http://www.themediastudents.net/im1/2014/yilingyang.hannahandrews.angusward

Integrated Media – Korsakow Essay

Stress is the body’s reaction to a change that requires a physical, mental or emotional adjustment or response.
Stress can come from any situation or thought that makes you feel frustrated, angry, nervous, or anxious.
Stress is caused by an existing stress-causing factor or “stressor.”

When creating this piece based on the subject of stress we noted that it is caused by an external stressor. This ‘stressor’ will be different for everybody.
For example a student may find balancing work and study stressful however a young mother may find her children cause her stress.
Furthermore what some people find stressful others thrive on. For example a high school student might find public speaking stressful yet a youth worker might thrive on the energy of presenting in front of a crowd.
Upon discussing with the group we quickly realized that many of our responses to stress and our lifestyle choices when stressed in many cases universal. to not have our work misinterpreted we decided to focus on the response to stress.
The aim of our piece was not to create a list of things that cause stress but rather report on the response to stress.

Content

We used colour as a tool to show what stress does to a person and did this by creating three groups of clips, each with an increased focus on stress.

The first group represented a mindset that is stress free. We discussed that when a person is relaxed, they the time to study things, to look at colours, textures and details. We focused on bright colours, living things with a focus on health. Some of the clips focused on movement, a reflection on being active and healthy and some simply took the time to study a single subject. We also incorporated clips based on relationships based on the idead that when relaxed happy we tend to spend time with family, friends and even pets.

Then we had a level of saturated clips. Using Instagram filter ‘Maven’ the clips appeared more saturated and focused on things that weren’t as overtly colourful or playful. They were darker and weren’t as concerned with details. In this second group of clips we added an element of ‘daily grind’ to reflect on our subject matter – stress which was gained a lot from travel. The idea that you don’t stop and enjoy life when stressed. Rather you simply go from place to place. Clips of trains and cars became a motive in this section and the final third group of clips. We orginally had just colour and black and white however felt there needed to be a gradual reduction of colour to better achieve the idea of steadily increasing stress.

Our final group of clips were filtered in black and white and aimed to depict what it feels like to be stress. They were trying to represent how one doesn’t take time to focus on the beauty of everyday life when looking through a lense of stress. Here we were able to counter many of the ‘healthy’ lifestyle choice with unhealthy lifestyle choices. Our clips contained things such as bad food, coffee and cigarettes. Between the group we easily found common ground between our group based when reflecting on out personal responses to stress as it came at a time in semester when a lot of work was due. We found the large amount of assignments we needed to finish, and the stress of running on deadlines takes away from the appreciation of the beautiful things in life. We used this as inspiration for our piece.

Here are the sub-categories of each group of clips and their SNU ratings:
1 – mate, pet, home, food, city, print, plant
10: 7.8.12.13.14.
8.92: 2.6.10.
7.84: 17.18.
6.94: 4.19.
6.04: 3.11.15
5.86: 5.
5.50: 9.16.20

2 – mate, pet, home, print, food, city, cigi, work, work2a
4.96: 12.13
4.06: 2.3.4.11
3.70: 9.14.17
2.98: 5.6.18
2.62: 8
2.62: 10
1.90: 7.15.16
1.72: 19.20

3 – work, human, pet, home, food, city
1.00: 1.10.12.14.16.20
0.88: 2.4.15
0.76: 5
0.64: 9.13.17.18
0.44: 3.6.8.19
0.28: 7.11

Sub-categories were added for the clips such as food, pet, home, mate, work, city and human were put into in and out keywords to link all the clips together in a specific order.

Interface

The major element of the work is create a work that illustrates how a persons mindset can change dramatically over time. The idea was to have a temporal element to it, wanting to show a gradual change in mindset over time. Therefore how we holistically showed this meant our interface design was vitally important.

The piece is designed so that in the beginning the mood is, happy, relaxed. Then gradually the second groups of saturated, darker clips get phased in and finally the black and white clips which essentially ‘take over’ the work representing the all encompassing nature of stress.

We considered a range of interfaces for the piece.

One that didn’t work was two large squares adjacent to each other as it essentially was a comparision of two clips. Therefore the emphasis was on finding patters or relationships rather than holistically looking at the work. Furthermore it forced the viewer to focus more on individual clips and their individual content which wasn’t the strongest or most important element of our piece.
This simply didn’t work and there was a need for a different, more hollistic visual approach.

Creating a grid like formation with each clip the same size and close together visually was the best way to represent a mindset. We took inspiration from David Shields piece; ‘Reality Hunger: A Manifesto’ reading. He describes collage of ‘a matter of adjacent data’ which is the exact approach we took to our interface design. A lot of the content if watched in isolation would not overtly represent stress. Context is required and achieved through the interface design as the collage we have created consists of ‘fragmented materials’ that are ‘out of context’. However based on the keywords that aid navigation through the work the overall effect of all of the clips represents a persons mindset when stressed.
Ultimatley the importance of out work as a collage was to create something that reflects ‘Not what you look at but what you see’.

Originally we had music intended however it did not work for a few reasons. For some of the clips the original sound was a very important element of the clip, so example the speaking and laughing between friends we thought had a strong association with being relaxed and happy. We looked at using very heightened, dramatic music however that made opening mood of our work very tense and we lost that change in mood over the course of the work.

We considered using a white background but felt when we tried it that it made it fresher and happier feel which was not the mood we intended. The black background better portrayed that dark feeling particularly toward the second half of the work.

Pattern

As mentioned previously, by using the wrong interface the piece could encourage those to make direct links between clips, which wasn’t the purpose.

However between the groups there were relationships between clips, that although subtle showing similar or related subject matter through two lenses; stressed and not stressed.

Food was on obvious choice of content. Simply we tried to illustrate that without stress you make healthy choices and with stress you often don’t. The colourful shot of the fruit relates to the black and white shot of a person eating chips.

Another element explored was a speed element. Again in regards to the use of time in our piece we wanted to show how when someone is stressed that they take the time to look and study things from everyday life. For example the street art, that would be easy not to notice, was focused on showing the detail of the work. Alternatively we wanted to show how things when rushed go unnoticed. A clip of pegs on a washing line, quickly whipping past, not stopping and looking at the colours or textures.

Ultimately the works general yet relatable content and subtle relationships between clips controlled by specific keywords and a strong interface design creates a piece reflective of the how people respond to stress and its all encompassing nature.

The film I chose to write about for the the Integrated Media course is “Dear Diary” made by  Kai Ebato, Sherilyn Wong and Kyesha Keleher.

The interface is made up with a black and white zebra-like patterned background, a broken toy bear with 4 strings with balloons of small thumbnails on each of them, tighten on its arm and pulling it up flying. A much bigger thumbnail is placed at the lower right corner of the interface, which shows the footage that is being played.

The toy is broken, one eye is injured and the whole bear itself looks devastated. Its movement is passive, being hung and lead by the 4 balloons, it has no control of where it will be flying to.

The background, especially the zebra-like pattern, however, doesn’t look connected to the mood (or atmosphere) of the story to me. I think I would prefer a more “actual” background…maybe a tattoo design, or a piece of art, drawing, consists with only black and white.

The piece, “Dear Diary” has no sound in any footage shown in the interface, what I could hear was only the voice over of what the girl writes in her diary. Along with some sounds of bike passing by, trains and trams, I can feel her isolated personality and how much she is emotionally attached with her brother, who is disowned by their parents.

I don’t have a sibling, but I have the history of hiding things from my parents, just like the girl. I guess what dragged my attention so deep into the piece of the work was the story of the girl and her brother took so much effort to achieve what they have always dreamed for. I used keep diaries when I was in my last year of primary school and I kept writing until I was 15, when one day I decided to burn them all. They were 16 books, big or small, thick or thin, I wrote down quotes from books I read (I also hid those books from my parents, not that those books were published illegally but they wanted me to study hard instead of reading stuff not related to course work), my naive but back then pure love sick, my loneliness of being isolated by my classmates and myself, my anger towards the discrimination I got because of my father as a government official and I was one of the most “stupid” students in the class and later on I was the poorest looking and weirdest behaving girl in the boarding school; and my desire of going overseas and living my own life – as what? I had no idea. I was only 16.

The girl in the film is also 16, at one of the stages of the film. Her brother has left the family for 4 years and he works in Miami as a tattoo artist. Her mother found what she has been hiding since her brother’s left, letters and sketch books. Her mother burned all the letters and the girl tries her best to keep the sketch books safe. She is always clear about what she wants to be, an artist, or say an illustrator.

I believe that a good piece of cinema art work is something that makes its audience reflect on their past, their present, remind them of what they have done or experienced. This piece is for audiences to watch again (and again) after sometime and they often have new thoughts and reflections. And I believe the content in this piece of art does not have too much dramatization but lots of things that we see and we do in our daily lives.

Thus I think the film is much more about real life and going for what a person dreams for than a common drama we see on TV. I wouldn’t doubt that the story is something actually happened in someone’s life. It makes me reflect on what I have been thinking or struggling about – where I want to go, what kind of person I want to be, what I want to do for living. The most part that the piece has made me think again and again is what I have been worried about – after I found out I in fact really enjoy drawing and photography – I am worried that what if after putting in so much effort in archiving an illustrator career for years and at the end everything happens only proofs me wrong about what I am capable of and I had only been living in a dream? But the piece also told me, the only thing I can and I should do for what I want is only DO IT.

When real life makes everyone struggle, media seems to be what always where we escape to from whatever we don’t want to deal with in everyday life. However this one piece, the audio lasts less than 10 minutes, at least makes some of us think again – about what we want to be, about defining our own positions in the society – I didn’t even need to watch the footage in the piece for what the producers what their audiences to feel. The voice tells it all.