DAMIEN HIRST: TREASURES FROM THE WRECK OF THE UNBELIEVABLE

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/06/damien-hirst-treasures-from-the-wreck-of-the-unbelievable-review-titanic-return

GW: MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING

I carried out some research into multi-media storytelling to see how other have used this approach in their work. It started by lots of articles explaining and trying to make clear what multimedia is. From research it seems that multimedia approach to creating content is really more about telling gone story and creating one piece using different techniques rather than telling one story through multiple pieces of content and these all working together .So I am still unsure if calling my work multi-media is the right way to go so I still have research to do.

There are also lots of platforms and software for creating multimedia content. Photos, video and text are the main stalwarts of all of these but I may try some of them out.

https://uncubed.com/daily/11-favorite-multimedia-storytelling-platforms/

https://ijnet.org/en/blog/elements-good-multimedia-storytelling

https://www.interactivenarratives.org/

https://contently.com/strategist/2014/04/02/how-multimedia-storytelling-is-changing-advertising/


I looked at lots of examples of multimedia content and as I mentioned at the start it is not really what I am doing and rather stories with some photography, audio and video to enhance it and make it more interesting. However some interesting and inspiring work.

EXAMPLES

https://elenaplaiter.com/2013/06/05/multimedia-storytelling-examples/

https://medium.com/@jcstearns/the-best-online-journalism-and-storytelling-of-2015-6fe3be80ccd1

http://01storytelling.com/digital-storytelling-example/

http://mashable.com/2012/01/31/digital-storytelling/#9Eu6qmy.PSqE

http://www.jeadigitalmedia.org/2015/09/07/70-interactive-storytelling-examples-for-inspiring-students/

http://blog.visme.co/10-mind-blowing-interactive-stories-that-will-change-the-way-you-see-the-world/

THE AGE OF STUPID: FRANNY ARMSTRONG 2009

The Age of Stupid is a 2009 film by the filmmaker Franny Armstrong about the effects of climate change and global warming on earth. The links to my Global Warmning piece are evident so I decided to analyse it. Franny Armstrong is a politically conscious filmmaker and has made several other campaigning feature documentaries to highlight environmental and political issues such as McDonalds and globalisation in McLibel (2005) and Drowned Out (2003) dealing with an Indian family who are about to be drowned by the Narada Dam which will consume their village. Armstrong's films are generally crowd funded but have accessed huge audiences which have together been seen by 70 million people on TV, cinema, internet and DVD worldwide. Her social conscious spreads through to her work where she has pioneered and championed reducing carbon emissions including the distribution and screening of her works.

The basic conceit of Age Of Stupid is a man (Pete Postlethwaite) on a now melted arctic outpost of earth in the near future (2055). He has archived mankind's downfall  at their own hands due to global warming in his global archive and through looking back at the year 2008 and a mix of real news and documentary footage and archive and created animations weaves a fictional yet factually grounded cautionary tale.

The news footage ranges from the obvious global warning effects and weather etc to the stories of a few spotlighted subjects to show the topic and argument from multiple viewpoints. A environmentally friendly wind farm planner, an Indian man starting up a low cost airline in India and a woman from Nigeria struggling to survive. Also an oil company employee who faced hurricane Katrina, a French mountain guide commenting on the shrinking of the glaciers and an Iraqi boy who was made a refugee due to the allegedly oil inspired Iraqi war. All of these people saw the climate change effects first hand through their own looking glass and it deals with the moral questions, issues and ethics from all of their standpoints..

The techniques employed to tell the story are varied and interesting especially the real news footage of real characters telling their story has a huge amount more kudos given the reflective situation of looking back from a destroyed planet. The irony of the Indian starting up a low cost airline using a private jet to do his "charity work" when the cost to the environment works against this as does the cost where the money the flight cost could have instantly turned around the fortunes of the village he is trying to save. The awkwardness of the "environmental" not in my back yard campaigners who are protesting against having a wind farm near their very middle class village whilst at the same time being challenged at saying they are environmentalists. These arguments work well if at times they are a little heavy handed and obvious. The multi strand story-line did at times make the flow of the film hard to follow however and perhaps too many points were being made at the same time so none made as strongly as they could have been.

The film is a very interesting premise to look back and try to fathom why as a human race we ignored all of the tell tale signs around us with the perspective of hind-sight. However it does not really offer much in the way of solutions rather than just reasons. Greed, oil, ignorance, selfishness and a collective no one else is bothering so why should I to what Postlethwaite calls the suicide of our planet. In terms of solutions the film itself realises it is a hard-sell and other than oil is bad, green energy should be exploited more and hopefully individuals need to be accountable.



THINGS I WILL TAKE FROM THE AGE OF STUPID.

• Using "real" people and doco footage gave it a sense of authenticity.
• Characters within the film worked well BUT multi strand story telling possibly not as effective as one story.
• Use of animation, archive news and doco, CGI and graphics worked really well and gave serious, fun and accessible ways into the topic.
• The conceit is good what would we think of a behaviour and general complacency towards climate change with hindsight.

TELLING STORIES IN THREE DIMENSIONS: INSTALLATION ART TODAY

This was a great article by Ann Landi on Installations and storytelling through them printed in ArtNews. It explores the use of narrative by installation artists in their piece to connect with an audience. I have extracted some of the key quotes that sum up their feelings towards using narrative to tell stories, capture ideologies, politics, and social messages.

The article is really inspiring and is a little bit of the missing link in my installation ideas. I want to have a narrative not just cause. It is also liberating to see that some of the artists do not want to make films, do not want to write but use the medium of the installation to communicate their ideas.


Iris Häussler. “If I could, I would probably write, but I can’t. Some people define my works as novels in three dimensions.”

Häussler adds “When I was a student I was interested in portraiture, but I found it absolutely dull and boring to try to put something into two dimensions or to do a sculpture. But if you go in someone’s drawers and fish around, you come across the things that were really meaningful to someone. What we allow in our private sphere tells a lot about the condition of our souls and our personalities.”

Film often presents opportunities for the narrative-driven artist, but those who turn their backs on the movies, or see them as too limiting, cite the reasons installation, in all its flexibility, appeals. “I wanted to tell my own stories in a way that I don’t think is possible in commercial cinema,” says Zoe Beloff.

“What’s great about the art world, as opposed to Hollywood or even most independent cinema, is that we have the freedom not to have to work with a lot of other people,” says George Miller. “We have the freedom of the audience being open to change and difference. We don’t like to stick to making the same things over and over”—as would many a Hollywood director to establish his or her reputation.

Many, if not most, contemporary installation artists turned to the possibilities of using many different mediums after encountering deep dissatisfactions in conventional academic training. “I went to an old-fashioned art school in Edinburgh in the ’70s,” says ZoeBeloff. “I was interested in storytelling there, and I felt that painting was no longer a storytelling medium, and that’s why I got interested in film. Then I ended up in film school, but in the end I didn’t want to make Hollywood or Sundance movies.”
Any work designated “installation” can demand a lot of the viewer. You’re asked to connect the dots, make sense of an array of disparate objects, and perhaps inject your own stories. There is the danger of any agglomeration of stuff tipping over into what Saltz called “clusterfuck esthetics”—“the practice of mounting sprawling, often infinitely organized, jam-packed carnivalesque installations,” which, he wrote in 2005, “is making more and more galleries and museums feel like department stores, junkyards, and disaster films.”

http://www.artnews.com/2015/01/20/installation-art-today/

BRUCE WEBER: LETS GET LOST (CHET BAKER)

I am still toying with the idea of a slow cinema documentary about a global warming activist. It may incorporate the anonymous theme by not revealing who the subject and keeping them mysterious. I love the style of Ben Rivers two Years at Sea and it reminded me of the documentary by Bruce Weber Lets get Lost on the Jazz trumpeter Chet Baker.

I wanted the film again and its free-flowing, access all areas warts and all portrayal of Baker is hugely atmospheric and captivating. The camerawork is a joy and high contrast jet blacks and whites. `there is even a touch of the surreal and Baker comes across as a flawed but gifted and mesmeric character. All of which I want my character to be.

Here is the trailer to the film to give an idea of the mood, tone and stylistics employed.

EARLY 1981 TV DOCUMENTARY: GLOBAL WARMING, GLOBAL WARNING

I watched this documentary for background. It does seem a little old and hackneyed and formulaic today but a lot of the information provided excellent background for my work.

The clips provide a poignant, historical insight into what scientists knew about climate change almost four decades ago – and how the world was beginning to react in terms of the resulting geopolitical, technological and societal ramifications. Many of themes still resonate strongly today. It also provides an insight into how predictions are viewed when they come true and almost is a who's who of the big players in the field of climate control and global warming. There are also lots of good clips that I may be to re-appropriate for my own work.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/warming-warning-1981-tv-documentary-warned-climate-change

GW: ANONYMOUS

As part of the raft of works for the Global Warmning installation piece I thought it may be possible to combine another of the ideas i have been playing around with on the course. This was to embrace the idea of creating a documentary back to front as trying to shoehorn creative style and formats onto documentaries has been to the detriment of the idea. So this will be a back to front approach on deciding the styles and formats I would like to use and then finding an appropriate subject. Whilst the the piece will not essentially be a documentary I will be able to create it as it is a fictional piece and to apply the stylistics to the idea to keep the characters identity a mystery.

I like the subversive idea of the documentary subject being anonymous and not appearing except possibly a voice and working backwards finding a subject(s) to whom this would be appropriate. The use of ECU, silhouettes, lighting, focus and other images will obscure the actual full physical identity of the subject from the audience. It will keep the audience guessing as to if the interviewee is or is not the character they are pretending to be.

GW: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TRUTH

Many of the works I have taken inspiration from have also been playful with the notion of documentary being purely a factual representation of the “truth”.  However the Global Warmning idea really will be blending fact with fiction and creative a fictional narrative based on actual facts. The Global Warmning creativity is in the content and the storytelling and its adhearance to the creative stylistics of the documentary modes I am using to my own ends. What will be more important is the mimicry and use of the codes and conventions of the modes to create pieces that feel like types of documentary that the audience are familiar with.

I will be working in the realm of a hybrid of the docu-drama which uses documentary form to tell an invented but plausable story and drama-documentary which is based on real events but uses conventional fictional forms (scripts, actors, narrative and structure) to tell the story. I need the audience to feel that the documentaries are right so an excellent understanding of the form is essential. We have all seen the disclaimer at the start of a film "this film is based upon real events" for fictional works and also "events and all persons portrayed in it are fictitious".  In order to understand the ethics of manipulating this in a word sold to the audience as factual I decided to dig up some research on documentary form and see how far "the truth" can be bent twisted or subverted ethically.

The Collins dictionary definition of a documentary is “a factual film or television programme about an event, person, etc, presenting the facts with little or no fiction”. When dealing with the notions of factual and truth in cinema it is a huge can of worms and at the very centre of debate in documentary. It has been present from the inception of documentary and Robert Flahertys Nanook of the North’s (1922) staging scenes in through to the same being levelled at Sir David Attenborough Frozen World (2007) zoo staged baby polar bear footage.

No documentary can be real as all are representations. Even observational “cinema veritie” documentary modes are not 100% truthful. Do or can people act naturally whilst aware of the scrutiny of a film crew and the potential audience for the text. The moment a shot is framed, and edit is made then a decision has been made and the subject is being re-presented to the audience by the cameraman, editor or ultimately the filmmaker. Semiotics and the meanings to individual audience members of the representation will differ. The intended representation may create with the audience preferred dominant reading, professional, negotiated or oppositional readings in what Stuart Hall termed reception theory. The notion of the truth and distortion of it can be a good or a bad thing obviously. The pro Nazi propaganda of the work of Leni Riefenstahl such as Olympia (1938) and Triumph of the Will (1935) are the most obvious examples. However propaganda is not always a negative and such works as Night Mail (1932) promoting society and co-operation and more recently the campaigning work against the global domination and the effect on societies health of McDonalds in Morgan Spurlocks’ Super Size Me (2004).

Representation of the truth in film is just that RE-presentation of what is there. So if there can be no real depiction of the truth and no black and white there are a lot of shades of grey to play around in. EWhy not experiment in the outer reaches of this and see how far a fiction can be used to sell facts. there is still the truth in there but and subjective and manipulated one.

Throughout my work on the course I have been interested in this notion of "the truth" in documentary and I want to see how the fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity can be treated individually or as interesting bedfellows. Is bias necessarily a bad thing? Can the notion of "truth" be subverted to create new meanings? Acclaimed documentarian John Grierson considered to be the father of British documentary film, (who many believed coined the term “documentary” in 1926) faced criticism for his definition of documentary film, that ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ was somehow oxymoronic but I love this idea of taking actuality and being creative with it to create meaning. Werner Herzog as I have mentioned previously in my work said there was an "ecstatic truth". In this  artisits use creative artistic licenses, aesthetics and the languages codes and conventions of their chosen medium from the creator to create THEIR version of the truth.

This is what I am aiming to do in my piece but not through the creativity of visuals and sound to create mood and be emotive. Greater emphasis this time will be in the construction of these not pushing the boundaries of style but working within them and using these to create the realism. the creativity will be as I mentioned earlier in this construction to create the reality. The acting, scripts, editing, cinematography, sound and mise-en-scene must ADHERE to these conventions to pull it off.

So just how far can I as factual film-maker go when creating representations of the actual FACTS but with fictional characters, places and events and still call the film a documentary? The facts are the truth but the characters and the narratives are not in my piece. What I am aiming to do is convince the audience that the piece is real though and the "based on true events" is just that factually but that drama is built in to hook the audience. The realism of the piece and representations have to be believable so the performance, mood, tone, codes and conventions used MUST mimic the real documentaries in order to pull this off. With the odd little slip as i want it to feel 99% right but i do want the audience to question and be puzzled by the piece in order to make them think about and talk about it afterwards.

1-1 TUTORIAL: GLOBAL WARMNING

A productive tutorial and I can now see the wood a little bit clearer for the trees. I have lots of elements of other projects on the go and they can continue but I have lacked a focus and a topic and piece of work to get me enthused and excited and I have been struggling with pulling all of the loose threads together on a few of these especially the Global Warmning one which has been the one I have devoted the most time to.

With the Global Warmning project so far I have not been heading in the direction I want to go in. The issue revolves around whilst the issue is a serious one, muddied waters, spin, apathy for the issue and obviously no hard facts as no-one can predict what may possibly happen in the future. Also my work has been lacking a narrative story and characters that I enjoy working with. So I have decided to list (below) all of the areas I am interested in exploring and then will outline how moving forward I can try and encompass them in my work.

• Character and narrative to tell story.
• A multimedia approach to telling story and communicating ideas.
• Climate change and pieces of work that are a warning and a call to arms.
• Highlight the media, spin, "fake news" and manipulation of facts and data on global warming debate. Both mainstream media and online.
• Playing with the notion of "the truth" and the Werner Hertzogs "ecstatic truth".
• Inform educate AND entertain.
• Experimenting with different media, materials and technologies to create pieces and extend my skill base.
• Investigate different methods of delivery, dissemination, exhibition and platforms for my work.
• Consider the notion of audience for the work. Targeting individual content at specific audiences whilst also working as a whole campaign

I feel that by pulling all of these threads together to form a "stealth" advertising campaign I can tick most of the boxes. What I aim to do is to create a fictional "movement" who existed in the late 60's early 70's who "predicted" that global warming would happen. Then by mirroring today when for 20-30 years there have been naysayers and sceptics of the organisation. However by jumping in a time machine and going back to "create" this fictional version of them predicting what would happen to the planet real irrefutable facts can be used to show that they did get it right. So using and fiction to sell a real fact. This could then be used as a lesson to show how it may possible go into the future and people may sit up and notice. It could be someone who "discovered" some found footage online and resurrected the teaching of the movement online or just excerpts put out into cyberspace from fans etc. The idea needs a lot of fleshing out BUT it has the potential to address all of my concerns

Action Plan

• Come up with a list of areas and keywords that are the foundations and building blocks for my Global Warmning campaign raft of work.
• Research into myth and truth. Traditional mythology.
• Find examples of artists, advertisers, writers who have created and spun myths. Blair Witch, Donnie Darko, urban myths, sleeper films.
• Research into Stealth  advertising, sleeper films and advertising campaigns to get messages out.
• Look at artists who have dealt with these themes and consider their preoccupations, inspirations and ideologies. Then look for papers on them (Tate papers good starting point) and see what references they have and who influenced them.
• Consider and investigate the mood and tone of the project.
• Consider individual pieces that could be created and look at style and tone of these if going to be re-created archival pieces.
• Make sure outline WHO the piece is for. Narrow targeted audience. Multiple pieces for a vast audience art installation, viral, doco, short film, advert, each one of them targeting a specific audience. Scattergun approach?
• Consider ethics if looking to hoodwink the audience.
• Consider WHY anyone should CARE about MY work! What are my influences, ideologies, messages, values and stylistics etc. Narrative, character, storytelling, representation, notions of "the truth", media spin and fake news and communicating a message.

JOHN AKOMFRAH

Following on from seeing Akomfrahs The Unfinished Conversation 2012 in the Tate modern I was inspired to find out more about him and his work.

Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah discusses how he navigates between the gallery and cinema, what compelled him to make his 2015 work Vertigo Sea, and the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky.This link has Akomfrah in conversation about his work.

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/john-akomfrah-tateshots

First seen at the 2015 Venice Biennale, The Vertical Sea is a three-screen film work. The Arnolfini gallery describe it as "a sensual, poetic, meditation on man's relationship with the sea and an exploration of its role in the history of slavery, migration and conflict."

John Akomfrah Vertigo Sea Trailer from Arnolfini on Vimeo.

Trailer for The Nine Muses a film by John Akomfrah. Opens in the UK Jan 20 2012