Blog film

gone underground

2004-05-05T22:25:00.000+10:00

I'm not a public journaller I've realised. BUT, I have been keeping a private blog. Is that still a blog.
PLUS a Word document which automatically puts my html links in without the hassle of typing it out.
Back some time...

the philosophers

2004-04-15T16:50:00.000+10:00

Socrates vs Aristotle – that woman who gave the lecture (Boyer lecture? BBC?) about one philosopher who spoke & never wrote, the other who wrote. The tension between recording and NOT recording; who is wiser – the one who records or the one who does not?

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Nastiness – must touch on these darker sides in my film too. There’s so much out there that’s horrible, but like the rest of the world, it’s full of everything – good, bad AND ugly.

community or not?

2004-04-15T14:30:00.000+10:00

Had a chat to Leu over lunch. Wow – what a veteran blogger!

So people branch off, eh? When you’re “more mature” and have gotten off your chest what you need to, you end up writing less – so says Leu. Leu now stays in touch with her music friends (esp. in Sydney etc) through the mono.net site and it’s more about just STUFF that’s going on in their lives – music or non-music-related. Excellent. I like this idea of ‘growing up’ beyond the ‘need to blog’ as if it’s an age or maturity (or self-publicity) thing. Also, the idea that she’s found this blog space that’s a cross-between a chat-room, individual emails and webpages. This is great – sort of a diary-as-open-scratchpad type blogging. Whereas mine is still very much a philosophical-rambling-don’t-care-who’s-out-there kind of blog, I’m very attracted to this idea of blogging as community-building. Yet that sounds like more work, more absorbing, time-consuming, relationships to commit to, etc etc. Ooo. Quite telling of me perhaps. I like my little space and what I’m creating. It’s getting comfy here.

Blogging is a many-faceted diamond!

As for the fire metaphor again – my blog is like me having gone over to a quiet corner of a field to start a little fire in my very organised, yet wandering way. I want to explore further the wild fields beyond – there’s some crazy stuff going on out there & I feel I’m just tinkering away at my own little embers. Be brave Theo!
(only wankers refer to themselves in the third person!)

Leu's magical blog tour

2004-04-15T11:30:00.000+10:00

Spoke to Leu today. Here's her take on blogging (along with her introductory tips on these sites):
www.mono.net
Look at the discussion board. Half of Melbourne is on it talking about music and what’s generally going on in Melbourne. It’s good because friends that are overseas can keep up to date with the latest for when they return.
Me…
I got lost following all the threads. Read about some poor guy who got mugged – it included pics of his cut leg & everyone was logging on with sympathy & sugestions. What I love about this host is it feels so urgent – the discussion lists are annotated with how many minutes old the postings are – wow! Some were only minutes, many were SECONDS old. It’s the closest thing to chat site I’ve come across without actually being chat.

www.friendster.com
A dating site that is really just a place where people connect their friends and show off how many they have. You can post pics and send messages, but you can only do this if you are "connected" to them, that is if your friend is their friend, etc. Famous people are on here too!
Me…
Suggested an older audience with comments about “how it’s great that married people are on here too.”

www.livejournal.com
My hoast for my blog, although its not easy to find posts if you dont know an exact address to begin with.
Me…
All looks very exclusive. This is the one that another friend of mine talked to me about. I got the impression that you had to physically know someone to get on it. Leu tells me that it used to be MORE exclusive than it is now, but since friendster started up, they lost a lot of people & decided to open it up a bit. There are now still many of layers of privacy (or “hiddeness”) about the postings on it – which aint such a bad thing I think.

www.diaryland.com
My (Leu’s) first encounter with blogging years ago. It’s full of young kids, but gives you an idea about communities and how people use it to forward ideas, distribute art, etc. This site is also easier to read peoples blogs, just by browsing recently updated blogs in the "browse the members' box.
Me…
It does sound like a younger audience – for whatever that’s worth. Everyone’s into Metallica & it was funny to see such a brightly coloured, happy site have links to people with such dark & heavy blogs and issues on their minds. From this I wondered: what’s a diary ring? (Leu says it’s just a way of linking from one blog to another). This idea of showing off you ‘fans’ (or ‘friends’) came home to me on this one. I was more & more intrigued with the competitive nature of blogging with this more communal style of blogging I found here. Some had 1 or 2 ‘fans’ – others had 100s – it must get to be a real social status thing (no doubt leading to ‘how can I attract more fans’ kinds of personal questions & doubts). ALSO, everyone was using false names. More pronounced here than anywhere else. It seems there’s the full spectrum – from people who openly & honestly identify themselves & their honest thoughts, right through to people who remain completely aloof.
Again – media reflecting life I guess.

Hey thanks Leu – great tips.

music, history & fire (again)

2004-04-14T22:45:00.000+10:00

Music is so emotive – must move to this next. That’s what “blogumentary” was missing – a good soundtrack, just a very ordinary drum track. I think I’ll steer away from drums, strangely enough. Journalling is so much more an expression of fluid thoughts – it’s a piano thing. Listening to Chopin as I write – romantic music (Op23 & 38) – great stuff. Naji put me onto this for my birthday present last year – a musical history study & I’m slowly, ever so slowly working my way through it.

There must be some history in my doco. So much of what we see visually these days has no links to the past. Surely that’s a necessary part of any artistic work that resonates with our humanity – that it carries with it the seeds of some former time and place. This is that part of any creative language (as film is) that goes on and changes little over time. I like that – linking to the past through music as a way of saying ‘blogs aren’t new’ without sounding completely boring and ‘wet-blanket’ about it all.

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About the fire metaphor thing. I’ve been stressing about how I can shoot that on no budget – I want all sorts of different fires. Now I have a possible solution: Maybe this can be my dogma – I’ll use whatever I can of a small fire (containable in a BBQ or like) to give the impression of larger and different types of other fires with still images, glow effects or whatever stylistic things fits with the rest of the work.

wiff of competition

2004-04-14T09:17:00.000+10:00

Did a search on google and came across these:
http://www.blogumentary.org
A PBS guy doing it (in his spare time?) – good solid doco in the traditional sense.

http://www.choiresicha.com/umentarymov.html
A more interesting take in terms of style, less comprehensive than the other though.

It was bound to happen – only a matter of time before it did. Mild depression, now I’m over it. If everyone in the world made a doco about blogging it’d be different. Well, I don’t entirely believe that but the principle’s right. Anyway, from the 2 trailers I’ve seen,
mine will be very different.
Do I dare search in case I find one more like mine? I feel so insulated. Leu gave me some tips on blogging & good sites she’s onto. I’ll check them out next.

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Funny – I was feeling so open & generous about my thoughts for the development of this film; SUDDENLY I’m feeling really tight-fisted. I don’t want anyone to get word of what I’m doing, keep it all to myself so no one copies it.

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It’s alright I’ve calmed down about it all now. Open it up. I’m all for ‘open-source’. It’s easy to be all noble about this when there’s nothing at stake for me. I have a money-paying job. I’m such a snoot.

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http://www.girlwonder.com
How did I get onto this? Just flicking through my history tool (on Internet Explorer) and found this again for Wednesday. Dunno what’s going on there. See – blogging is actually an advanced tool to keeping track of everywhere I’ve been on the internet – like a kind of an electronic snail trail.

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/mefi/3285
Same issue – I think I was reading links to the blogumentary site and came across all these. No time to read them all, just a gist of who was linking into this thing & some of the issues around it all. Oh, this one was interesting though, ‘cos “Matt” is getting hit with lawsuits or something & someone suggested they chip in to help out.

sounds like a blogger down the corridor

2004-04-13T09:12:00.000+10:00

Must play with sounds next – music. That’s the thing I’m having most trouble imagining at the moment. Soundtrack great for playing on, use that one.

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Hey, I found out just now that one of my colleagues (Leu) here at work is a regular blogger. Cool! Must chat to her about it. I wonder what Leu writes…
I wonder if she’ll let me know what here site is? Oooo – crossing into strange territory here. My guess is she won’t talk about it. But I’ll see.

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Sent Leu an email, see what she says.

more looks

2004-04-11T21:45:00.000+10:00

Why not have moving images scrolling (might give the feel of a surveillance camera though – is that the feel I’m after? Not really, but try it anyway). How would I get video footage of resolution high enough to expand it in this way? 2 options I guess – enlarge footage just a bit (or maybe even a lot – the pixelation might not be so out of keeping anyway); the other option would be to shrink the window of the moving image and have the image enlarged – might give the feel of just being a cropped image (which of course it simply is – UNLESS it shows full frame in the window, then cuts to enlarged portion of same shot in same window).

Must try these things.

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OK, OK. Could really mess around with the metaphor & ‘real content’ elements. Start with the fire being in the background and pictures being described scrolling up… then (perhaps much later) have a still of fire scrolling up and later again have moving footage of fire scrolling up. Yes, I like it. Play around with these elements – reflects the self-referencing nature of the web. Blogs talk about ideas, objects AND blog themselves. Nice.

the web-look

2004-04-09T21:31:00.000+10:00

OK, woke up early this morning consciously thinking about how I could display images in the blog film – show them like you see images on a web-browser… copy that vertical jerky motion you get when you scroll down a blog that has images in it. I tried it today & it really seems to work (filmed the computer screen while I scrolled down a webpage, and matched the moves using keyframes in Final Cut Pro). It worked in the sense that you’d think it was actually someone scrolling down a picture on the web. Will it work in a doco? Dunno. Be nice to have the fire elements happening as the background image. Could occasionally have BIG images that scroll sideways as well (obscuring the fire footage) & play with these two visual elements. Also, not EVERY still image would need to come on by scrolling up from the bottom – some could just do a quick wipe down from the top or simply cut in. I like the feel of these as visual design elements. Would make the film more stylistically representative of the web.
I like that.

AND, we could shoot stills just with the 1megapixel still part of Sony TRV to get stills of high enough quality to get sideways (& enlarged?) scrolls for some interesting detail studies of important images – I’m picturing a shot of people sitting stony-faced in a train, then seeing different bits (or scrolls across) of the same shot revealing actual faces & expressions. Cool. (May need more than 1152 x 864 pixels to make this work on a 720 x 576 screen). Shoot 35mm stills instead? Nah, that introduces a budget to the film that I’m trying to avoid. Borrow Mum & Dad’s 3.2 megapixel cam for a few select shots? Maybe.

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Getting more blog-wise. Having decided to change my blog template, also feel it’s much easier to read with a title given for each entry – newspaper style. Getting into this. I like blogging! Now back-editing each entry so it has a title – makes it easier for me to navigate too.

new template

2004-04-09T21:30:00.000+10:00

changed my template - sick of the big murky green one.

story idea, 1st big blogsurf

2004-04-08T12:28:00.000+10:00

Story. Story. It’s all about story. I think I like the story of a blog –
• from the excitement of its birth,
• its hopes & ambitions of changing the world,
• its rise and development into something interesting (but perhaps falling short of the original dream),
• its tiredness and staleness,
• to its ultimate death.
Not a day-in-the-life, but a complete lifecycle. That’s got a natural feel to it – something I was hoping for.

NOW – to find blogs and grabs from each of the ‘stages’ in order to tell the story. Weave them together like they could be one – with a soundtrack (loved a bit of skaa that I heard this morning on JJJ – I think you’d call it skaa) and the metaphor of fire. The trick I think at this stage will be how much to incorporate the metaphor with other images. Should I even include other images?

I’ve seen some good blogs out there with beautiful imagery – glimpses of life. While I’m not going to rip them off, they got me thinking about some of the beautiful imagery I could shoot myself of similar substance. I still like the idea of images like I had on 4/4 (train faces, city faces, detachment). Dunno where to go with this metaphor vs. other image question. Ideas?

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Now I have a half hour or so to search while I’m at work & don’t need to work (a rare opportunity – fast connection, spare time – woo-hoo!)

http://www.jeffdoolittle.com/archives/000203.php
carnival of the consumers – here’s another one of those ideas (like photographic interview ‘Snap Happy’ 2/4/04) where someone wants me to submit stuff for their collection. Great idea – if only I had time!

http://www.blogs4god.com/linker/index.php
Apparently it was ‘formerly Martin Roth's "Semi-Definitive List of Christian Blogs"’ – interesting idea – a network of Christian bloggers.

http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=PoeticallyExplicit
Statistics of a nightmare – yep, she’s pretty freaked out (if it’s really a ‘she’) and having a few problems. No doubt blogging is a good vent for a few problems. Sounds pretty honest. I like that.

http://sh1.antville.org
The “shithappens” site. Fascinating read – part German, part English – nice to get a linguistically varying blog (certainly cuts ME out of a lot of the comment, but there’s plenty of content). Led me to the google labs – stimulating techie stuff I don’t have time for:
http://labs.google.com/papers.html
(about how the Google search works – heck, I knew it was tricky, but obviously that’s an understatement!) Interestingly, the list of papers written on this site shows (for each article) how many citations it makes – eg. “121 citations”. Now there’s a thought – a scale of worth (or perceived worth) based on how much I quote from other people. What’s that say about information on the web. The more you’ve read, the higher the value of your writings. Does this follow? There’s a line of logic or argument I hadn’t thought of before. How does this relate to blogs? Is a blog better because its blogger has read more blogs?
http://www.obsolete.com/120_years
Wow, what a site – a fabulous list of electronic musical instruments from 1870 to 1990. Amazing! Find sample audio for the soundtrack to my blog film?
No such luck – can’t find a single mp3 or wav file on any pages. Anyway, I think I want as much ‘natural’ sounds as my soundscape – don’t want to alienate any non-internet people.

Lists, lists, everyone’s got a list!
Maybe it’s a geek thing.
I love lists.
Maybe I’m a geek too!

http://www.cromwell-intl.com/toilet
There it is again – the monumental list… of a completely universal subject – loos. WHY would you do this? WHY NOT, I guess. And what a monstrous one. It kind of makes that student doco I saw 7 years ago about people’s letterboxes completely banal and tedious (actually I pretty much thought that about it back then when I saw it anyway).
http://www.directimported.com.au/down/570000.htm
LOVELY visual sequence – thanks for this beautiful link yet again Mr.Shithappensblogger!
http://amleft.blogspot.com/archives/2004_04_01_amleft_archive.html#108112087436221697
Wow. Who’s got the software that generates these images – I love these creations. I want one. Oops – sorry, deep political statements and shadows over this one in particular. A whole thread of discussion & comment about THIS one in particular.

http://velcrometer.blogspot.com
This one got a “Best comedic entry” award from the diarists awards or something. It’s probably funny. Who knows – no time to read. Time’s up – I’m off home.

OOOOO – I do like this http://www.blogwise.com site – helps give me a focus – a blog “centre”. It lists by country & all sorts of things. I think I’ll call this home for further research (for no other reason than it’s been the first blog directory I’ve used).
Research. Research. It’s all just research. Keep that in mind, Theo. I am personally detached. Or am I?
Don’t take yourself so seriously Mr.Theo – they have names for people like that.

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How are these blogs (listed in the top 10 favourites on blogwise) getting 3000+ hits? Amazing! And is that per day? Week? Year? Must look up the FAQs.

aint born yesterday

2004-04-08T08:33:00.000+10:00

What’s so special about blogging anyway? Just sent an email to a friend I hadn’t seen for a while this morning. It’s strange how, even though she is always accessible via email, I don’t make contact. The unspoken rules of social networking hold themselves deeply entrenched in our minds – in my mind at least. I guess it’s just like old telephone thing – I COULD ring up anyone I know at ANY time I wish. But I DON’T, unless I have a reason to – if I’m still IN CONTACT with them. Strange. No normal, just seems strange when it comes to emails. But it shouldn't.

Perhaps a blog film could look at that. There was an article at a doco conference some years back by a Melbourne guy who likened online documentary to this obscure story of people trying to market telephone dramas when the telephone was first invented. Media mismatch I think he called it. Too much hype about what the new medium COULD do, and not enough reality-checking about what the new medium actually MIGHT do.

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Technology – a bit new, but then, just a variation on the same old thing. Blogging technology – it’s a variation on dairy-writing. But then it’s an open diary, a hybrid of communication forms. Where am I going with all this?

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Spooky thing – blogging makes you MORE self-absorbed (yesterday’s comments). Maybe filter-blogging doesn’t, but it seems free-form blogging does. That must be a bit of a dark side to it all.

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Came across some nice LOOKING blogs in my search for something else today:

http://davin.ws/archives/2003_06.html
Great look, Davin – simple, yet stylish

http://jellyfish.angel-watashi.net
Very Chinese – tiny, shock-comic, cute, hard to read in places – I like it

http://www.rearviewwindow.com/blog/archives/2003_09.html
Love the image at the top & general layout – good one

homeless thoughts

2004-04-07T09:35:00.000+10:00

OK, what about assumed names? I believe there’s people out there who take on several personas and then “blog out” from behind them. No doubt this happens a lot on chat sites. A university professor who poses as a teenage girl, AND as a young man AND an older man (and perhaps even more) in different blogs at the same time. What does THAT say about the psychology of human beings?
It’d be good to find some of this happening and explore these themes.

I’ve realised that part of the reason I’m WRITING more than I’m READING is simple accessibility. I don’t often go online at home (we only have dial-up) and at work I keep myself restricted to relatively short periods of time to check out sites. Maybe I’ll rethink this approach, or at least set aside time for some serious surfing sessions. Curiously (or perhaps not so), I find it easier to write than to read. Am I typical in blogging land on this point?

It’s funny how thoughts come when you least plan them to. A good deal of my blogging is an expansion of a quick note I jot down on my trusty paper notebook. Some quick entries are typed in directly when I’m at a computer throughout the course of a day at work or home. It rarely happens at a set time of day – as opposed to my posting of them, which happens pretty systematically.

Find a home for a homeless thought – before it walks away
That’s my philosophy. John Wynn-Tweg, one of my first teachers in media production taught me that ideas are precious and need to be treated like children; nurtured and looked after, otherwise they wither and die. It’s something I’ve always remembered.
No doubt some ideas DESERVE to wither and SHOULD in fact die – but it’s often good to at least meet them before they’re discarded.

Is blogging therapy? Not for me. It’s instructive, but it’s not therapeutic. Not yet. And I hope never. I’ll end this blog when it’s run its course – when the blog film is made.

nothing to say - blogdeath?

2004-04-06T09:32:00.000+10:00

Here’s one for Tam:
Why do people give up weblogs?.
As Rebecca said “I learned more about myself than anything else.” Curious comment. This Theo is learning too.

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People who want to speak publicly, like people who want to write publicly should have something to say. A colleague of mine, Tam, believes this vehemently. And I agree with her. But who’s the judge of what can be said?

Rebecca Blood reflects on blogging in this way:
“…fragments, pieced together over months, can provide an unexpectedly intimate view of what it is to be a particular individual in a particular place at a particular time.”
Surely, this is what being a documenter is all about – whether that’s a documentary filmmaker, radio producer, documentary essayist or even journalist. Of course the original meaning of journalism was surely the “writer of journals”. And it’s often said, newspapers are the first draft of history. Famous dairies have always given us a glimpse into what it means to be a particular person in a particular place at a particular time.
On our revolving rock, there’s a place for everything. Beauty and appreciation must be in the eye of the beholder. Any other cliches I can think of?

detachment

2004-04-05T09:49:00.000+10:00

The thing that amazes me about blogs is how willing people are to open up their private thoughts to the entire world, and yet we can't even open up to the guy who sells lollies to us at the milkbar across the road. What is it with us human beings?

Images – people interacting, not making much comment
blank faces in the street – lots of faces but no one talking to each other
people sitting on train in silence, no one talks – no community, no meeting of minds, yet people open up to machines
focus on the strangeness of us human beings
people staring, interacting visually but not connecting emotionally or spiritually

I like it.

Find blogs where people talk about the wonderful explosion of blogs, the power of community, the way we connect via the internet - make sure it's strikingly contrasting the images I get...
don't make it so anti-web that it becomes tedious, make it funny – a few laughs along the way about people
shoot people in odd settings where they'll give funny & embarrassed reactions to camera (ie. just walk to them and point it in their direction?)

hmm

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"The Change in Front of me" - Adam Goddard. Must find out where that's from - I've heard it before. This time it was on The Night Air - Radio National's Sunday night ecclection. Fantastic document of his grandfather's personal account of farming. A musical doco - interviews turned into song. Like a doco I once saw (2000 Adelaide conference - Lucky People Centre International) which was like a Baraka with interviews. People's comments repeated & turned into rap. Mesmerising, and insightful. I loved it.

blogtheory 101 - the 2 modes of blogging

2004-04-04T10:41:00.000+10:00

A few pertinent comments from Rebecca Blood (“Rebecca’s pocket” article ‘Weblogs: a history and perspective’) about audience vs public and a few other bits & pieces I’ll have to re-highlight (I’m a bit distracted at present). Makes me think I should tap into the experience of someone like her for a good overview / assessment of blogging.

Rebecca suggests there are 2 types of blogs:
* filter-style – types that provide big lists of websites (& other blogs) and comment on them
* free-form – types that are completely open forms of self-expression
My interest is in the second type. What can this type of writing offer society in a broad sense?
On a slightly different note, I think I should approach the research for making my blog doco on two fronts:
1. the theory of blogging – I need to understand blogging in a general sense if I’m to represent it intelligently, ie. so I may have something worthwhile to say about it
2. the “most fascinating blog hunt” – perhaps highlight one or two as the main thread of a narrative for the doco

At the same time, I want to see more short films – watch that episode of Eat Carpet I taped weeks ago. There’s another doco I taped from a few weeks ago – will watch that tonight, Making Venus.

letting go

2004-04-03T10:38:00.000+10:00

Blogging is kind of like the Toastmaster’s equivalent of “Table Topics” where you simply get to you are required to simply get to your feet and speak. The main difference is that the spoken word can be retracted. What’s in your blog is more incriminating – editable, yes, but not retractable. Scary when you think about it!

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On blogging...
FIRE is good metaphor – people can get obsessed with it and it can become all-consuming, but fire in its place is one of those essentials in life. Fire is symbolic of both good (Holy Spirit) and evil (fire of hell etc). Can’t get fires started (arrive at a campsite & the wood’s wet) – can’t get my blog “fire” going. No one’s coming to it. Things said I later regretted are like a fire out of control – the classic image of fire following a line of petrol leading up to a major explosion of something. “Inflammatory” comments. The tongue is like a fire (Proverbs?) – difficult to tame.

Green Guide helps out

2004-04-02T10:12:00.002+10:00

The Age’s Green Guide lists “blog of the week”. OK. Will follow some of their lead for a bit to induct me into this whole thing of what makes a good blog.

www.loobylu.com
Beautifully, simply designed. Great ‘open’ feel about it. I agree with the Green Guide’s critic – very appealing. “Winner of 4th annual weblog award for best Australian weblog.” So what are these weblog awards & who judges them? Must check out http://www.anthonyjhicks.com/aussieblogs which covers Australian blogs.

I love how some people just seem to have this knack for writing (or speaking, for that matter) in a way that’s entertaining and sounds like a complete flow of consciousness. Very Kate Langbroek I reckon. It sounds deceptively effortless and unfiltered – like you’re listening into someone’s thoughts. I think it’s a gift.

Blogs themselves are like personal documentaries – little documents of a life, a series of thoughts. The Green Guide last week offered Madrid Memoir as a case in point.
www.puertadelsolblog.com
Fabulous and intimate stuff of such internationally significant issues. If only I had time to read ALL of these blogs in depth. Surely the biggest problem with blogging and the internet in general…
where do you start…
where do you stop?

And finally…
Snap happy site from Sydney-based web developer into photography.
www.sh1ft.org
And even better, the proposal to collect “photographic interviews”…
www.sh1ft.org/q&a – love this idea, maybe I’ll do it. I love photography that attempts to capture a person. What a concept. I wish I’d thought of this!
There’s a meme worth propogating (see I’m learning the jargon now).

Theo the blog-toddler theorizes

2004-04-02T09:29:00.000+10:00

OK I need to find blogs that aren’t about blogging itself, but that explore the lives of people who blog because they want to. Back to my original thesis (some handwritten notes I made on 24/3, prior to official start of my blog) that there’s possibly 3 or 4 types of bloggers.
1. techies – people who keep track of technical, IT-related sites. Not so interested in these, but need to acknowledge them in my doco all the same
2. politicos – people on a mission (maybe visionaries of what the web can or might do)
3. diarists – people who just to write diaries
4. socialites – in a geeky, IT kind of way
I want to find blogs of types 2, 3 & 4 because I feel that’s where perhaps the best stories might be found. Whoah - I want to prove or disprove my theory as well!
I want to find examples of memes at work – not sites about memes themselves. Came across a few meme sites:

Oh, and an interesting (sorry no better word comes to mind at present) film review blog site:
http://blogs.salon.com/0001517/categories/myHobbies

On memes…

http://maxwell.lucifer.com/virus/alt.memetics/fire.walk.html
There’s that reference to websites & blogs in particular to FIRE. It’s a good metaphor.

http://maxwell.lucifer.com/virus/alt.memetics/what.is.html
Best list of meme definitions I’ve found so far – great reading.

http://www.christianitymeme.org
What’s their thing against Christianity specifically?

http://maxwell.lucifer.com/virus/alt.memetics/index.html
Looks like an early record of memes and what they’re about.

As I said, I need to focus on blogs and websites that follow memes, rather than philosophising about what memes are. Endless navel-gazing on my part will not lead me closer to making a documentary short.

leading lights of media

2004-03-31T09:41:00.000+10:00

My introspective drivel continues. Time to look outwards.

Alistair Cooke died yesterday, an insightful old man.
I’d heard a few of his “Letter from America”s over the years and enjoyed them. Sadly, I didn’t fully appreciate them until I heard he was retiring. (ABC Aust. news item)
And now he’s with us no more. A good case for arguing that what you do is central to your fundamental existence. Our resilience is surely related to our occupation (paid or unpaid) and the value we place on it. I always got the sense that Alistair’s work was heartfelt.

I heard a few comments from an obituary on the radio this morning. His work was described as “factual story-telling.” From his own comments I sensed the importance he placed on narrative, that one sentence must lead you to the next; and if there’s a dull patch, the listener has the right to switch off. That’s a tough yardstick to measure up to.

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Watched “Lumiere and Company” on video last night. A tribute to the Lumiere brothers in celebration of 100 years of cinema. A wonderful document of 40 directors from around the world and the films they made with the original cinematograph. The one that stays in my mind is the replication of Lumiere’s original film of the train arriving at the station. The modern-day version was captivating:
- same station
- no people
- no train
- complete stillness, and suddenly…
- WHOOSH! The train passes
- it's an express train not stopping here
- and it’s gone.
What a profoundly simple and fitting tribute to the founders of cinema, and a true document of change.

What also impressed me was the “dogma” of the concept: 52 seconds, editing in-camera only, no sync. sound, and only 3 takes allowed.
Like a “White gloves” idea (Melbourne film festival).
I love the challenge of dogma filmmaking – defining a set of constraints and being creative within those boundaries. I MUST see more of these dogma films.

I have a new dogma for my BLOG: see at least one film or visit at least 2 other blogs before making another entry.

imagery

2004-03-30T14:50:00.000+10:00

Listened to poetica, Radio national – “astronomical” on Saturday. Loved the ambience, the audio landscapes painted, as with many radio docos and essays.

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I think I shouldn’t EXPECT any feedback for the making of this doco. I should merely use it as my own record of the RESEARCH I’M DOING ON OTHER’S BLOGS. A blog on the process of making a doco could be rather tedious and painfully introspective after all. I think I now realising that I’m simply using a public space to gather thoughts & ideas. I must PRIMARILY explore the world of blogging myself and not naively expect the world to come to me.

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ICT imagery has a tendancy to be all keyboards, wires, electrical fantasy stuff. Certainly in the educational programs I’ve made there’s been plenty of keyboard shots to go ‘round.
I love the idea of basing the imagery of the film instead on a raw element like FIRE. Communication is about the very fundamental and earthy concept of human beings living together. OK, it’s more cerebral than stubbing your toe on a rock, but it has a hard core of what it means to be human. Perhaps fire is a good metaphor, because, like fire, communication spreads and can be impressive to watch.
Simon Pockley describes his web page the Flight of Ducks as an online community, and originally implanted the idea of the online communities as a series of campfires where people gather for a while.
I find that image very appealing and think it goes to the heart of what online communication can be about.
Yep. It’s decided, my doco on blogging will make use of “non-technical” imagery. There’ll be no wires, keyboards, or anything “man-made” in that sense in any of it.

it's new

2004-03-30T09:36:00.000+10:00

http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog
adrian miles is a vogger.
What’s vogging?

Adrian says: “A vog respects bandwidth. A vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television). A vog uses performative video and/or audio. A vog is personal. A vog uses available technology. a vog experiments with writerly video and audio. A vog lies between writing and the televisual. A vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media. A vog is dziga vertov with a mac and a modem. A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog.”

Hmm, fascinating.

hi, from me

2004-03-29T08:54:00.000+10:00

My name is Theodore Haston, although I prefer to be known as Theo.
I live in Melbourne, Australia and make documentary films.
Welcome to my blog.

I’m new to this whole concept of blogging, but the whole idea of it fascinates me:
public journaling,
speaking openly about private thoughts,
the development of ideas over time, and
keeping a journal that has input from others.
More about this fascination in future entries; suffice to say that I want to make a documentary film about it. In this blog I intend to record the development of my thoughts, as a way of trying to understand what blogging is about, and to open up the creative process to others who might want to add their own thoughts along the way.

The central themes I’m hoping to explore in my blog, and subsequent doco, are:
* communication in cyberspace
* isolation and community
* the place of web-based communication in society
* gender and communication
* the centrality of communication to our very existence

Someone I once knew had a theory I’ve become fond of in regards to all this. Simply stated it is:

To live is to talk
Or be talked about.

I credit Andrew Waywood with this concept and would love it if he could correct me if I have the wording slightly wrong. Of course “talk” is meant in the broadest of terms, as is “live” or “life” when you get down to it. It seems to me that the internet is very much a place where ideas can come to life, and ideas form the basis of most of what we do. This theory (or idea, or meme – can someone define a meme for me?) I hope to make the basis of my documentary project.

I haven’t yet nailed down a length for the documentary, but I’m thinking it will be a short piece – between five and ten minutes. There’s no way to cover all the themes suggested in such a short space of time, but I want to allude to them at least. It will be more impressionistic than factual.

I invite your comments on ANY aspect of this or any subsequent entries.

theohas@hotmail.com