Yes, But You Can Only Do So Much
Posted: May 30, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: practice | Tags: practice | Leave a comment »The key things that turned up as ‘things that I could have done better’ during the participation assessment (in no particular order)
- more focus
- more blogging – personal
- more blogging – readings
- more blogging – lectures
- more blogging – classes
- more linking to other stuff in my blog writing
- time management
- more reading of the readings
- more reading of other stuff
- prioritise things better (aka time management)
- asked more questions
Final K-Film Checklist
Posted: May 30, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Korsakow | Leave a comment »Have written a page that is a check list for what is needed for the final K-film project. Hope it helps.
How Do I Add a Link On The Project Page?
Posted: May 29, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: korsakow tips | Leave a comment »When you make a k-film it is pretty sensible to make sure anyone who views it knows who actually made it. There are a couple of simple ways you can do this. The first is to include your name on the k-film page itself, which might also link to more detailed credits (and a statement about the work, for instance). The second is to provide a link to a page which contains the relevant information.
In both of these cases you need to edit the index.html file that loads and plays for k-film, which the Korsakow software writes automatically when you export a project.
If you open this file in a text editor (eg TextWrangler or something similar, certainly NOT Word, and I’ve even steer clear of a HTML editor like Dreamweaver because it might try to do things to all the code it finds there) it looks something like this:
The relevant part for adding/editing a HTML link is:
Specifically where it says a href=’http://www.korsakow.org’ title=’made in Korsakow’ you need to replace ‘http://www.korsakow.org’ with the url you want the link to go to, and replace title=’made in Korsakow’ with some other description.
Then were it says Made in Korsakow replace this with the text that you want to appear as the link (the clickable text) that appears in the actual Korsakow project. That’s it.
How Do I Change the Background Colours?
Posted: May 26, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: korsakow tips | Leave a comment »There are two lots of background colours you can control in your k-film project. The background colour the webpage, and the background colour of the interface itself.
This screenshot is the project settings window and the cursor is over the Color button which sets the background colour for the project. This only sets the colour for the project stage (which in this case is 1240 x 600 pixels). Any part of the webpage the displays your project that is larger than this will still be the default black that Korsakow uses.
To change the html page you need to edit a CSS file (this defines how the web page appears). This CSS file is created when you export your project and is located in data/css/style.css
Open this with a text editor (not a word processor, in the screen shot I’m using the free TextWrangerler, and simply change the background-color attribute which is in the body element:
I have not tested this but this CSS file is possibly rewritten each time you export which means you’re better off changing this at the end of the project, not every time you export your project as you’re working.
Essay Reminder
Posted: May 26, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: practice | Tags: pedagogy, practice | Leave a comment »Some questions have come my way about the essay component of the final project. The essay can be written as a traditional essay, it might be hypertextual, it could be quite creative in its tone and manner. However, it is still an academic essay. This means it is about making an argument and not just stating opinions. This means that any claims require evidence (from the course notes, from your blogs, from the project you are writing about, from the readings, from other sources). Evidence is how you prove your argument. As an academic argument it also means that you must reference things properly, and so there has to be a bibliography that has properly cited sources, and any quotes you use must be appropriately attributed.
The essay is not in Word, or a PDF. It is to be online so that others can read it, so that it contains links (for example to your project), it might even contain images (screenshots of the work in progress, of films or things that have influenced you). The key thing of the essay is to think about your project via the theory and/or think about the theory via your project, to find ways in which ideas inform making, and making helps you to understand ideas.
Manovich Notes in Relation to Korsakow
Posted: May 25, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Korsakow, tactic-strategy | Leave a comment »Phoebe has an excellent post contextualising the Manovich reading in terms of Korsakow. There is a key question – as multilinear and open does this mean it is capable of infinite readings. The answer is yes. But the answer is also that this applies to any other thing too, just look at all the interpretations of, say, Hamlet. The qualitative change in something like a Korsakow film is not only that you can read it in an infinite number of ways, but that also the actual object (text, narrative, work) that is being read keeps changing. Not quite infinitely, but they usually have a sufficiently large number of possible combinations to be thought of as near enough to being infinite.
Wholes That Are Not
Posted: May 24, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Korsakow | Leave a comment »Here’s a useful outline of the lecture from week nine. The post, entitled ‘the incomplete whole’ is a good title, as this is in many ways the essence of cinema and things like Korsakow films. A whole is something we think of as being complete, entire, that is why it is a whole. Think of a shot of a cup of coffee. It is a cup of coffee, we can see what it is, it is a blue cup with a nice thick crema of coffee wisping its surface. The shot is whole. It goes for 10 seconds. I cut it in half. It now goes for 5 seconds. But it is still whole. That’s pretty freaky because most other things, you can’t do this too. So if it was whole at 10 seconds, how can it still be whole, at 5 seconds? Now, take this over to a k-film. What is a ‘whole’ k-film? Is it just the sum of the clips? Is it all possible combinations of all the clips that that particular k-film makes possible (in which case good luck with ever being able to watch a whole k-film). So in some ways a k-film is a whole, but it is always in some radical way, incomplete.
Editing, Kuleshov, and K-Films
Posted: May 24, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Korsakow | Leave a comment »Here’s a simple outline of Kuleshov and editing. The meaning is not quite in the shot (so where the heck is it??), so when I take a shot of one thing, and then join it with another, a meaning is created that is the product of this. It is not contained in either but is the product of each, where the total is greater than the sum of the parts. It is not just, however, that different readers interpret differently, this is a feature/attribute of shots and editing. We can change what a shot actually means, by putting it into a different relation with other shots. So a k-film becomes a big engine for making this possible.
Writing to Your Work
Posted: May 24, 2011 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »Phoebe has a good post thinking about softvideo, writing with video, and writing to a k-film. The final assessment task requires writing because it is in writing that you have to consolidate your ideas. I also want you to learn how to write to your work, how to be able to articulate what it is about, what it is trying to do, and why. Enough of makers who have no capacity to describe, say, be intelligent about the things they make. Writing is, at the moment (and has been for quite a while) our key mechanism for articulating, sharing, and disseminating knowledge. Knowledge can be expressed in other artefacts (a film, painting, dance, all express particular sorts of knowledge), but each of these remains internal to the language of the medium. Writing is what lets us translate this across media.
So Phoebe picks up how writing requires something to record, which might imply something inherently physical. But in softcopy what or where is the physical? Related to this I would recommend Alexandre Astruc’s ‘caméra-stylo‘ (or if you have the French, or a bit of translation software: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caméra-stylo).
The Everyday
Posted: May 10, 2011 | Author: admin | Filed under: practice | Tags: Int Media, practice | Leave a comment »Holly is working on the final project and often forgets to film . One of the small but big changes we are playing with this semester is to think through how a semi-formal, everyday video making might also be ‘serious’ and produce ‘real’ work. Stephanie wants Melbourne, but done differently. While you do need something like 60 clips, some things to approach what she describes might be to only film at night, or to only explore one aspect of Melbourne. Imagine spending a couple of nights in a popular lane, filming what you observe. A piece of paper on a cobble,the reflection of light off something wet, feet going past, a bottle. Smoke. A portrait of a place in its moments.