Reflection and Retrospective

Overall this term was a productive one for me.  I learned a lot about the concepts of spectacle, power and memory.  I feel pleased with the blogging I’ve done but perhaps I could have improved it by doing a little everyday rather than a lot spaced throughout the term.  Still, I would like to think that this will actually be read and not just noted at the amount of posts I’ve done.  I’ve tried my best to avoid irrelevant conjecture etc as that is not really what I like.  I prefer to be straight to the point when it comes to academic stuff and module criteria.  However, the two blogs about The Matrix and Little Big Planet are a lot more about my opinion rather than the opinion of others and my view on them but I think this is okay when I consider Little Big Planet because not many people take videogames very seriously yet and so it could be the pioneering of this kind of analysis.

Or not.

I didn’t find it particularly easy to get into a rhythm of blogging.  It’s not something I’m used to.  I tend to just read up, learn and understand something and be content.  Proving what I now know and giving evidence etc I understand is part of university life and I think my posts are full of relevant content.  So in that sense I’m pleased, but I’ve still not found a comfort zone with this kind of reporting.  That is something I need to work on.

I think the artifacts I made over the term have been well realised, but I will always be overly critical of my own work and if given the opportunity, I would redo them all again in a more controlled, organised and clear way.

I’ve had a lot of opportunity to critique the work of others this term, and I’ve definitely enjoyed that.  It has given me a confidence boost, but also made me bitter of work out there being made with no purpose.

To summarize, there’s a lot of improvement I could do with concerning blogging, research and personal reflection in an academic way.  However, I firmly believe that I’ve followed the criteria’s requirements and avoided a lot of regurgitated info and personal uneducated speculation.

Here’s to term two.

Curtis Riley

Production Ideas for Term Two

Idea One:

Based around memory, the concept of this story is about remembering.  Influenced by the videogame ‘Second Sight’.

Second Sight Box Art

A man wakes up in a medical research facility. He has no memory of his past except for a mundane task occurring six months before.  He learns from a computer he finds in the medical facility that his mentality suffered from the death of someone close to him shortly under six months ago.  He then has a flashback in which he prevents this death.  This changes what the computer says back in the medical facility.  The rest of the film focuses on the protagonist reading what may have contributed to his incarceration in the medical facility and fixing it back in the past.  Nothing seems to be fixing the situation as the protagonist changes the past until he reaches the final possibility for his mental state on the computers list.  The final flashback (him and his friends experimenting with a wigi board) is repeatedly interrupted by a series of flash-forwards, showing the various outcomes that the protagonist has prevented so far via the actions in his other flashbacks.  During these, the protagonist discovers that he has not been having flashbacks at all. The séance is still ongoing and incomplete, whereas all his experiences in the medical facility are merely possible futures, and are a manifestation of his mental ability: precognition.  Now knowing the truth of his situation, the protagonist pushes the wigi board off the table and leaves his ‘friends’, ensuring his stable mental state and giving himself a second chance at life.

Idea Two:

A standalone sitcom-style spoof episode called Sod’s Law.  Detective Inspector Sod is a homosexual police officer whom is very dedicated to both his occupation and his sexuality.  The idea is that the conclusion of every episode sees D.I. Sod right at the point of solving the case but unfortunately always failing at the last-minute for a reason related to him being gay.

Idea Three:

A reality game show called Death Row where the ‘housemates’ are ‘killed off’ every week.  This is of course just a bit of fun.  However, one week there’s an accident and someone actually dies during one of the ‘executions’.  The film becomes about who is to blame for the death, the creators of the show or the public that voted for which victim should ‘die’ and how they should ‘die’ as the decision was theirs as was the power.

Comments and Criticism

I took a moment to constructively either critique or simple comment on my friends blogs.  Here are the links to a few of them:

http://medprod3.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/retrospect/#comment-9

http://cattlec.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/solaris-vs-event-horizon/#comment-49

http://3yearsandcounting.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/memory-final-artifact/#comment-5

http://deejaythreeonezero.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/final-major-project/#comment-7

The Medium of Videogames – Final Fantasy VII

Videogames are things I feel very passionately about.  I can passionately hate them or love them.  I think they’re an underrated form of expression and aren’t as recognised as books or films.  So, because of this, I have a real desire to analyse a particular videogame that I feel very strongly about:  ‘Final Fantasy VII’.  I’ll begin with the fan-desired sequel that it spawned:  the movie ‘Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children’.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children differs from most films based on videogames because, essentially, this is a continuation of the story of the original videogame told through another medium; Film.  It is not just another ‘videogame to film’ made “for the sake of it”.  For example; Doom or Resident Evil which, although being good films, were not worthy of note and are not as true to the games they are based upon, whereas Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is true to Final Fantasy VII.  There is purpose behind its creation.

Advent Children DVD Cover

It is completely impossible to watch the film and give it any justice without having played and understood the original videogame to its fullest.  The game is more influential than any book I’ve read or film I’ve seen.  The film ‘Advent Children’ merely explores what is created in the original videogame, so this is not what I will dwell on.  It is the game that is most important, yet is still a greatly misunderstood medium of storytelling.

Final Fantasy VII was developed by Square Co. Ltd (now known as Square-Enix) and was published by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.  It is an RPG (role-playing game) and is based around active time battles, compelling storylines and statistics.  It, in a way, is an interactive story, not dissimilar to a book in itself.  It just uses imagery to convey some things, making videogames perfect to be made into films, if done well and done correctly.  Final Fantasy VII is by no means a normal videogame however, so its change to film was not exactly going to be classic cliché.

Final Fantasy VII Cover

The history in the game can be easily related to occurring events in today’s world.  A city names Wutai in the game is oriental based and was waged war upon by the mega-corporation ShinRa as a means to force them into accepting their plan to use the Lifestream as an energy source, feeding the world with electricity etc.  The Lifestream I must quickly explain is the river of life that flows through the planet and which all humans return to when they die, feeding the planet and keeping it alive.  Such abuse by the ShinRa corporation (roughly translated as ‘God corporation’) represents the lack of care for nature today when it comes to global business and industrial movements.  Remember though, this was made many years before certain outbreaks in today’s world (1997).

Some aspects involved in the game that relate to modern-day living almost seem like a premonition.  Also, when you consider Japan’s history with the United States you can begin to understand why some of the conventions are present.  The cultural codes really show in this game.  Although it is Japanese created it was intended for American audiences to decipher the philosophies they were attempting to create in their work.

ShinRa Logo

The art director refers to the game’s atmosphere as “strong and dark”, achieved through lighting effects that he considers “the darkest of darkest”, and a story that emphasised realism while drawing on a variety of myths, legends, and religious and philosophical systems to “use as a framework for loftier ethical aspirations and ecologically conscious evangelism”.  Clearly more than your average videogame.  These concepts were reflected in names, such as ‘Sephiroth’ which involves transcriptions from the Kabbalah, also in Cloud’s personal conflicts (the main protagonist who I‘ll discuss later on), the permanence of Aerith’s death (having a playable character who you grow to love taken away from gameplay permanently) and the plot element of the Lifestream.

The purpose of the game (holding such an emotional tie to real life, death and birth) was so compelling to the creators that they delayed the game’s release from December 1996 to January 1997 so that they could make several additions the to gameplay and story for the game’s North American release.  The creators themselves translated the text so that the game’s philosophy would not be lost in cultural codes via shoddy mistranslation.  This is how deeply the story behind the story of the game affects those that understand it.

Aerith's Death

Barret is a perfect example of some of the myths surrounding black videogame characters.  His appearance is almost identical to Mr T from ‘The A-Team’.  They exploit the stereotype throughout the game with him being the most leading character up until a point where you delve into his past, discover the reason for his gun-arm, which is grafted where his arm should be.  Basically, once the obviousness of his strength, his gun, is stripped away, he starts to show emotions not of anger or courage but despair and sadness and regret.  Still though, the patriarchy remains and he always wants to protect those that follow him and especially his daughter who is his reason for fighting against ShinRa and what they are doing to the planet.  This challenges the audiences myth for that ‘type’ of black man.

ShinRa Hierarchy

The game purposefully has a few inspirations of its own, most noticeably the characters Biggs and Wedge which share their names from two characters in Star Wars.  A film most of the targeted audience will know.  This is an attempt to connect with the player of the game.  It is one of the very few connections that one Final Fantasy game has with another and is always known as the most obvious tie-in between Final Fantasy and Star Wars.  In Star Wars, Biggs was Luke’s good buddy from Tatooine.  When Luke runs into Biggs right before the Death Star battle, Luke is thrilled.  Soon enough, most of the rebels have been blown out of the sky.  Luke prepares for his run at the Death Star, and his two wingmen are Biggs and Wedge.  Wedge Antilles gets shot and pulls out.  Biggs stays with Luke and is killed.  In most Final Fantasy games, the two randomly show up in different spots during each game as sort of homage.

In Final Fantasy VII, They both show up right at the beginning as members of the Rebel Alliance called ‘AVALANCHE’ of which Cloud is a new member and the team is led by Barret.

Biggs has a line mourning those who lost their lives to bring in some information, “Think of how many people risked their lives, just for this code…” just like the character Mon Mothma has in the Star Wars series.  In Final Fantasy VII, you (the player) and your rebel group (‘AVALANCHE’) are fighting the evil Corporation (‘ShinRa Inc.’) who is killing planets (sucking out the life force of the planet) with their technology.  Coincidence?

Star Wars Influence

Jenova is a being that crashed onto the planet over two-thousand years ago bringing the ancient race of the Cetra to the brink of insanity.  It did this by posing as their deceased loved ones using it’s unique ability to change it’s shape and ‘Reunite’ it’s cells if they are separated.  This is called ‘The Reunion Theory’ and the ‘Reunion’ takes place during the entire course of the videogame.

Jenova was sealed away by a few remaining Cetra and during the years that past, most of the Cetra died out and a new race of humans lived on who did not have as much of a spiritual connection with the life of the planet as the Cetra did.  Then, a few years before the game begins, the Shin-Ra electric power company found Jenova and began experimenting on her.  This leads us to Sephiroth.

Sephiroth

Sephiroth is a man whom Hojo (who worked at ShinRa) experimented on by injecting Jenova cells into his mother’s womb and therefore into Sephiroth’s unborn foetus.  However, Sephiroth eventually misinterpreted his findings about his birth and came to think that Jenova was actually his mother.  He went insane, hating ShinRa and eventually hating everything.

Jenova = Jehova + Nova = New God

The game explored ideas such as:

• Vast misinterpretation, leading to catastrophic events way out of proportion; (Sephiroth summoning a meteor to smash into the earth, then absorbing the life stream that would seal the wound of the planet and becoming a ’God’).

• Birth, life and death; (the main protagonists discovery that his memories were in fact not his own but those of his best friend whose life he took over, unable to cope after his friend had been killed.  His eventually recovery of those memories through a state of vegetation and rebirth and ultimately his complete revolutionary understanding after thwarting Sephiroth’s plan.

• Influence; (the truth that since Jenova came to the planet over two thousand years ago she subliminally influenced the creation of ShinRa, it’s army, the ability to use the Lifestream as an energy source, the creation of Sephiroth and the almost destruction of the planet and all life on it).

Connotations to the outlook people can have on America can mostly be seen through the words and actions of Rufus Shinra, the president of ShinRa Inc.  A famous quote is as follows:  “A little fear will control the minds of the common people.”

Rufus Shinra

All he has to do is invoke fear into the hearts of those he deals with and provides energy, security and basic living to; the general public of Midgar (the city in which the Shinra corporation resides).  Most Americans live in fear of terrorism today and such things are not yet fully explainable, but this is one example of how Final Fantasy has had a view on the present, even though it is the past that once held its original allusions.

What it all comes down to in the end (and few people pick up on this, especially with only playing through the entire game just once) is that there never really is a true antagonist other than Jenova, the instinctual extraterrestrial life form that crashed onto the planet many years ago.  It is incapable of conscious thought, it is merely a parasite.  Every seemingly antagonistic character in the game is only seen through one perspective.  In the end everyone is only doing what they do for what they believe in, but only one answer shines true.

This is a very controversial concept of religion.  Complete subliminal influence on the lives of those that live blindly in it’s wake, believing in it because they are told to.  This is the essence of the character of Jenova, yet who is not a ‘character’ in the true sense of the word.  She only speaks five words in the entire forty-nine hours of gameplay and it is only said once:  “…because you are a puppet.”

Jenova Dialogue

References from:

(2005) in Studio BentStuff: Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω (in Japanese). Square Enix, 57. ISBN 4-7575-1520-0.

(2005) in Studio BentStuff: Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω (in Japanese). Square Enix, 198. ISBN 4-7575-1520-0.

(2005) in Studio BentStuff: Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω (in Japanese). Square Enix, 591. ISBN 4-7575-1520-0.

The Final Fantasy VII Citadel site staff (2005).

Hironobu Sakaguchi Interview.

The Final Fantasy VII Citadel.

Vestal, Andrew (1998). The History of Final Fantasy. GameSpot. Retrieved on August 10, 2006.

http://www.noiresensus.com/bookshelf/ff7/site/quotes.html

Experimenting With Representation

Having grown a steady interest in metaphor and representation through video over the course of this term I was intrigued in a video my friend showed me.  It’s quite simple, average, but intriguing.  The depth of field was nice though, and I wanted to try using a different lens to get the same effect and build upon the video I watched.

What I made eventually turned out fairly good, but it’s still just a prototype as I’d like to finalize the piece, cut down the time a little and have everything in it only be there if it’s meant to be in a more controlled environment.  It’s essentially about growing and realising that things in life aren’t always crystal clear.  It’s also about the denial of this truth that we all must accept.  Nothing is truly black and white.

The music is called ‘Third Uncle’ by Bauhaus w/ Brian Eno.  It’s there because it’s awesome but also because it feels frantic and gradually becomes more demented.  This helps the development of the film and the issue within it.  I like the way this film looks and feels.  It could be a little shorter and a little more specific about everything, less clogged up, but like I said, I wish to redo it.

Finding Spectacle, Power and Memory in the Film ‘The Matrix’

‘The Matrix’ is a film with a plot that heavily focuses on choice, a type of power.  Power is represented through this film as a differing consequence of a choice that can be made (blue pill or red pill) and therefore a reflection of what we do everyday, but having a much stronger impact.  The audience feel even more empowered when the character Neo makes a choice and grows stronger because of it, overcoming great conflict.  This is classically the power of good triumphing over evil.

Matrix Code

The Spectacle of this film is its concept of virtual reality and what’s considered a normal life.  It also focuses on the feeling that not all is what it seems and (moving back to power) breaking free from that prison of ‘normaility’.

Finding Spectacle, Power and Memory in the Videogame ‘Little Big Planet’

The entire premise of this game is to use it to create your own.  It’s made to be able to construct anything your imagination is limited to.  This invokes a high sense of power, especially as you can upload your creations online for other gamers to experience and rate in a five-star scoring system.  This also gives you a reputation within the community as a good or bad level designer.

Little Big Planet

With this power comes a certain amount of responsibility.  You are literally limited to your own imagination (and knowledge of the games technical requirements) which can be a bad thing in some cases.  For example, it’s very easy to notice custom user-made levels which have the September 11th attacks as their theme, having the character (you) control a plane or something similar.  The character you control is an incessantly cute humanoid sack called ‘Sackboy’, but simulated genocide is still simulated genocide, no matter how adorable.  It’s pretty clear that the game wasn’t made for these kind of intentions, but if certain crazed people are given this power, they will use it.  In one productive case, someone proposes to his girlfriend using the game, having created a level for her to play.  Quite a spectacle.

You need to know all the workings of the game to have your level creating skills at their full potential which means the game will put itself into your head if you take the time to memorize everything you need to know to play it properly.  It’ll stay there too.

Memory, Research and My Understanding of Roland Barthes

“Perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of a myth…”

This quote by Roland Barthes (a French literary theorist) stems from the idea that history is written by the winners.  It makes sense to me.  It ties in with the theories of power and spectacle that I’ve discussed before.  The control of the masses.  Those currently in power will never hold themselves in a negative light and those that were reduced from their state of power are ‘evil’.  This keeps the public feeling safe, protected and thinking that they are being led by people who fight for good.

Nothing is better to achieve this than to use the media.  Documenting (or at least showing) what matters to the winners, not the losers.  The focus is on what portrays those winners as just and good and hiding anything that may hold them in a negative light.  It is scary to think that you can’t trust your government, so people don’t think like that and just trust and believe everything they see and are told.  As is my understanding at least, based upon another quote by Barthes:

• It is the photograph, not the cinema, that put an end to resistance to believe in the past (Barthes, Camera Lucida, in McQuire 1998).
  • Barthes argued that the fusion of reality with the past constituted the uniqueness of photography.

For Barthes, the relation of the camera to figuring a past, a history, a memory is an ontological relation.  Also, to Barthes, the photography was not only never a memory “but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory” (McQuire 1998: 128).

Admittedly this is more relevant to the medium of portraying or capturing the past, but it’s point is relevant which is that any artifact that supposedly is “what was” or “what used to be” is manipulatable, manipulative, and potentially a farce.

I had a great deal of trouble being satisfied with any idea I came up with for a memory video.  They all seemed to say the same irrelevant moot point.  Eventually I decided that I wanted the film to feel very spacious and empty.  I based it heavily on a deleted scene from ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ which could have existed as a short film itself.

Series One

The eventual problem was that is was close to 20 minutes long and so I’m unable to upload it to YouTube, so I’ll post another artifact that I’ll do of my own accord at a later date.  For now though I’ll briefly describe what my film was about.  Essentially it’s two guys sitting in a car attempting to remember what they were there to do.  The dialogue and excuse for conversation is pushed along by a strange noise that the car is making and figuring out what it could be.

I wanted to play with the idea of what happens while you try to remember something and make interesting the activity of conversation which is actually just a stop-gap while the memory is recovered i.e. pure pointlessness.

Lapse Screenshot

I enjoy watching what we filmed.  The dialogue and timing was very important in keeping it interesting.  The film successfully felt very spacious and every word, no matter how pointless in content, always felt quite important and relevant to the film when spoken.  This keeps the audience hooked.  I called the film ‘Lapse’.

Power, Research and My Understanding of Ciaran McCullagh

• “Today we are saturated by media of different forms, shapes, and sizes … The dominance of media products in our lives has led people to blame the media for a range of social ills. .. This is a view of media power as total and all-embracing…” – Eldridge, Kitzinger and Williams, The Mass Media Power in Modern Britain (1997), p.10.

Ciaran MCullagh is an author who wrote the book ‘Media Power: A Sociological Introduction’.  He is also Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University College, Cork.  Here is a quote of his:

• “It has become both a truism and a commonplace to observe that we live in media-saturated societies … there is a feeling that this kind of media saturation is not a ‘good’ thing…” – Ciaran McCullagh, Media Power: A Sociological Introduction (2002), p1-2.

These two points above got me thinking about control and how this view of media power is potentially what makes the general public victims to it i.e. the choices they make in their lives are not actually their own or made by them, therefore, none of the general public really live their own lives.  They merely exist and make albeit a fair amount but a very capable amount of fuss.  My thoughts on this helped me decide what to do for my next film.

The obstruction for this piece was to have the video last exactly one minute and thirty seconds.  This was a kind of challenge for me as mine was ‘reality’, but I pulled it off.  Here is my piece on power:

Here’s my explanation of the video:

I take advantage of Alam, Cat and Sarah’s trust by inducing them into a state of fear in order to succeed in my own hidden agenda.  This is exactly what the government does via the media (coverage on terrorism for example) which is supported by this notion of selectivity:

• “…the source of media power lies in its ability to be selective in what it tells us about the world… it controls the information that is available to media audiences and so has the potential to shape or set limits to their knowledge and to the images that they can construct of the world in which they live. This model of media power can be characterised as ‘agenda-setting’, after the formulation of McCombs and Shaw..” McCullagh (2002: 22).

Thus, the message behind my power video.  Trust no one.

Spectacle, Research and My Understanding of Guy Debord

My task was to make a piece of work around the concept of spectacle no longer than three minutes.  The obstruction was that no cut could last longer than 12 frames (about half a second).

I studied ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ by Guy Debord (a French Marxist theorist) and learned a lot from three early points in particular:

“The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”

“The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.”

Society of the Spectacle Cover

I found the book to be pretty mind-boggling, but from these points I came to understand at least a little about what Spectacle actually is:  A representation of reality that can be used and abused.  These three points immediately were the ones that made a lot of sense to me and I strongly agree with them.  I think that using and abusing representations of reality is something the media can do to control the public, like broadcasting only certain information or even misleading information about particular events or occurrences, etc.  All to keep those in power in power and to keep the public thinking they have power.

After thinking for over a week and a half about what artifact I could create, as well as an interesting concept, I had come up with a lot of rubbish-to-average ideas that could easily be bashed out.  However, it isn’t really my nature nowadays to make something unless I feel it’s worth making.

Luckily, after talking about the concept of spectacle with my girlfriend, I hit upon an idea that I thought would portray it quite well.

My piece shows the work of René Magritte from his series of paintings ‘The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images 1928-29)’ .

This is not a pipe.

What I am showing with my piece is how the media is able to manipulate an image of any kind to suit their needs or desires (smoking the image of a pipe) which is primarily what spectacle is; a manipulatable representation of reality.

Upon discussion with my friends Alam and Luke, we came to the conclusion that our films would work much better as a compilation of three shown through an image of a TV, the media’s greatest weapon.  I had to do a little research into Adobe Premiere Pro (the editing software I use) to figure out how to chromo key an image (use green screen) but it’s pretty simple now that I think about it.

I had to use Photoshop with this image of a TV to give it a green screen.

Retro TV with Green Screen Effect

Using these techniques I was able to fully portray my film as I wanted it to be.

I am proud of what I made and I think the film works, but I would consider only taking my main segment forward (the smoking man) and to transpose it into an installation piece.  I think that there’s more to the film that is needed and that as an installation piece it will just as well portray the point I am trying to make, as well as trimming the fat.

The way the film is edited is an allusion to the first obstruction of ‘De Fem benspænd’.  ‘The Five Obstructions’ is a 2003 film by Lars Von Trier and Jørgen Leth. The film is a documentary, but incorporates lengthy sections of experimental films produced by the filmmakers. The premise is that Lars Von Trier has created a challenge for his friend and mentor, Jørgen Leth, another filmmaker. Von Trier’s favourite film is Leth’s ‘The Perfect Human’ (1967). Von Trier gives Leth the task of remaking ‘The Perfect Human’ five times, each time with a different ‘obstruction’ (or obstacle) given by Von Trier.