Collaboration in Quarantine

With current circumstances involving the nationwide lockdown due to Covid-19.

My group and I decided to continue to work together instead of working on separate projects but we know had to think of new ways to create the film we intended to in the first place.

Unfortunately, our 4 step plan quickly became a 2 step plan overnight as we had:

1. no access to equipment

2. no access to each other

Luckily, the primary ideas of the project such as frustration could still be effective with the use of archive footage anyway but the likelihood of the shared idea to film our lives over Easter Break was halted.

So as a collective we searched for new resources in our own personal archives and internet archives and put the footage we liked or thought would be useful in a shared google drive folder we created so we could all view the same footage and still be able to work collaboratively. We also thought of new ways to make the film more interesting as we had two editors on the project Matthew and myself we considered having each of us edit half of the film each to make it feel further disjointed.

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With the stressfulness and frustration we are all currently experiencing due to lockdown, the film, in my opinion, began to shift towards greater meaning and although my group and I didn't want to make a film solely about this incident. I thought it may be of interest to include some elements in this. Like any good disaster the Government puts out its usual propaganda which always seeps into our consciousness in the case of COVID:

As part of the film, I would be interested in maybe incorporating various subliminal slogans into the soundtrack as I feel the repetitiveness of these is irritating, much like repeating advertisements. Including this, makes the film relevant to the current global situation happening in the world right now without it being blatantly obvious.

I thought it was then essential to research into found footage films. I decided to read some of the articles on Blackboard one, in particular, stood out while reading an extract from “Found Footage Film As Discursive Meta-History” I learnt that the format is about critically investigating the history behind the image and are often metaphoric in nature.

Matt also pointed me on the direction of Adam Curtis' work namely a film called HyperNormalisation [2016]

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

But I also looked at other films used in this format:

Cobain: Montage of Heck [2015] Brett Morgen. Is a multimedia film using a combination of archive footage, interviews, music and animation to create a coherent timeline of late musician Kurt Cobain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH00BUAvJmQ

London [1994] Patrick Keiller. Uses a fictional narrator to tell the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zgHBACzfkI

Of Time and The City [2008] Terence Davies. Uses archive footage, classical music and poetry extracts to tell the story of, Liverpool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzhrdNzqu1w

La Jetée [1962] Chris Marker. One from the initial Hyde Park Picture House meeting. A film made up of narration and photographic stills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6anMLFwHFqs

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Drive Link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xRiR2QrrwmKyFpToDP_rc8xjfzj-di0E

Detachement and Locked Rooms

In discussion with my experimental group. We discussed an idea of the audience being distant from the action on the screen. Much like how I discussed in a previous blog post about Godard and his ideas of distancing the audience through the use of audio and breaking of the fourth wall. A way we felt we could achieve this was through using a tv screen which in post we would mask parts of the film onto. We would also have people sat in front of said tv screen constantly changing the channels to further distance the audience from the action, hopefully leading to ideas of frustration.

Thinking of television we then discussed what we commonly saw on tv and how we could interfere with it in our film. Cartoons such as Tom and Jerry are usually short and satisfying to the audience as the reach a conclusion within a few moments without much need for concentration on the plot, an idea we then had was to cut the action so it would be difficult for the audience to watch and the climax would be missed therefore making the action frustrating. On the other hand, adverts are also usually present on tv and they are rather annoying so what if we were to mix the audio to irritate the audience and make the viewing of the film uncomfortable?

I also introduced ideas of illustration or animation, partially due to my own love of the medium and from a music video by the band The Maccabees called "No Kind Words"

In the video, it depicts two people unable to communicate although facing each either. I feel the animation present in the video accurately depicts the character's frustration at their miscommunication.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=605fY2RqTkI

When looking at initial ideas of frustration I was pointed in the direction of The Locked Room experiment by our tutor Matt. The experiment took place between 1969 to 1973 at Central St Martins School of Art, a group of sculpture students were locked in a white room each weekday between 10 am to 4:30 pm and banned from speaking to anyone. The reaction varied within the students from silent protests, to rebellion and dropping out.

I then looked to where this could apply to my experimental film. Each student was presented with material and forced to use it without full creative control or guidance. I think I wanted to imply this lack of control to the audience during my film, that they were forced to watch something and take influence from it without being allowed the satisfaction they expect to receive of an ending, beginning or climax.

Brainstorming

This week in the experimental film module, my group and I met up to discuss ideas to finalise the premise of our film. As a group, we devised a 4 step plan of action as we moved more towards the idea of solely focusing on the frustrating images over that of subcultures specifically, what annoys us as a collective. The reaction we wanted to evoke through the film was a sense of confusion and annoyance from the audience by what they had been forced to watch.

To still fit in the idea of our generation in the first step of our plan we were going to use clips we had filmed on our camcorders depicting our daily life. Mariam, Lillie and I had tested this out at an event we went to, to see if the camcorder footage would work. However, most of it was incoherent and lacked direction so we needed to despite what the motive of it was going forward.

The second step was compiling a list of annoying images:

• The shaving of a head but missing a patch of hair

• Someone mowing the lawn and intentionally missing a patch of grass

• A long black space in the film - to irritate people's attention spans

• A band set up with a saxophonist playing a solo as the rest of the band are about to play the film cuts

• Someone colouring in the lines but then goes outside

• Someone biting into the middle of a Kit-Kat

• Someone discussing an elaborate story which keeps getting interrupted so you never hear the full conversation

• Ice cream dripping down a hand

• A bad domino set up

• Changing the format of the film e.g the aspect ratio, the camera type

• Penny pushers

• Cutting before the perfect bowling strike

• Mis -spelt subtitles

• Incongruent dialogue

• An informative video with all the information missing

The third step moving forward with these ideas we thought about getting an emotional response from an audience of our peers for example at the Secret Cinema meetings. So then we could see what clips worked or were more frustrating than others.

Then in the fourth step, we were to conduct interviews where we would present the interviewee with a nostalgic object such as a Tamagotchi and ask them questions while something weird was in front of them such as a desk covered in soil. And therefore frustrate them by ignoring the elephant in the room being the soil on the desk. Of course, moving forward we would have to consider the ethical issues of intentionally winding someone up.

Inspired by the first two steps of the plan as one of the editors in the group, I began to look through archives and personal archive to create a short edit of what the basic structure of the film could be going forward.

https://vimeo.com/395696686

When showing this montage to other people the part which stood out the most was the long black video where the majority of the people presumed the video had stopped working or had frozen. According to a 2018 study by Microsoft, the average human being as of now has an attention span of 8 seconds. So being in a cinema environment when the film is shown and forcing people to watch 30 seconds of nothing visually stimulating is bound to frustrate.