The deadline for your Final Project is Thursday 24 August. If you are in the UK there will be a hand in session from 12:00 – 16:00 for you to get some final feedback. If you cannot attend then make sure your final film as well as your reflections are on your blog. The final post on your blogs should be called M104 Final Project Submission and should have your film embedded in it or a link if you are submitting a Klynt project.
If you have not had feedback yet then email me to arrange a session to meet in London or by talk by Skype.
This Thursday will be the final session, it is important that you are all in so that we can finalise the projects before you leave for the summer. Please also bring in something that we can celebrate the end of the semester with and feel free to invite families and friends.
At this stage you should be firming up your production plan for your final project. This is useful for all of you but particularly relevant if you are going to do long term remote study films. The dates that you need to work to are as follows:
29 June Last laboratory session in ICE
1 July – 23 August Production of final projects
24 August Delivery of Final Project
The delivery of your final project must be your film on your blog as well as your writings on research, process, influences and reflections. Make sure you use imagery also.
Supervision we will be available throughout July and August for tutorials. These can be by Skype or in person. Funds are available for you to travel to London for this. Those on remote study will need to keep in touch by email once a week to report on progress. This can also be included on your blog.
The outlook is very good for weather and hopefully your Final Projects will also flourish over the coming weeks and months. This week we will be looking at the Curate Project that some of you have been working on, the deadline for which is tomorrow. We will also be going through the work of students that have not presented as yet.
The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls. Maya Deren
I would like to spend some time today looking at the work of Maya Deren. Deren was a pioneering avant grade filmmaker whose experimentation with the moving image pushed creative boundaries with a focus on kinetic and graphic experiments with film. It would be a good idea to consider the notion of kinetics in your own films. Kinetics are the effects of forces on the motion of a body or system of bodies, especially of forces that do not originate within the system itself. This idea of dynamic movement is relevant to fiction, documentary and especially forms of experimental films many of which rely on the rhythm of the montage to stimulate the eye.
“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.” Andrei Tarkovski
Last week quite a number of you presented the development of your Final project ideas. There was a good range of films and interesting approaches from experimental to observational through to sensory immersive. If you did not present last week then you mast present at this session. Here are a few clips worth considering in terms of approaches:
Immersive – The Iron Ministry
Observational – Grey Gardens
Surrealist – Un Chien Andalou
Animation – The Street of Crocodiles
Essayistic – News from Home
Expository – Taxi To The Dark Side
We will also continue with the Curate Project looking at it in more depth and making sure everybody is represented.
“I thought the cine-tracts were a really good idea. They started out with things about the police, about the repression, in an attempt to publicise what had been happening. The newspapers had been suppressing alot. To make it more widely known, they simply filmed photographs, for example. I mean they made films but very stylized….You take a photograph and a statement by someone like Lenin or Che, and then you divide Che’s sentence into, lets say 10 parts, one word per image, and then you add the photo that corresponds to the meanings, “corresponds” whether with it or goes against it, depending on the cicumstances. That’s a cinetract.” Jean Luc Godard on the notion of Kino-Praxis
The session this week is important as all of you should have made a decision on what your final project is. Make sure that on your blog before the sessions you have uploaded your plans, images, influences, inspirations, schedules, characters, treatments, maps, trajectories, approaches, theory, photographs, style, thoughts, approach, philosophy and direction of the project. Come ready to share your ideas for discussion in class.
MA 21st Century Media Practice 2017 