Filed under: media industries 1 | Tags: creative class, florida, reading, research
The basic premise of this article is to research into the rising nature of the Creative Class and what type of people and industries constitute a creative class of people. Or basically what needs to be in place to make the most out of our creative people. The annecdote that Florida uses at the beginning of the article was really relevant in terms of explaining that it is not simply technology that is bringing about these cultural shifts, but an overall ‘result of incremental shifts in human behaviour and social organization’ (p. 17). The annecdote being that a man time travelling from 1900-1955 would see a larger abundance of technological change, but not much social/political change in terms of the workplace and at home, however a man time travelling from 1955-now would on the surface see not many new developments but the whole social hiearchy would have changed into an expansive people driven economy fueled by creative minds.
The second part of the reading focuses on ideas around what different aspects make a creative class of people, in terms of three ideas surrounding ‘technology, talent and diversity’ where through research Florida draws correlations between different types of people and a creative environment. The correlations Florida makes is an openness to migration allows for innovation and economic growth, where high concentrations of migration in a particular city creates a conjested area of ‘innovation anf enegetic people from around the world’ (p. 252). He also points to a strong correlation between homosexuality and high-tech industries. Florida claims that in measuring high concentrations of homosexuals he is able to point and single out cities that are open and tolerant. Florida concludes with a certain system in terms of how creative classes grows:
a cluster of creative agents form larger economic units, which grow and develop, which leads to a cities own growth and development.
So what does this mean in terms of us?
Overall, I found Florida’s article really facinating and inspiring in terms of the fact that creative people are needed more than ever and that the business world is opening up in a more casual creative environment, which means that there are more jobs and employment opportunites for creative people in this new social structure. Even though his article is very much based from an American point of view I kept drawing on his examples and relating them to Melbourne and found that Melbourne has all the means to become a creatively fueled city. As it is extremely multicultural, which in terms means a large sense of diversity. Has a large (what Florida labels as) “The Geography of Cool”- cities of culture and fashion. At some point in his article he even made the point that it is the cities that have more cultural than landmark emphasis that have a larger creative class, which immediately drew a comparison between Sydney and Melbourne.
In terms of certain research aspects I thought it could be really cool to research similar things in terms of Melbourne’s own ‘Creative Class’ because I think these studies are really important in terms of seeing which cities have the creative power to revolutionise media and to actually make a possitive change.
Reference:
Florida, R. L. The Rise of the Creative Class, (p. vii-xi, 1-17, 249-266). North Melbourne, Vic. : Pluto Press, c2003.
Site research has been a rather rollercoaster journey in terms of establishing what’s normal, because to tell you the truth nothing really is that normal and is constantly filled with ups and downs. So maybe what I can establish as normal is that it is constantly up and down, and maybe an abnormality would be a constant. I’ve been trying to integrate myself as much as possible within the environment and realised that a lot of the women are open if not too open about their problems. However, what I’ve realised is that to get them to tell you this information it is easier to bring it up in a conversation than ask direct questions. Asking more open-ended questions are a lot easier as well.
What you realise is how little things impact their days and it’s this constant struggle that is never going to end. One little thing could bring their world crashing down. I’ve been talking to the people that work there and started to get the overbearing sense of injustice towards homeless women, and that men who are homeless have a lot more opportunities away from homelessness than women. This I feel brings a stronger hold to our documentary because we are doing something that hasn’t been done before. In also talking to the workers there I get this sense of the major issues that women face and the common cause that women become homeless is domestic abuse. This seems to be a common thread through homeless women. Therefore stories that don’t adhere to this could be remarkably more fascinating.
What I’ve also noticed is that some of the women have quite functional families such as sons and brothers and sisters that aren’t affected by the same predicament as these women. This I haven’t been able to get a lot of information about, but seems fascinating how one member of a whole family unit is affected by something so dramatically that it leads them to homelessness. It’s truly fascinating and makes me wonder how these women deal with the rather normalness of their family units.
In terms of organising it’s been rather difficult as there are so many other priorities and obviously we don’t go on the top of the list and it is constantly busy there. I apologise to my group members for not getting anything set in concrete yet and fingers crossed this will happen by the end of the week. In dealing with this I expected a sense of difficultness as opinions change and things get forgotton and this just adds to the dilemmas these women have to face everyday, however it is something we also need to face and treat as respectfully as possible while still getting the job done.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: Colossal Youth, Pedro Costa, research, site research, watching
So I’ve disappeared from the blogging world temporarly due to a rather strange loss of internet connection, when someone else moved into my house. It’s been a very stressful few days. Anywho I’m back with some more research from something I watched.
Colossal Youth is a film by a Portugese director named Pedro Costa, and a selected scene commentary is found on a DVD package called Letters from Fontaihas: Supplements, which is a Criterion Collection DVD, which is nice as it has a little book of essays that accompany it.
This will probably lead into a string of blog posts surrounding these films, because what I found is this rather strange mix between documentary and fiction. Colossal Youth is not a documentary, it is a feature film with real people, and real stories. Yet, not considered a documentary. I was really glad I watched this rather small scene analysis with commentary, as I don’t have time to watch a 170 minute film at the moment.
What I learnt from this is ways of making everything look spectacular and still retain this level of humanism, of true human stories embedded under a veneer of surrealism. For instance, there is one scene that is analysed, which shows the protagonist next to all these paintings of higher society in an art gallery. Followed by this is the protagonist sitting on an eleaborate day lounge that mimics the paintings that previously he sat ajar to. These shots of him on this lounge are extraordinary, high contrast cinematography, where the lighting sits above the subject only highlighting him on the couch and nothing else. As the voice commentary says this scene is making a large comment on different class structures, where this man who has lost everything is now placed in this unknown situation and remarkably looks like he fits in even though he looks uncomfortably.
Even though this film is not a documentary it draws on a lot of the things that Robin has been mentioning in his cinematography lectures, questions regarding aesthetics in documentary. There is no reason why a documentary cannot look spectacular and still have a large degree of truth and humanism embedded in it.
This film made me think about how we approach our doco and reminded me to really listen to what the woman has to say and think of ways to metaphorically embed this into our film. As I’ve learnt through various research this idea of homeless women is this rather invisible and hidden part of our society, and I would love to have this as a dominant theme throughout our documentary. I was talking to the case manager (who happens to be my mum) at the house and she told me that there are many places for homeless men and very few for homeless women, and how much of an injustice this is. She also told me to always focus on what their predicament is, which gave me a lot to draw from and to always think about how this has happened to them.
Through watching I gain this overwhelming sense of inspiration of things to look for. It also made me want to have our documentary filled with light and colour, rather than being dark and moody, because these women are so used to be a hidden entity and I think it would be worthwhile to show them in full shining colour. Show that this is an issue that shouldn’t be hidden any longer.
Colossal Youth taught me to look for the political and look for all these themes, and show them rather than tell them. Maybe, it’s a good idea to change places, to have the women in somewhere unknown, or to have cutaways to things that link to what the woman is saying on a subtly metaphoric level.
Rabiger outlined in an article that I blogged about ages ago that there are three main forms of research when it comes to documentary- that being on-site, background and aesthetic research. In our tute last week we discussed that we were all going to go crazy and research a lot in terms of this background research being watching films, reading articles, etc. I have watched two docos, which are outlined here and here, and therefore decided it was time to read. To also note Meenal has been doing some excellent research into creating our natural cinematic visual approach without the doco looking like a amateur doco.
My reference is a report on violence against homeless women, but also targets some key ideas that are specific in women’s homeless situations, and a lot of this does surround violence as a cause of and during homelessness. I read some parts of this report and will continue to read more as it gave me insight into what are normal circumstances for homeless women. A major point of researching is to find what is normal so you can find out what’s abnormal when interviewing your subject.
In terms of this research I focused on two areas of the report being ‘Homelessness and women” (pp. 9-10) and ‘Violence and homelessness (pp. 10-11). These sections were really good in terms of finding out what to expect in terms of these women’s stories and helped me create assumptions in terms of what the women will talk to us about and also helped me to generate some questions, which I will outline at the end of this post.
I wrote up the main points in these two sections in terms of what was relevant to our story and again focusing on this establishment of what is normal. I don’t want to re-write all these here, but what I will do is give some of the key facts that has given me knowledge to work forward from in terms of our doco.
Some key facts:
- Definitions of homelessness
- A person living in a boarding house/room without their own kitchen and bathroom is regarded as homeless.
- People who stay with friends or family because they have no accomodation are categorised as experiencing secondary homelessness.
- Primary homelessness includes the experiences of people living on the street, sleeping in cars or squatting.
- In 2006 over 9,200 homeless women in Victoria, 45 per cent of the homeless population in Victoria
- Different forms of homelessness in relation to time
- Chronic homelessness is when someone is homeless from a young age and hasn’t experience a sense of home in their adult lives.
- Long-term homelessness are women that have lived independently , however due to a series of crises during adulthood has led to the risk of homelessness and then to homelessness.
- Situational homelessness is when one exceptional event makes a person homeless, however these cases of homeless are usually resolved much more quickly than the above.
- Issues surrounding homelessness include histories of sexual abuse and/or domestic violence, problematic drug and alcohol use and mental ill-health.
- In homelessness, women often experience violence and intimidation, or a deep fear of these things, often associated with ‘mixed-gender environments.’ Sometimes this leads to seeking safety through a male partner that ‘offer the promise of security and intimacy.’ However, this can lead to more violence and/ore exploitation.
- What leads most women to alcohol, drug abuse and the subsequent mental-illnesses is this sense of ‘grief in relation to their loss of home’ and the ‘spatial relation of loss and displacenment.’ (pg. 11)
- This can lead to extraordinary experiences of self-harm, overdose, suicide attempts, extreme violence, theft, rape, domestic violence and abuse and assault (perpetrated by family members, and also by strangers and neighbours, landlords, partners and friends), which have immediate and long-term negative impacts on tenuous housing and mental health. (pg. 11)
What becomes apparent is how one thing can lead to another, which leads to another as women seek safety and in some cases this leads down a line towards more unsafe ventures. In terms of developing questions I think there’s a big reliance on two things, what led them to become homeless? and subsequently what was their experience of being homeless? These two questions are those open-ended kinda questions that can lead on and on into a tangle of scenarios and events that can shape a documentary. For instance, from the question of what led them to become homeless? comes other questions surrounding who they were with? was it a certain event or string of events? in what stage of your life did this take place? etc. etc. and what was their experience of being homeless? what did you feel at the beginning, a sense of displacement? How did you get by on a day to day basis? Can you tell us any major events or stories that shaped your homeless experience? These lead on to wider questions that impact them today How does your homelessness affect you today? How do you cope with this? What is better about your life now? Do you think your in a better place both mentally and physically?
Reference:
Suellen Murray, “Background to Research,” Somewhere Safe to Call Home: Violence Against Women During Homelessness, Centre for Applied Social Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 8-11.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: bastardy, inspiration, research, review, watching
Yesterday I realised that I was completely lost with our project, well not completely lost, just completely uninspired because I could not see our documentary. I could not visualise it. When Liam was talking to us about our treatment I just thought how underwhelming it was, and how it lacked vision and I totally blame myself for this. And then something extraordinary happened- I watched Bastardy and then could see our documentary, could literally see how it would shape out. And then something else happened that was truly amazing I went to the film’s website to find out more and there was a detailed section discussing the making of the film in terms of structure and visual design, soundtrack and sound design and I realised that all my angst about our documentary had just vanished into a cloud of smoke far, far away from me. In other words I am completely inspired.
And why you ask? Here is why. What I’ve always wanted to do with our documentary was for it to be rough, verite style with lots of hand-held camera linked to more professional yet natural interviews and I got this from Bastardy. This is how the director describes this visual style:
A mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic story of one man’s life, BASTARDY is cyclical in structure – beginning and ending in vérité style with Jack roaming the streets of Melbourne in the present day. In this way he is seen as an almost anonymous character coming to the fore for the duration of the film and then remerging with the landscape again at the film’s conclusion.
There is this clear sense of justification in what Amiel has done how his visual style reflects the character. This is what I want our documentary to be in every way shape and form, the style needs to deeply carry the persona of the character. The style of Bastardy was a hand-full of archival footage and photos, a hand-full of natural interviews, a hand-full of observational footage and a hand-full of metaphoric images. It was a rollercoaster adventure which mimicked Jack’s life, the life of a homeless Aborigine that really was never still. In this sense the style of the film humanised the character, almost like the style was controlled by the character.
The same goes for the sound design of the film, where Amiel describes it as
…a very particular type of music to reflect Jack’s bowerbird-esque character
I’ve got to say it must have been easy for the director as Jack provided a lot of the soundtrack as he was a busker on the streets of Melbourne so yeah that’s pretty lucky. However, the music really resonated with me it was this perfect match between director and character and character and film. A perfectly tied together humanistic film.
A film that was not afraid to take risks. It is obvious throughout the film that the director and Jack (the homeless man) share this amazing relationship. There is this poignant moment in the film that springs to mind where you hear the director speak off-screen asking Jack if he has stolen a ring and laptop off a woman because she had asked the director. The director informs Jack that the woman has agreed that if he gives back the ring the woman will not press charges. It is the instance the Jack admits it to the director and camera that he has that you realise this extraordinary bond between the two men that totally destroy the common hierarchy of director above subject. It’s on very equal grounds, which I think says a lot about the film since both people live such very different lives. Amiel Courtin-Wilson as a quite successful filmmaker and this homeless heroin addict.
To me this says that when we look at homelessness we need to throw away all this misconceptions and start to realise that we’re all people functioning in the world and trying to get by, we all approach hurdles, except for homeless people these hurdles are larger than we could ever expect. And what really suprised me about the doco was that we never found out how Jack became homeless and to me it was irrelevant to the story, because Jack was a character that really lived in the present.
I will finish by saying that there were issues I did have with this film, especially how it seemed that the filmmaker was trying too much to change Jack’s life to protect him from certain realities. Even though I thought the sections in the film where we directly hear a conversation between filmmaker and subject were highly profound, I thought that the filmmaker maybe impeded too much, which was slightly distracting for me anyway.
In saying this I learnt so much and now have lots of fresh ideas for our own documentary in terms of capturing moments of poignancy and trying to capture that even though this woman is homeless doesn’t mean that we should approach her story carefully, well we obviously need to be ethical but we need to get the information, and be sure to get to the heart of the story and capture this sense of everyday people.
Reference:
Bastardy Documentary 2009, ‘Making the Film,’ Bastardy, viewed 18 August, 2010,
Sorts of research that was done:
You can assume the questions that were asked, questions they already knew the answers too. You need to be open to flexibility.
Research into what questions will lead to getting the answers that you want. Research into finding the right people. Research into aesthetics, watching other films, the form of the film.
Interviews:
The idea that documentary is just what occurs spontanously is a misperception. Something has to be planned, even if it’s just a knowing between the group members of simply what you are going for. Research helps you understand what you’re trying to say. Why we’re attracted to certain people? or the topic.
Documentary Filmmakers Speak.
The planning you need to do: who the person is? research that gives you a solid definition of what’s normal, most importantly to discover what is abnormal.
What do we want to say? Is the first question. What does it tap into, on a more universal contextual level.
Therefore defines what we’re looking for, what type of people we want to get.
Look for things that the person does/says that is abnormal and pick up something from it, and drive that towards the next question. Draw conclusions from these abnormal behaviour, and then this will lead to more questions that stem from the conclusion that you’ve made. Is the conclusion that you’ve made true/false, the key is to explore these conclusions.
Chase things down certain corridors. You need to have the confidence and the knowledge to ask the right questions and also carry something down a different line. Find the central core chase something to the central core, find something more. Chase something up. Anticipate answers and look for something that you don’t anticipate.
Think more about aesthetic research, contextualising and adding meaning to your doco. Think about the look you want and research that aesthetic, find out about technical things you want to achieve.
Think about post-production, and different ways you can cut your doco together.
So I did a reading, and it forced me into proactive mode as I realised that there is SO MUCH to do. The reading was on ‘Initial Research and the Draft Proposal.’ The things I loved about this article was that it gave me a starting point and an end point and heaps of steps along the way (well 23 steps to be precise), luckily this is a group project, otherwise I’s be terrified of running out of time. Overall there are three stages: The initial stages, which include research. trust and reality checks. Following this is the drafting and proposal stages, which includes action sequences, preinterviewing and rewriting a hypothesis. The nest stage is a refinement, to narrow your focus and deepen the film. The final stage is addressing aesthetic concerns, such as style and images. The broaden the contextual framework of your film.
This was overwhelming for me so I decided to draw up a mind-map to get to the main points I need (and therefore my group) to do in terms of getting the most polished, well maybe not most polished by to achieve all our aims.
a research mind-map different areas we need to explore.
I did a seperate one for aesthetics, because even though a lot of these ideas will come from research I think that it lies quite seperately to the research frame.
aesthetic areas we need to cover
These mind-maps helped me to see where each form of research led to and how that will help us to come towards a refined idea for our documentary. I will use this reading mainly as a check list in terms of pre-production. Even though some of the ideas are more crucial than others I think that a systematic approach to this will really be of value to our documentary in terms of shooting and editing. One thing about this reading that really stood out for me was step 12. I thought that this step really guages if you are ready to begin filming. The step is to ‘Write a three-line description’ that will summarise your story. If you cannot summarise it in 3 lines you aren’t ready. I find this a crucial point. In these lines you need to get to the heart and sole of your documentary, without any nonsense. Another point made that really resonated with me regarding narrowing the focus to deepen your film. The tip here given was to ‘seek the center of your film by assuming that you may not yet have it’ (pg. 210). This to me will force your documentary to have so much more meaning, even though you think you have a great central core, there could be something better.
I will really use this reading to really get into what our documentary is all about. It has truly motivated me to research and develop our story into something that will truly resonate.
Reference
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Rabiger, ‘M. Initial Research and Draft Proposal,’ Directing the documentary,
(p. 207-218). 4th ed. Burlington: Focal Press, 2004.
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