise intervals. To ensure the stairs looped in a coherent way, I had to ensure that the direction of Justin’s movement-either up or down the stairs, changed at a constant rate.

I decided to use four shots in a certain direction, employ a distorted or glitched shot, and this would be the catalyst for Justin’s movement to change direction after the cut.

It actually worked out rather well! However, in hindsight, wish I’d overlayed justin over justin over justin and really had a chance to slow them down and distort it all further, stretching, replicating and reversing until I had made the effects of Escher’s stairs, each step full of people. Give me a week, Paul. It’s my next stage of examination. I’ll get my crane and I’ll make it happen.

After staring down the barrel of a semester where my work was going nowhere, and my head was completely out of the game, I had a chat to Paul and he suggested returning to the ideas that motivated me at the start of semester, and that I should approach the stairs in this manner. However, not through film, which had frustrated me, but through camera and still photography.

This idea really resonated with me. Despite trying to avoid pretension, photography is something I should do more of, and Kubrick started out as a photographer. There’s really something in the idea of completely controlling a shot. I hoped that investigating the poetics of the stairs, and the meanings held therein would give me a better grasp over them, and help me really examine the space in a controlled manner.

Indeed, there’s very little to problematise about this particular investigation. Photography during the afternoon and evening let me capture the stairs under different sorts of lighting conditions, and really let me examine the burnished surfaces and resonant colours of the stairwell.

I feel as thought there’s a mathematical truth lurking deep inside this stairwell. I wish I had access to the architecture plans, so I could examine the equations that they used to design and build the stairwell. As a side point, I can see myself doing more of this sort of work in future, the juxtaposition of the mechanical and the human. Finding post-modern surfaces and environments that enable us and actualise us, and using them for narrative, contextual and emotional purposes. Where and why do humans do what we do? How do we give environments meaning, and how do those environments give us meaning? What impact does space itself hold for a narrative?

There comes a day where nothing works. A day where you have no energy, no vision, no drive and no real impetus to finish a piece. Your crew is sick, you are emotionally distraught, everyone is tired, the weather is horrible and the whole piece seems doomed from the start.

I hate these stairs. I hate them and their angles, I hate them and their stupid people that walk up and down them. I hate elevators. I hate shot bags. I hate tripods. I hate pickups. I hate doing the same thing again for a marginally different result.

Now that’s out of my system. I had a new camera, on Paul’s recommendation, with a bigger and better tripod. I hoped this would let me crane it over the edge of the stairs and get some really stable, deep footage. In theory, this should have worked. In practice, it did not. Already brought low, and without the energy of the previous week, trudging up and down the stairs with even more equipment on a day where everything seemed defeated, absolutely ruined the whole affair.

I got some footage, but it seemed to lack the spark and passion of the previous week.

It seems flatter, colourless. Perhaps the fact that I had to reshoot the whole thing had sapped me. As a side point, can the energy we bring to a shoot really get transferred into the work? Or do we just colour it emotionally after the fact? I don’t know, but it could be worth investigating in future. As it stands, I hated everything about the work I had just done, my semester seemed to be a bunch of dead ends, and I really wasn’t sure what or why I was investigating anything anymore. In my quest for meaning, I had overthought and collapsed my own processes. The irony was not lost on me.

Given that my attempts to pull apart and distort the nature of media and meaning have hit a dead end at this time- I’ve found it fairly difficult to isolate just what I’m looking for, and I feel as though this idea may need more time to percolate before it really comes to fruition, I want to try and look deeper into montage and try to make something a little odd. I’ve always been fascinated by logic puzzles, magic eyes tricks, optical illusions and psycholigical chicanery, and everyone recognises the famous ‘Penrose Stairs’, Escher’s painting illustrating an infinite loop of people going up and down, with no real end in sight.

This is tied to my work earlier in the semester and my reflection on montage. I want to pull apart linear motion and recreate the sense of infinity that powers so much of Eschers’ work. As the montage theorists explored, montage and meaning are created ‘on top’ of each other, the argument is constructed in the edit and humans interpret the narrative as they go, accepting the strangeness of it all, and the distortions of both time and space that the film-maker decrees worth exploring.

With this in mind, I found an appropriate set of stairs, and set about gathering as much hard footage as I could. The stairs in building 13 were incredible, and really had a massive number of fascinating angles and perspectives which resonated with my ideas about maths and the core meaning of things. How should I frame something? How can I maximise the angles and really communicate the shapes and flavours of these stairs? What is their stairness? What is stairness? The inherent narrative potential of climbing and struggle resonated with the mathematical precision of the space. I imagined I could trap a human here, and really create this sense of looping, mindless infinity.

I really appreciated Justin’s help in this regard, and he was a damned hero as he walked up and down many flights of stairs again and again. I tried to maximise my coverage, and really mucked my exposures up, but I was interested in the edit and how that would be constructed, not every single aspect of the craft. This was probably a rookie mistake on my behalf, and in hindsight, I wish I’d gotten a single perfect shot, rather than a series of blocks that I hoped I could assemble into a coherent whole.

It was as I reviewed them that I began to become angry at them. My camera shook, my exposure was off, my angles weren’t good enough, and the grand ideas I had about assembling a series of edits and shots into a non-linear masterpiece fell to dust. I was unable to recreate my vision as I had wanted, and most of my footage seemed unusable.

Reflection in class seemed to salvage them somewhat, and I was still driven to create what I saw in my minds eye. I had a vision of infinity, and I would make it happen.

What is colour? I wish I’d spent more time on colour this semester. The colour wheel and its applications affect so much. Colour can change tones, interpretations, flavours spectrums, moods, genres and approaches. As visual animals, it is one of the dominant ways we consume the world.

But how does it work? Is it like media? Is it made in the moments? How can I distort it further? We’re too used to a single spectrum, and like lighting, we go for efficiency rather than meaning and driving the story, or just saturate the whole thing with a filter. People treat colour like cinematic tone too often, they say it should be constant throughout, when really, as long as it fits the story, you can do anything.

As a side point, why don’t more people make films in infrared or ultra-violet? We forget that we only live in so much of the spectrum, and the world of colours, like the worlds of maths and ideas, is far beyond what we can comprehend at first glance.

Should we also seek to overturn the industrial models of colour and colour correction? The typical views we have of colour are merely those mandated by the industries of making. What does colour really mean? How does it cross cultural and sociological boundaries? Some languages don’t have words for certain colours or shades, and they therefore can’t ‘see’ them properly. If cinema is a language, how can we take this fluidity into account? Is our view of colour simply a dominant Western discourse? We are all members of the same species, but the way we think and process is often different.

Research also shows that people like colours strongly associated with objects they like (e.g., blues with clear skies and clean water) and dislike colours strongly associated with objects they dislike (e.g., browns with feces and rotten food). Further research shows t that, even though the colours of many modern artifacts are almost completely arbitrary do not have significant signal value, deeply ingrained natural color signals (e.g., the redness of a blushing face) may be strong enough to influence colour preferences.

This lends cinema considerable visual richness, and there is a depth to colour processing that I really want to examine in future. How can we reconcile the semiological and sociological with the biological? Where does colour begin as a property and end as a feeling?

Here, we can see the ways in which I graded and saturated the footage. I reallly wanted to make the colours pop and find the ecological reality of the shot, communicating the feeling of life and vibrancy.

It’s just a start, really. I used these settings over the rest of my footage, to match them, however, I really need to spend more time with colour. I can make certain things happen, but I haven’t mastered masking and I don’t know enough of the why of colour to justify doing too much to my footage after the fact.

Werner Herzog said something that resonated with me the other day, I was bouncing around the internet, and I came across a site spruiking a film school delivered by none other than Herzog himself. Now, as a man, Herzog understands implicitly the value of his own magic, mystery and mystique. He cultivates drama like I cultivate sneakers, and this brief video of his online film school was no different. He was typically Herzogian, and rambled about a few things. But one thing he said really resonated.

‘We are thieves, not filmmakers’.

This was a viewpoint I had never considered. He attached it to a dismissal of storyboards and industrial processes as well. Given the nature of this semester, it got my mind to spinning on this new viewpoint. Why am I trying to ‘make’ film, when I should be trying to ‘find’ film? Why am I trying to ‘tell’ stories, when I should be ‘stealing’ stories. Everyone steals and remixes to some degree, but approaching it, paradoxically, as an honest act of theft, might be the one thing I need to overturn industrial process. If I let it be, and let the artifact speak for itself, maybe that is what I need to help me break down and distort meaning.

Herzog also went on to ramble about preferring “people who have worked as bouncers in a sex club, or have been wardens in the lunatic asylum. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn’t mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that’s what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.”

As much as that both stings and resonates, attaching this viewpoint to the rest of my semesters work may be a little hard. I can’t quit my job to work in a mental asylum, I have already organised shooting days, and I’ve already decided my investigations for the rest of semester.

However, I might be able to remember this for the future, sink my teeth and steal moments of time when I film in the years to come.