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Into smithereens is an experiment in animated concrete poetry. It’s inspiration is a series of nursery rhymes, which seemed to call for a surreal approach. In keeping with the nursery theme, the artwork is niave.

Got home last night, pretty beat after two days’s intensive teaching, so I dialled up Apple TV, which has a very limited selection of movies to choose from, mainly B grade (but much better for TV). Anyway, I chose, to my regret, Taken 2 (Dir. Luc Besson, starring Liam Neeson). Pretty sure Neeson knows how bad it is. But it’s the editing style, known as intensified continuity, which is taken to extremes in this movie and really got on my nerves. Split-second cuts in the action scenes, which makes you think that the protagonists’ fists aren’t really coming anywhere near each other, so they’re using editing to cover up the gap. I remember one brilliant, breath-taking moment in which a single take is allowed to rest on an air-borne car before it crashes. Completely restful. Then on the with show…

Anyway, it reminded me of this video essay by Matthias Stork.

Stork argues that the techniques of ‘chaos cinema’ extend beyond the editing into camerawork and CGI integration.

It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical film-making style to bits.

These directors’ bi-word is spectator disorientation, to the extent of narrative break-down. “The only art here is the art of confusion”, Stork argues. Intelligibility – such as it is – is derived from the soundtrack. The sound design saved these movies.

Stork goes on to illustrate how the techniques of chaos cinema extend to other genres, and inhibit the actor’s ability to communicate. I’m wondering whether a lot of the transmedia phenomenon is an extension fo chaos cinema – a profusion of media in which order is threatened, the spectator is meant to piece it together, sometimes rather impressionistically.

Narrative will never be threatened, only projects that fail to strike a balance between the chaos aesthetic and narrative convention. What drives people to wade through the chaos to make sense? It must be the core narrative values of character, drama, location, etc.

Some time ago, I harvested my first crop of chia. All well and good, although it took longer than I expected, about nine months from go to whoa. Lesson: plant early, as soon as there’s no frost. And if you live in a frost-ridden climate, chia is probably not for you.

If you can grow tomatoes you can probably grow chia, treat ‘em similarly – down to staking them and tying them up. Like tomatoes, the stalks get dry and brittle long before you’ll be ready to harvest. Although they’re meant to be an arid climate plant, they want plenty of water (again: just like tomatoes).

However, you’ll want to plant your chia earlier than tomatoes, because they take longer to mature.

Anyway, like everything in life, the problem occurs deep into the process. Here are my dried chia seeds still on the stem. I expect it took me 50 hours to separate the chaff from the seeds. There must be a machine, a small scale thresher – but I don’t even know what it’s called. I’ll tell you now, having several gauges of strainer will only get you so far. And then there’s the old school ‘blow across the top of the mess, and the chaff will blow off’ theory. Nope. These seeds are light and small.

So I painstakingly sorted them with a knife on my kitchen bench. At least I understand why chia is so expensive…. except I’m sure the big boys have a better way. Just not me and my backyard.

Anyway, I have a fine second crop well on the way to maturing now. Only three more seasons before I can call them organic! And after that, panning for gold. I’ll be able to use my strainers for that, too. There’s a certain creek I have in mind.

….but one that is so relevant to transmedia storytelling, argues Peter Usagi in Modern Mythology: Modern Mythology and the Transmedia Revolution, a broad-ranging post with wonderful media. I think the reason why archetypal storytelling might be important to transmedia is that these complex projects must have such a strong story to bring them together, to motivate the user and to given them coherence, given that users will access bits and pieces of the project unpredictably, that their knowledge will only be partial most of the time … what will keep them going? A narrative that gives them a hero, or a quest, or an obsession …

I’ve always loved mythology. Right now I’m reading a rather horrid old Victorian redaction of Greek and Roman mythology called The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch (c. 1855) – all the sex and rape obfuscated under layers of seamliness. Nevertheless, the stories sing… passions and conundrums, the difference between the human and the inhuman, sex and power. Bulfinch ends each chapter by quoting the turgid verses of some romantic poet who has been thus inspired.

The wonderful thing about reading such a book is that you distill the essential stuff of the myth from the shifting sands of fashion and morality. For a text to entertain the myth, the writer needs to have more of the former and less of the latter. It’s the difference between the story of Cupid and Psyche and some Mills and Boons bodice-ripper.

You can watch The Power of Myth, a TV series featuring American mythologist Joseph Campbell online (6 eps).

Tom Zaniello proposes a number of new genres of digital documentary including what is an essentially marketing video like the one, which I include mainly as an excuse to listen to Sigur Ros. Tom gives himself an out, by saying that

hybrids are the rule, not the exception.

Well, OK: but i’m a little dubious that this makes the grade. It’s been quite a few years since we’ve been happy with propaganda (ie marketing) as documentary, but I’m beginning to feel that if it’s digital and online, people will call marketing a doco. Criticality, guys! And where have all out sophisticated engagements with the nature of non-fiction gone? They seem to have stayed in the cinema. I don’t think videos such as this would make the grade in any documentary festival anywhere – and while it might sneak in on some commercial TV stations, surely some programming exec somewhere would be sitting uncomfortable on his/her plush seat?

More interesting are Zanielli’s other new categories, Remixes/Mashups and Faux Docs

To me, a remix is always likely to be some sort of satire. This genre can conceivably be traced back to A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, by Jonathan Swift (1729), in which the form and style of a political pamphlet is mashed up to satirical end. The Faux doc is similarly satirical. Also known as a mockumentary, as far as I can see.

Tom also mentions some great early participatory UGC documentary making by guerillavision. These docs are early examples – albiet more highly edited – of what Kate Nash has called collaborative webdocs. The beauty of editing the UGC is that you can still have an authorial voice and present an argument. Unedited collaborative webdocs suffer from the randomness of the content that is submitted to them. It can’t be ‘massaged’ into any sort of shape, and whether you have a progression of ideas, or 10 people saying the same thing, is entirely whimsical. While it might be valuable to sift through similar statements looking for contrasts and agreements in the style of a categorial argument (Nichols/Nash), it might also be plain boring…. At least to the outsider. Maybe collaborative webdocs are designed for insiders, and then they become a celebration of a community.

Reference

Nash, Kate (2012). ‘Modes of Interactivity: Analysing the webdoc’ Media, Culture & Society, 34(2), 195-210.

I’m sick of this character! This is my last cartoon. For now.

In this lecture, we explore basic audio editing techniques using Audacity and Garageband. Both are free software, although Garageband is only available for Mac.

Audacity is more basic than Garageband. Garageband also allows you to compose music, using built-in software instruments. Depending on your project, you may need nothing more than Audacity, however, the more you are mixing music into your recording, the more you are likely to need Garageband. There is lots of audio editing software, but these two alone are quite powerful.

Audacity

Download here. The first tutorial below pre-supposes that you wish to record directly into Audacity. You will not get the best quality recording if you record your voice directly into the computer. At the very least, you will get the hum of the computer. A better-quality recording can be achieved using something like a xoom handheld recorder, or indeed, even recording into your mobile phone. Try to find a small fully enclosed room, away from traffic noise, voices, etc. Then upload that to your computer and open it in audacity.

More tutorials are available on Youtube.

Garageband

The first two of these tutes are very heavy on learning the software. The last one is a quick n’ dirty guide to making a ‘song’ – a pretty unoriginal song, but nevertheless … I hear these loops often enough on the ABC.

More tutorials are available on Youtube.

[post written for CMWP, a course at RMIT University]

The Dream is Now is a participatory “documentary” about undocumented children in the US, deriving its content from UGC ‘confessional video’ style pieces to camera.

This doco captures, to great effect, is the moment – in this it replicates the strength of social media, the ability to take the pulse of now. But what happens when the situation changes – if these people get what they so ardently want, for example. Sure, they could then upload a new vid celebrating the event, but the structure and design of this doco is unable to represent that something has changed. It would be a matter of chance if the viewer uncovered the historical trajectory of events. We can’t sort it; we can’t interrogate the database, let alone follow a suggested (ie, editorialised) path.

What this may mean is that complex arguments, or sophisticated philosophical positions, are unlikely to emerge. The genre becomes a type of propaganda. Although the footage is very modest – people talking to web cams to mobile phone videos – Lene Reifenstahl would have understood this style of documentary (if not, necessarily, the specific message). Structurally, the creators have made no room for complexity – and the more I think about it, the more reservations I have about calling it a documentary at all.

Of Michael Renov’s 4 ‘aesthetic functions’ of documentary:
1. To record, reveal, or preserve–derived from photographic antecedents, a documentary’s realism, a film-maker’s primary desire to ‘record life as it is’… (Renov p 75);
2. To persuade or promote–to mount an argument in favour of a position on some issue of social or cultural import. State-supported propaganda films are extreme examples of this function;
3. To express–perhaps the most controversial, a documentary-makers use of aesthetics to ‘add value’ to the raw record, thus possibly distorting it;
4. To analyze or interrogate–perhaps the most overlooked, this function seeks to analyze and question the very record that justifies the doco in the first place (Renov 83).

I figure The Dream is Now only really does justice to (2).

Reference

Renov, M (2004). The subject of documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp 191-215.

I’ve been downloading a lot of apps the last couple of years – I’m sure you have too. About half of the sit there, unused, for a year or so, then I realise they’re a waste of memory and they get trashed. But the other half become a part of my life. Why?

I only download things I think I’ll use, but I’m busy – so the first thing they need is to answer a clear and present need. Yeah, there are a few apps that I’ve never even opened once. Intellectually it sounded like it would make me more efficient, or more creative, but the need was never urgent enough. Or there was an alternative that was more familiar, easier – regardless of whether the unopened app would meet my needs better.

That’s the first cut.

Second cut: I try the app, but one of two things happen: Either it’s not flexible or powerful enough, or the interface and user design features are too disorganised and unintuitive. If I’m really sure I need it, I might persevere through the second reason – it’s amazing what you can get used to if you have a strong enough need – but the first reason is a real killer.

Third cut: the life-change. The ones that I begin to use constantly are the ones that change my life. Wow. Usually this is not just greater efficiency. I’m doing something different, something new. That’s when the app has captured my attention and I’m excited. I choose to use it above other things.

My daughter, who is 2, love apps too – but I think her reasons are a bit different. Maybe because she’s got such a different relationship with time, she’s happy to click things and swipe things with no real sense of purpose. She’ll quit the game half way through, just when, from my perspective, she’s getting to the good part. In a sense, it’s not the app that excites her, it’s the zen of interactivity. Her favourites, however, tend to be the stories and the nursery rhymes for which she is the master of the interface. At the moment, the more creative ones are a bit beyond her independent play abilities, so she quits them quickly.

[quote by Ivan Illich]