Courseworks:

Assessment pattern:
100% continuous assessment (class exercises and take-home creative projects)
Grading pattern: Standard (A+AA-…F)

Project I (20%) / Project II (20%) / Project III (20%) / Final Project (40%: 10% writing + 30% video work)

Note: Please lock and label your tapes properly and submit Mini-DV or as digital files.

[to get a pdf version of all courseworks...]

Take-home Videography (delivered September 9, 2011)

Project One: a series of 2 videos on Intermedia experiments (Dr. Linda Lai)
Individual work – for class critique

I – 1 
Make a 2-minute video that asks questions about still photographs and moving images.

Basic orientation:
This is a rule-driven approach to experimentation:

1. The work begins with constraints (or restrictions, or limitation), not with a theme or content suggestions.
2. No need to worry that you don’t know what your piece is going to be about – you’ll discover what your work is about at the end of your experiment. So focus on gathering material: shoot, photograph, and work/play with them. Let your process and your material instruct you and help you discover something new about yourself and the world. This is different from your having a work in mind and trying to realize it.
3. If you still find this strange, think of how you treat automatic writing.

Some possible directions:
Play with time and space…Think of how to animate still images… (You invent time.)
Think of how to break down a video sequence… (There’s more about images hidden in speed and individual frames…) Play with how to build a bridge bewtween still and moving images. Think of how to piece them together.

THERE IS NO SINGLE IDEAL WAY. THERE IS NO LIMIT.

Due: class time September 16, 2011
All students should be prepared to show their works in the 2nd class meeting for open critique.

I – 2
Videography based on graphic notation for music and sound… (an exercise on dynamics, rhythm and structure)

Make a video based on one of the following [micro-narrative] experimental musical/sound scores.
Study the shape(s).
Consider the shape to be charting the flow of energy level of your work.

Or, you can translate the components in the scores into visual elements.
Consider translating the notation into image sequences as closely as possible.
Think of different textures, motions, directions, forcefulness… These can be descriptors for both sound and image.

Explore polyphony, or, polyphonic structure in these scores.
Notes: you can see this as a complex linear flow, or as a polyphonic structure.
Think of different textures, motions, directions, forcefulness… These can be descriptors for both sound and image.
Imagine more than one thing going on within a single image.

Interpret this diagram as a ‘world’ and a ‘process’ (-- or you call it narrative trajectory). Visualize ‘simultaneity’.

Option A:

From Carl Bergström Nielsen’s site: http://www.musicextreme.com/cbn.htm

Option B:

A Bus Ride Downtown, by Simon Petry, from his Computation Arts Portofolio: http://simonpetry.com/page/2/

Option C:

Bring I-2 to class for class critique: September 25, 2011

From I-1 and I-2, pick one for submission for grading: due October 3, 2011
*Feel free to adapt your individual work based on reviews and comments in in-class critique.
****Include a 1-page discussion of the two works and why you put them together as a series.

 

Project Two: Sound Practice (Dr. Cedric Maridet)

II - 1
Sound-Practice EXERCISE I: exploration of recording

Experimentation with microphones: use multi-track recording to create a sound-image through on-location sound recording [where sound has its own time and space. A sound-image can make a ‘realistic’ space unrealistic, a static space multi-layered.]
Duration: between 2 to 4 minutes.

The idea is to explore the creative possibilities of microphones and to be exposed to a mediated listening situation.

• Choose a location through listening only. You may want to explore all the sonorous quality of the space. Listen first, as a way to decide what to do, and how to do it.

• Make use of the (hidden, unheard) ambient sounds in the space. You might spatialize the movement of some sounds (distance, position, layer)

• Useful questions:

1. What are the unwanted sounds? What are the wanted sounds?
2. What kind of mics should then be used? How should you position and direct your mics? Do you choose a static recording, or in movement?

• Think about the recording as the main compositional act: no editing is allowed except layering sounds, cut and crossfade.

 

Project Three: Micro-narrative integration: sound practice & Time-image

III – 1

Micro-narrative integration: sound practice + time-image + tableau (vivant)
(a group project)

[get pdf version]

This 3rd submitted assignment invites you to combine what you have learn in the following class meetings:

• tableau shot construction, tableau vivant…to maximize the potential of a still shot (Meeting 4, 5, 6/7)
• time-image and thick description: experience of time and new attentiveness (Meeting 9, 10/11)
• sound practice: microphone typology and enhanced sound experience, acoulogy as a framework for listening and composing, activating the sound object (Meeting 6/7, 8, 10/11)

 
You are encouraged to use the image work created in-class in Meeting 6/7 as the raw material to create a new group work that emphasize the autonomy and complexity and sound and image in collaboration.

--
Creation:
1. The work you will create should explore the relations between sound and image via the basic set-up of a still/tableau shot.

• Experiment with camera and microphones as tools.

• The camera sees differently from our naked eyes do.
• Recording tools open up hearing: they enhance our naked ears.

• Explore different kinds of relation between sound and image:

• The idea of trans-sensorial: how rhythm, texture or color are not exclusive to only one sensory channel but can relay both to sound and vision
• Temporal / spatial relationship
• Use of speech
• Visual score
• Different relation of narrative trajectories in sound and images

2. The work you will create should explore Gilles Deleuze’s idea of a time-image. (See notes for key aspects.) and how time-image and movement-image may work together. Note also that Deleuze’s notion of time-image has an audio equivalent, which he calls sound-image, i.e. the presence of sound that forms a unique layer of reality in a work, and NOT taken as secondary or supportive to image.

Here’s a short list of the characteristics of time-image/sound-image:
i) it activates conscious experience of time (activates our thinking) and intensifies our attentiveness, or leads to new perceptual awareness (through the senses) - time often becomes increasingly spatial (requires continuous description / spatial revelation / revelation of details)
ii) it favors internal, mental montage: invisible cut and editing within the same shot same frame (montage is found within shots and not between shots)
iii) it calls attention to details as the shot or sound object sustains
iv) Elements within a shot, and the work in general, change status as micro events occur (the notion of a circuit) – within a shot there are strata of realities, changing and multiple levels of consciousness, breaking the normal hierarchy of events

Think of your work as a thick pile of sheets (time sheets, sheets of space, sheets of actions): they “pile up” and yet they “dialogue,” “collide” or “merge” with one another from time to time, forming a series within the same shot.

Carefully plan the screen space defined by the frame.
Think horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Think of the screen space as having different zones and layers.

A work that helps us to rediscover the potential of a long take

3. Think of how your work engages the viewers in ways that they are compelled to find a new language to describe their experience of time. Two aspects:

• Think of one or more kinds of circuits you’ll put in your work. Circuits refer to circular exchangeable meanings, e.g. the past and present blending into one another, thought and action becomes one, mental state mingling with dream and illusion etc.  You must ensure that at least a couple of elements have a status that cannot be easily settled.  (Think of the last two sequences in Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia.)
• Consider how your piece would become an exercise of thick description for your viewers.  That is, if viewers start describing what they see in your work, they will realize that the morethey describe the more they want to look and the more there is they discover.  In other words, your viewers are absorbed into your series of reality sheets.

In sum, your work should emphasize the process of description: image as a description and sound as description due to its pure optical and sound situation.

Due dates:
Group 01 (Cedric’s group): class presentation in Meeting 12 (November 25)

Group 02 (Linda’s group): each of the 3 groups should make individual appointment with Linda for a special tutorial to present the group work – preferably by December 2.

 

Final Project: (40%)

[get a pdf copy]

How long should the work be?

Preferably 8 minutes and below... The length of the work should be justified by the concept. Learn to work with this duration as much as possible from the perspective of rule-based creativity. Make a work that fits 8 minutes, just for the sake of the rule. If you discover the concept of the work requires longer work in the process, it must be strongly, highly and precisely justified.

You must include an Artist's Statement, which takes up one-fourth of the grade.

*Your artist's statement should include with at least 2 references to class lecture notes on sound and image.
*Your artist's statement should be 2-3 pages.
*Your artist's statement should: (1) clarify the concept of the work, (2) clarify the form and the method of construction, and (3) explain your mode of description and attentiveness.

Focus of this creative assignment:

*Emphasis on narrative construction – the piecing together of image segments and orchestration of sound….
*External musical work not allowed. Source of sound: recorded sounds that are processed or non-processed and layered.
*Review the contract of micro-narratives….

What do we assess?

• Articulation of image and sound concepts is evident in the work itself.
• Sufficient exploration of the idea of micro narrative for enhanced attentiveness, at least perceptually
• Shot composition: clarity, design, precision, descriptive power
• [Sound] quality recording and composition, demonstrating trajectories of time and space
• [the artist and the work] maturity as a work: a work that is self-evident of its method, voice and style (i.e. it does not give the impression that it is an exercise or a demo of an idea)

December 9 (Friday), 2011 (presentation in person required for open critique)
December 12 (Monday), 2011 final submission day after revision

For all submitted works of videography:
*No auto shooting unless there is a specific reason
*Include a 5-second color bar (with tones if the work has sound) + a 6-second counter-down
*Give your work a title, but DO NOT put title or your name and other textual information on the visuals unless it is essential to the design of your video.
*Separate course title, student number and assignment title/name from the work title and your name.
*DO NOT forget to LOCK your tape before submission.