Male Gaze

I was doodling whilst watching Beauty and The Beast - this happened.

Whilst looking at Male Gaze (For my video project) I was reminded of an argument I saw on Tumblr a while back - I went and found it again and was actually quite intrigued by it.  Click here to see it!

When reading it I couldn't help but agree with the idea it was presenting, I've since looked at this projection of male fulfilment in other Disney films (simply because I find animation to be a clearer indiction of this since the animators have to create something from scratch, this is exactly how they imagined these characters) I found an interesting paper from Dundee University in which they discuss that in it's entirety, found here.

This got me thinking about how the internet has influence my way of thinking on other things, I personally didn't think much of feminism until I started reading comments on my favourite book series/tv shows/films ect and I read all those critiques online. Sites like Tumblr have been a factor in how I form my opinions of the subject in the current social climate because posts are made instantly. Now I'm not under the naive impression that everything on the internet is the truth nor should it be taken seriously, but seeing these comments have encouraged me and many others to undertake more research into what's actually going on this world. I remember seeing a post called '2014 the year Women stopped taking shit from the media' but at the moment I can't find it - I did however come across this video which gives the viewer some food for thought so to speak.

So I'm still working on my idea but I have one which is more than I had last week, I actually have a few now it's just the case of figuring out which one to pitch on Tuesday. 

Mind Maps!

I did some brainstorming on what I could possibly do for my film project and got some interesting Ideas, the one that caught my attention was the idea of 'Walk a Mile in her shoes' simply beats sue I could see a campaign emerging from it. I think it's a testament to how much time I spend online that I judge ideas on how likely they are to go viral on the Internet, I can see this one going quite well I marketed it right and had a good film to aid it. 

 I am still looking around for importation however so this is by no means my final idea. 

It makes noise!

I've always loved writing music and playing around with it in Cubase but when I started Music Tech (and evidently now) I do find it hard to drift away from what can be seen as traditional composition methods. For example; sitting down at piano and figuring out the key, the meaning behind minor or major, what motif would fit best? That kind of thing, but then again I've only ever composed for theatre, and pretty badly at that.

Something I've found today is that no matter what sounds I have I edited them so they fit my idea of an instrument so I could create some kind of riff or beat. Now whilst in theory this works for me I'm beginning to think I'm loosing the raw quality of the recordings by taking away their literal identity. Although trying to turn sounds from a pool table into a guitar riff and drum beat is pretty fun - at times infuriating - but still fun.

Here's a little file I created on Friday entirely out of sounds from a Pool table and some Water;

A Week in The Life of a DFSA Student

So for my Vlog this month (I had all good intentions of it going live in January, things happen....) I brought my camera to class with me and gave potential students a overview of what DFSA does in a week. The caption? 'How do you describe the course that does everything? In Short? You don't. You show them.' So here it is.....

Also let's use this as proof that I do actually do work? OK.

Aha!

I'm a bit behind of the video project in the sense that I don't really have a particular direction in which I specifically want to head in so to get a bit of inspiration I decided to look around the internet to see what types of experimental film is out there and how it came about. I found a website called nofilmschool and two articles one 'Experimental Film For Dummies' (Pretty fitting in this case) and 'A (Very Brief) History of Experimental Cinema', I have to say it was the latter than intrigued me most. In all honesty Experimental Film has never been my forte simply because I've never understood it I'm quite a systematic thinker so experimental films go against what my mind wants to do.

The first thing I looked at was actually a credit sequence ( Gasper Noe, 2009, 'Enter the Void' rather than an entire film, what I noticed straight away was that it was quite hard to follow, the eye is constantly moving trying to register what is on screen and read the text but the font and size is constantly changing making you strain a bit to understand the words. But even with all that I became more interested in the credits of film than I have done in a long time.

Thorsten Fleisch's Energie, this is a big one for me because it's watching and reading about this one that I (rather stupidly and a bit late to game) realised what experimental film is, an experiment. This is a man who was just fascinated by electricity so he created a way for more people to understand his fascination, he did this by conducting an experiment and simply filming it. It is raw and intriguing, the context in which is was created is fascinating in itself and whilst it's hard to watch at times that's countered by the soothing music.



I also looked at 'The Kuleshov Effect - Lev Kuleshov' and 'Hunger - Steve McQueen'. The first of which was really interesting to watch especially since this was made entirely in the edit, and then to understand the audiences reaction to it. Hunger on the other hand was fascinating - whilst I only watched the trailer and read a bit about it seemed like the perfect mash up of narrative cinema and experimental cinema, it was dramatic and immersive.

Finally I watched 'Emak Bakia - Man Ray (1926)' what I found interesting and yet annoying about this film is that it seems to have a narrative that I just can't figure out, even though since it is 'Pure Cinema' it shouldn't, in theory, have one. It has a lot of sporadic camera movements which keeps the eye moving keeping the audience entertained, it almost creates an optical illusion at some points making the mind go in to overdrive almost trying to make sense of what's going on. But the thing that stood out for me in this film is actually the soundtrack, it has a string orchestra play throughout something that I believe effects the mind more than a full orchestra due to it's shrill, piercing sound - it's also something most people associate with danger (think Jaws).



So that's my research, whist I still don't have a definite idea of what my proposal is going to be I do have more of an idea of experimental film consists of and I think that gives me a lot more freedom when it comes to brainstorming in the next week.

Digital Memory

Frames from all 9 Harry Potter Films in Chronological Order

As I've been thinking about the Photography project I've been leaning more and more Digital Memory, after my experimental 'fail' something I did find interesting was the use of the internet in how I got the images for the Merlin Filmography slideshow (Thank you ColinMorfan and LadyOfTheLake on Tumblr!). Whilst I don't intend to make the project interactive, I did start thinking of art that is made in Tumblr/Internet fan-bases, something that caused a lot of comments on Tumblr (something I saw years ago and is still popular today) was the use the key-frames in an image. A fan had condensed the key frames/key colours from the Harry Potter series into one long image, I find this fascinating as just looking at the colours, they way they get darker as each film ends, the colours get cooler as the series goes on and finally the white line near the right of the image symbolizing “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, when one only remembers to turn on the light.” - or at least that's how Potter fans look at it.

So my initial idea for the project is very similar, but instead of using films I'm going to use Digital home movies, therefore creating a tangible object (the photograph) out of something that in a few years time might not be readable (MP4 files). Whilst I dabbled with this technique a few years back I haven't really looked at it since, I'll post here when I have a first draft!

Talk About Feminism....

From an earlier post regarding my portrait project, regarding 'GamerGate'

'Now you see I call myself a Feminist, for a long time I didn't because the word was tabbo and if someone called themselves one they got verbally attacked. It wasn't till very recently that I would call myself it and now everything I do is surrounding it in some way or someone will make a comment and I will want to comment back because of how sexist it actually is. This seemed to consume my time and mind for the past few months and everything seemed fine, a few arguments here and there but other than that it's been fine, yet I read an article a few days ago that really scared me.

The basis of the article was really simple, a feminist author called Anita Sarkeesian was asked to lead a lecture at Utah State University and when someone found out he* threatened not only her but everyone who was going to attend the lecture. This person stated that they would commit 'the deadliest school shooting in American history' before commenting 'I have at my disposal a semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols and collection of pipe bombs'. Read the full article here.

All this because a woman was finally standing up for playable female characters in Games! (Also know as #GamerGate apparently).

*I can't find the article with the exact name but I remember them being male, this isn't me making assumptions. Just clearing that up.'