Bloodlines
(2010)
makers: Adeline Hooi, Alicia Lowndes and Nikki Tran.
So, interesting continuous soundtrack. That now ancient sound of a modem dialtone, and now music and a sound collage of voices. It's called Bloodlines, though as I follow videos through it seems to be primarily snippets from the daily life of an Asian student in Melbourne. It seems to bounce around and off being away from home, independence, family and obligation. Having a soundtrack is a good idea, and reasonably well done. There is a text sub title for each sequence, most of which are suggestive rather than descriptive or declarative. Technically, compression is a problem, the work has a lot of artefacts yet seems to aspire or need better quality than this. Similarly the very large red status bar, indicating where we are up to in the current clip, provides really useful feedback (a problem in many K-Films is that with no status bar you have no way of knowing if the current sequence goes for 30 seconds or 30 minutes!) but it is big, bold, ad visually dominates when really, all it does is how where we are up to in the current video. Finally, the thumbnails are all over the shop. Scattered, descending from larger to small. There is some suggestion of, well, a scattering, of letting the cards fall as they do, which is potentially an interesting idea and way of presenting the thumbnails, but things are just cramped and crowded, and because of this no one part, the text, video, thumbnails or status bar, is able to 'be'. Yes, this might reflect the idea of the work, though I suspect 'accidentally'. The video material itself is reasonably diverse and has a lot of potential to build a K-film as a minor, observational video diary, another iteration would have been really interesting.