Infographicality

So here we go, another one of those ‘things I have to do’ this time taking the form of an infographic which details my personal strengths and weaknesses. Whilst the task did state it had to be sort of in line with the marking criteria for previous assessment tasks I’ve instead detailed the sort of things I’d prefer to be marked on, in a perfect world that is.

The New Mode: Redefining Storytelling

I recently took a course called True Lies: Documentary Studies as a part of my Cinema Studies major and was pretty much taught to worship every word written by the apparent ‘Godfather’ of documentary film criticism, Bill Nichols. Nichols is famous for sorting documentary it six distinct categories or ‘modes’: Expository, Poetic, Observational, Participatory, Performative, and Reflexive. In an extremely brief (and probably unfair) overview, he defined each node as the following:

• Expository documentary “emphasises verbal commentary and argumentative logic” often utilizing a voice of God narration. Prominent examples of this mode include the films of John Grierson and nature documentaries such as those of David Attenborough.
• Poetic documentary moves away from the objective reality of a give situation and tries to instead grab the inner truth. It involves a much more manipulative role from the filmmaker in terms of editing, framing etc. Think Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (though this film does hold aspects of other modes).
• With the Observational mode, the camera observes the action unobtrusively in an attempt to directly capture reality and represent it truthfully. It has also been called fly-on-the-wall filmmaking and is present in Nicolas Philibert’ Être et avoir (To Be and to Have)  and D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back.
• Participatory  documentary welcomes interaction between subject and filmmaker and, thus, the filmmaker become a part of the events being recorded. Prominent examples of this include the works of Michael Moore and Ross McElwee.
  
• Performative documentary emphasises the subjective nature of the filmmaker, making it the subject of the narrative. This mode is utilised in films such as Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied.
• The Reflexive mode acknowledges the constructed nature of documentary and it strives to make the viewer more acutely aware of the device as well as the effect – conveying to the viewer that they are not nececerraily viewing the truth, instead a reconstruction of it.  For example, in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera he features footage of his brother and wife in the process of shooting footage and editing, making the viewer accutely aware what they are viewing is a construction.

Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera revolutionised reflexivity
Source: filmreference.com

I found it difficult to accept this apparently ‘accepted’ way to categorize documentary film in a way similar to how I find sorting films into genres tiresome. One of the main reasons for this was that many films fall into multiple ‘modes’ (i.e. Man with a Movie Camera) and many appear to able to find one that fits at all (i.e. Ari Folman’s brilliant animated documentary Waltz with Bashir). Another form of documentary that has caused many to reappraise Nichols’ taxonomy recently is the interactive online documentary.

A recent example of this new and exciting form of documentary filmmaking is Bear 71 by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada’s digital studio, the documentary is constructed as an interactive online experience that observes and records the intersection of humans, nature and technology. It follows the life of grizzly bear, who was collared at the age of three, via the trail cameras in the Banff National Park.

Footage from one of the many trail cameras in Bear 71

The viewer is first introduced to Bear 71 and then dropped into an interactive map of the National Park, where they encounter other creatures that live in Bear 71′s home: golden eagles, Big Horn sheep, wolves, and deer all similarly tagged and under surveillance. To make the experience all the more personal, the viewer use a webcam to place themselves on the map as Human X (my number was 1156971). Though the viewer is free to explore the park as they wish, the story continues through narration from Mia Kirshner. Kirshner speaks from the point-of-view of Bear 71, describing herself and her cubs, as well as anecdotes from her life in the wild. We follow Bear 71 over hills and through valleys, as well as crossing man-made landmarks such as the free ways and rail-roads that run through the park. The interactive nature of the project adds a level of intimacy to the story as the viewer is able to figuratively spend a day walking  in the shoes of this animal and experience, on a basic level, what life is like in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and how human influence affects it.

The National Film Board of Canada, in fact, are industry leaders in this bold new mode of documentary.  According to an article by Kristy Hutter of Macleans.CA, 20 per cent of the NFB’s English-language programming budget will be devoted to the interactive section in 2012. This is a huge investment considering each interactive web project costs up to $300,000 compared to a conventional documentary, which can reach $1 million.

Another of their productions focuses on the God’s Lake Narrows, a community located in northeastern Manitoba in Canada. Produced by artist and filmmaker Kevin Lee Burton, this interactive web documentary draws the viewer into a community they would never have visited otherwise (it doesn’t even have road access in the winter months), a community where Lee Burton spent most of his childhood. The documentary begins its interaction with the viewer right from the introduction by using  your IP address to personalise your location.

A little disconcerting..

As we flip through the slides of what is essentially a photo essay of both the people and the houses of the reserve, Lee Burton give us insight on what these images mean to him.  The sounds and the images of the community — its people and its simple houses — are interspersed with words written in a very direct manner by Lee Burton. By bringing the viewer into the community and displaying its people in natural settings, the documentary tries to break down the stereotypes often associated with native reserves. The interactive nature of the production makes it much easier for us, the viewer, to relate to these people who live in such a different setting to us.

One final example of this technique of storytelling I’m going to mention is Brèves de Trottoir by film director and journalist Olivier Lambert and photographer Thomas Salva. This platform is a collection of films and photography stills that help to tell the stories of ‘daily celebrities’ in Paris.

In Brèves de Trottoir you can hear from Mr. Quan the Vietnamese restauranter to Patrick, a homeless stockbroker

This web documentary series provides the viewer with a clickable map of Paris on which they can pick from a selection of 18 different personalities from around the city. What makes this production particularly charming is the apparent mundaneness of the characters. If you click the icons you can watch a short, 10 minute video detailing detailing who each of them are what they do. This creation sets out to prove the assertion that everyone has a story and through their in depth looks at each character they have definitely achieved this. It is a great production and a great snapshot of Paris.

The eBook Explosion

Depending on your personal preference, you’re probably either quite excited or tremendously concerned about seemingly exponential growth of the eBook medium. It seems like, right now, people tend to sort themselves into either team Paper Book or team eBook. On one side of the coin, you may excited as eBook technology is making it books more accessible and the more accessible the medium, the more likely it is to find a readership. This assertion that has been demonstrated through statistics published in the Wall Street Journal which state that the average number of books read by e-reader owners in a month was found to be 2.6, considerably higher than the 1.9 average for print-book readers. Another advantage that eBooks have over print media is the convenience that is being able to carry 100s of books on a small device. This has proved to be a great advantage for those who travel regularly and don’t want to deal with the extra weight and baggage space taken up by print books.

E-readers have become particularly popular with those who travel regularly
Credit: goodereader.com

The third, and currently the most poignant, advantage that eBooks and e-readers have is an added level of privacy for the reader. This has been evidenced recently with the astronomical success of the erotica novel Fifty Shades of Grey. The “Fifty Shades” books were originally released as eBooks by the Writers Coffee Shop, an independent publisher based in Australia. They were instant hits, drawing attention of fans and Vintage Books, which acquired the rights in March and published them as eBooks first and then as paperbacks. For woman around the world, what was once their dirty little secret could now be read in public without the fear of embarrassment.

With Fifty Shades of Grey, woman were able to hide their deviance behind the Apple logo
Credit: coverthink.com

This eBook ‘explosion’, however, is not an entirely positive thing. This surge of popularity of e-books has put many book retailers out of business, the most notable of these being Borders who closed the doors of over 800 stores across the globe in 2011. I personally much prefer reading print novels simply from a collectors mindset. I love having material, tangible copies of books that I love which I can put on a bookshelf and pick up again years down the line. I love buying old, first edition copies of classics whose bindings have cracked and whose pages have yellowed with age.  A good book has more of a soul than an eBook ever will. In fact I would venture to say an eBook lacks any kind of soul altogether. I understand that eBooks hold a certain practicality that is absent in print media but this is forged from a loss of sentimentality and it is for this reason that I still plan to have a library room if I ever work up the funds to realistically achieve such a thing. I’ve always considered myself someone who is eager to see technology reach its full potential and it is a natural inclination for me to hope the the eBook continues to grow in popularity. However, if this ends up being at the expense of the print novel I can see myself becoming the guarded conservative I always knew I’d become.

PTA to take on Pynchon

Just read (yes, on one of my RSS feeds) the Paul Thomas Anderson has finally confirmed that his next project will indeed be an adaption of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, confirming rumours that have been circulating since the start of 2011. As reported by Cigarettes and Red Vines, PTA confirmed to both Empire and ScreenDaily in interviews that he is currently working on a script for a film adaptation of Pynchon’s neo-noir detective novel set at the tail-end of the psychedelic sixties.

Credit: wikimedia,org

I actually recently read Inherent Vice and I would say the blurb on the back of my paperback sums it up pretty nicely:

It’s the tail end of the psychedelic Sixties in L.A. Private eye Doc Sportello hasn’t seen his ex-girlfriend in a while, when suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer. It all spells trouble to Doc but before he knows it he is caught up in a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters include surfers, hustlers, dopers, and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con whit a swastika tattoo, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang.

Having read a few of Pynchon’s books (currently reading Gravity’s Rainbow) and it has to be said that this would be one of a few that could actually be adapted for the silver screen. Most of his other novels are so long and complex it would be an terrible injustice to cut them down to anything less that a three film trilogy. Inherent Vice however is shorter than your typical Pynchon novel and, more importantly, it possesses a linear storyline perfect for the big screen.

PTA likened the novel to Cheech and Chong but I feel it draws much closer comparisons to the Coen Brother’s The Big Lebowski. It’s been rumoured that Robert Downey Jr. will be starring as the reluctant PI Doc Sportello and I can see that being a perfect fit. PTA did amazing things with Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love and I can see him having a similar effect on RDJ.

Credit: themovingarts.com

Anderson and Pynchon.. PWWOOAAH!

Six Degrees of Channing Tatum

So I just finished watching a BBC documentary on the ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ theory (yes, the one of Kevin Bacon fame) and there really was very little to fault about it. In fact, I would even venture to say I found the whole thing pretty fascinating.

The program was based around an experiment of sorts which posed the question: can strangers get a package from one side of the world to the other in only 6 moves? Whilst this was a fun exercise to add a bit of visual flavour to the program, it was the science the was interwove within it that really interested me.

According to recent studies into networks and how things are all connected, there appears to be this a  mathematical formula which we have all been living under, obliviously, our whole lives. And it’s not just us! The beauty of this is that ALL networks in society and in life follow this same mathematical pattern. The internet, the human brain, roads, and the mating habits of the snowy tree cricket all follow this same pattern.

This really is ground breaking stuff and, if used efficiently, could completely changes how we look at things like cancer, disease, or how genetic mutations talk to each other. It will be able to tell us how disease spreads, and how best to cope with it. Networks is the science of the future are it is the science of predicting the future. Once we have worked out how and why things communicate the way they do we will be able to start predicting occurences before they have even come to pass. Crazy Stuff!

Let’s give this a shot!

Yay my Bacon number is 3!

Web Crawlin’

So as the race to leave behind this so-called Land of Destruction heats up, it has come to my attention that I must now write a post comparing the effectiveness of different search engines.

The three web crawlers I’m going to put to the test are:

1. Google

You may be familiar with this one. Google was launched in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and has since gone on to become the Internet’s most visited website. It is said to process over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes (that’s 1,048,576 gigabytes if you were wondering) of user-generated data every day.

2. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo was launched in 2008 by internet entrepreneur Gabriel Weinberg. It uses information from crowd-sourced sites to augment traditional results and improve relevance. One of it’s main claims is that it emphasises privacy over everything else. Unlike other websites (i.e. Google) DDG doesn’t record user information and thus every user receives the same search result no matter their age, sex, location or any other defining characteristic.

3. instaGrok

From the words of instaGrok founder Kirill Kireyev:

instaGrok is an innovative research tool for learning about any topic in a personalized and interactive way. It is particularly designed to simplify the process of self-directed learning and exploration, which can often be challenging due to overwhelming amount of available information and not knowing which questions to ask. instaGrok facilitates the learning process by not only retrieving educational materials on any topic, but automatically identifying important concepts, key facts and relationships, organizing materials by difficulty, and even generating review questions.

instGrok basically lets you punch in any search term and get a neatly formatted and interactive experience as search results. This includes mind maps, facts, websites, videos and even quizzes.

OK let’s get this going. The person I’ve decided to put through this ordeal is actor Edward Norton because I recently saw Moonrise Kingdom and he is the best (did that really need an explanation?).

1. Google

What we get from Google is pretty typical. Norton’s Wikipedia page, his IMDb page, his Twitter, and his Facebook. What appears to be a pretty recent addition to Google’s offering is what we get on the right side of the page. There is a short bio lifted from Wikipedia which details some important details about the man, including his DOB, height, family and Academy Award nominations. Below this is a selection of films he has been in and the images of five other people Google has associated with him. We also get a selection of images from Google’s image service. Overall this what we’ve come to expect from Google; sleek, well laid out and easy to understand.

2. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo’s results look very similar to Google’s. Once again we get Norton’s Wikipedia page as the top result, his IMDb page in there at number 3 and his Twitter account jumps up into second spot. It just isn’t Google though it is? There’s no eye catching images or lists of movies or picture of Matt Damon. It does have a small profile at the top of the search which mentions in passing that Edward Norton is an American actor born in 1969 but it pales in comparison to Google’s which has taught me that he has a brother named Jim and a sister named Molly. For what it’s worth, it works.

3. instaGrok

This is what you get when you type Edward Norton into intaGrok.. A weird star-like graph that connects his name to a series of vaguely associated words. The fact that one of the words is ‘avenger’ just about sums up how helpful this was for me. There is nothing helpful or informative about this graph, nothing.

We get a list of semi-interesting facts which does help this site’s cause a little bit. I was unaware that Ed dated Courtney Love between 1996 and 1999 so there you go. I’m not sure what election the first fact is implying or what election it is referring to though. Why are they being so cryptic? Is it shameful to call someone a Democrat these days? I mean this man made a documentary film about the election of Barack Obama.

Finally we get the quizzes section. What this entails is a random section of sentences taken out of his Wikipedia page with one word removed. The aim is to fill in the blank from a multiple-choice selection. Most of the questions only have one answer that makes sense in the gap you’re looking to fill. This sucks.

Google wins, I’m out.

Images courtesy of Google, DuckDuckGo, instaGrok