Category: Tutorial notes

K film class notes

We want to explore our three different hometowns, highlighting what is different between them and what is the same.

–       First memory

–       History of town

–       Favourite place

–       Worst memory

–       Favourite store/café

–       Little anecdotes

Intimacy, personal, creating meaning, self-reflective, autobiographical,

How to link them – narration

Narratingplace.info

Voiceovers while filming – more intimate?

Constraints when filming, eg a shape, a time of day

Mood board – documentary examples to align with the project

–       what kind of documentary and how does it fit in to the documentary genre

 

Hubs

Notes from week nine symposium and tutorial

  1. The center of our own network/our relationship to the network vs the network actually having a centre
  2. Networks are dynamic – always growing
  3. ‘Dynamic’ as a way of thinking and learning: open to change, admitting when we’re wrong – this is not a popular way of thinking
  4. Global networks and how cities fit in to this network –> creative industries
  5. Creative knowledge workers
  6. Creative economy
  7. Networks: centralised (hierarchical) vs scalefree?
  8. Heritage media
  9. There’s no centre for the internet – if something goes downs, the rest of the internet won’t go down as in TV or radio or newspapers.
  10. Hubs – defined by how many ties link in and out
  11. The importance of the strength of weak ties – friends don’t get you jobs but acquaintances do
  12. 6 degrees of separation
  13. The internet is not virtual – bandwidth pollution and carbon footprint
  14. Developing countries leapfrogging heritage/industrial media and getting straight to wireless, eg Nokie interface translation
  15. The mechanics of scarcity, eg, retail shelf sapce, TV only having 24 hours of broadcast time a day
  16. Venture capitalism
  17. 80:20 rule
  18. Internet infrastructure is finite

Unspun thoughts

A few half-formed thoughts from the last week or two:

Mixing up categories of form and content. Eg, poetic documentary
– I like this idea because I’ve been thinking a lot about contrast, conflict and duality, and how we can make meaning out of deconstruction and appropriation.

Genre – relies on audience formation, so what is interesting about interactive documentary is that its not fixed in terms of audience expectation.

Media literacies around genres and media forms. Are these learnt behaviours? Rap example of “What is this?” and “why would I enjoy this” and “where is the artistry” – the literacies for pleasure and judgement weren’t yet learnt. How can ____ be judged, and why?

Storytelling makes truth claims, either about a world (fiction) or the world (non-fiction)
–> doesn’t all fiction allude to the human condition in some way, hence documentary?

Interactive documentary: Wikipedia = participatory non-fiction

Authorial intention and purpose. Plurality of the ways that texts are engaged with.

Authors can never control the interpretation of their writing
–> books belong to their readers
– eg, example of the Bible, what does it mean!

We can interpret texts, but we can’t have access to the author’s mind. How can we have access to Shakespeare’s mind if he is dead? This is magical thinking. What we interpret is a text, not the author’s mind. Treat the text as the thing with the personality, not the creator.

Author’s cannot control their texts or the interpretations of their texts.

Chop/stop example. We think that reason is in charge of everything that we do, but a trivial childish rhyme can completely subvert what we think is the privilege of reason. If that’s so easy to do, how can we think author’s are in charge of anything, and if we read anything we can get magical access to the author’s mind.

Plot and story. Plot is the order of the things that happen, story is the order in which the things are narrated. Eg, flashbacks, etc.

How does communication work at all if there are no guarantees?

Idea of encoding and decoding – trying to work out the different codes the author/composer may have in the text, they may be thematic, visual, etc, and they use those to construct the story, and the audience can decode that to find meaning in the story.

The difference between understanding the author and the author’s mind, and understanding the author’s composition and strategies.

–       Psychoanalytical theory?

The unconscious by definition cannot be known. We analyse the text over the person.

No context can be attached to the text.

Intent cannot survive. We can’t say what we mean because we can’t guarantee the audience will take the meaning away.

We assume there are intentions in the message, but we can’t guarantee we will take the intended message away.

We can’t help but find patterns.

Context cannot survive the text, eg, 1950s film being racist/sexist, or Adrian’s teacher explaining Aboriginals would soon be extinct.

For interactive media, authorial control needs to be surrendered.

Networked media: while sitting at a cafe on a cold and wet Saturday afternoon in mid July.

Something a bit unkempt, even dishevelled. Smart, a lot – too many – of ideas. A sea indeed of ideas. An ocean of ideas. And there’s networked media. A boat. Certainly not a big one. Doesn’t really have a sail but there is some sort of mast to pin something on, against, to. Or a motor. Not adrift. It bobs, floats, weaves. Seeks and follows eddies of the breeze, currents, a wave. Sometimes it gets blown and washed around, other times darting along with deliberate intent revelling in its boat knowledge of breeze, current, wave. There is no shore. Not at least to be seen. Anywhere. All ocean, and because it is all water one place is as well as close enough, or further away, than any other. Each wave is different. Different enough to have a difference, a difference that matters. This gives this ocean contour, currents, eddies and tides. You dip an oar, seeking something over there, enjoying the whirl and whorl of water around the oar.

As a speculative curriculum, I find this metaphor for what we are studying quite fitting. The symbolism of water, rough tides, navigating a boat through a somewhat-but-not-always predictable atmosphere – these ideas readily lend themselves to something so ‘fluid’ as the changing media landscape and the places we can go both laterally and vertically. I’m a creative non-fiction fan, so I’m looking forward to playing with fiction and voice in this critical thinking and writing about the subject.

Making waves

 

In the tutorial I found myself thinking about how different aspects fit in to this metaphoric idea – I especially liked the idea of tsunami’s as changing paradigms, uprooting what we think of as knowledge with possible devastation, for more creative and interesting outcomes forming in it’s wake. The possibilities for networked media are truly unrealised, and I’m excited to be entering the industry in this time of creative change and innovation. I really don’t know what to expect.