Specacle – Going nuclear

This was my first peice of work and the text will follow shortly…

The trainman cometh

Rightyo, i’m getting the hang of this a bit more now. Todays lecture on the ‘Train of Freedom’ was very insightful into a country that a lot of us know nothing about. It almost seemed, to me, as a holiday film showing how Cosovo has changed and adapted to it’s different religions, nationalitys and development of it’s society. Mind you this was only in certain areas, as some of the partisipants in the film discribed the country as not being tollerable. Arguably this would not be put in the final edit of ‘wish you were here’ or whatever rubbish holiday shows are on now. The train works as a great metaphor for the country, as it slowly chugs along, it resembles the countrys infastructure.

However the news that the train had been halted up to a point is quite distasteful as it shows a backwards step to the way things used to be. However overall I found the film quite insightful and inventive and would love to be apart of something like this in the future. I find it pleasant to think that the country has developed into a multi religious country very much like our own, where we get on well with one another. But this then brings me back to the comment earlier where the train has continued to function in the north part of the country. The time scale in which it was created also didn’t surprise me as I am aware something like this takes sooooo long to create, but as always the inspiration to start something like this is always fascinating to see. How the idea develops and comes to fruition along with camera shots, music and the characters used. Am i woffling? … wait a second can i edit these again after i’ve published them… guess i’ll find out now…

Memory

For this i’ve decided to have a look down many avenues and perhaps merge them together. Firstly I thought of (in rather a strange way) something that effects most children, the idea of having someone or somthing in your room for example the boogie man. Initially I wanted to create a short film showing the fear of a shadows and noises in ones bedroom. However this turned out to be rather hard under the time limit we have and overall was possibly too much for me to do in two weeks. However my photoshop skills are developing better and I’ve opted to create a surreal series of images to try and make the viewer react to them. Hopefully this time i’ll actually be able to put up my pictures, but wordpress continues to disrupt my work with it’s stupid format. So hopefully the images will be posted up soon. If not my website which i’m developing at the minute will be okay to use… hopefully. Ohh yeah, my second idea is the fear of thunderstorms, which a lot of children have. It itself, its an amazing spectacle in my opinion, but I wanted to try and put a thunderstorm somewhere in my pictures. Well i’ll leave it here and come back to it later…

Little wooden baby

I need to start with ‘okay that was strange’. A baby born of barke, sap and shaped by it’s father using all kinds of tree cutting implements to create the infant. Ohh let me point out, the couple could not concieve normally. The couple are so cut up about not being able to have a baby that they start imagining baby related incidents everywhere. A tree baby is born! Very much like jesus but this is a tree… not a person. Time out New York said this was “hilariously chilling”, I for one would disagree. No part of this film made me laugh, and theres something ineptly creapy about a root that comes to life and starts attacking people, and eating them. This film directly links with the fall of the amazon rain forrest, a drunken logger obviously saw this film, got creeped out, decided that he didn’t want to be eaten by a tree and subsiquently decided to cut down all the trees he could find. All that aside, I must say that I didn’t and couldn’t relate to this film in any way. I havn’t tried to have a child, I don’t want to create my own wooden cretin and I certainly don’t get anything out of this film besides more of a reason to keep roots of trees well and truely in the ground.

The Five Obstructions

The perfect human is quite a strange and intriguing film. Filmed in Cuba it encapsulating all the traits of a typical Cuban male and female.  The use of the 5 obstructions by Lars Von Trier is very enthralling but exceptionally strange. To me the film is all too weird, for example the perfect human wouldn’t be a male Cuban gangster getting undressed. The film only allows the creater to use up to 12 frames per shot, this restriction creates a more surreal feel to the artifact.