Today’s lab is all about brainstorming for our major K-films. Number one problem: I am the only member of my group in the lab. OK, what do I do?
So, last week, I joined my group after the other two members had already decided they wanted to use the prompt “Life is…” and that they wanted to vaguely show a progression, like have videos of babies and kids and so on. I took these ideas and formulated them into a plan for a narrative-ish structure. Daniel, in the assessment review session this morning, talked about his first K-film and his attempt to make it narrative-ish by using POCs in a progression, a series of numbers. I have attempted the same sort of thing but the POCs will be a bit different.
Seth played devil’s advocate just now to try to understand my concept. I explained that I was trying to structure the major work with the limitations I was given by my group. There will be four themes — baby, child, teen and adult — and each of those themes will have a varying number of videos with half as many POCs. So, for example, there will be 8 ‘baby’ videos with 4 POCs. ‘Child’ has 12 videos, 6 POCs. There are two POCs between ‘baby’ and ‘child’ that will be the same, so that they can cross over. ‘Teen’ has 18 videos, 9 POCs. There are three POCs between ‘child’ and ‘teen’ that will be the same, so that they can cross over. But ‘teen’ and ‘baby’ have no common POCs so can never directly cross over. ‘Adult’ has 22 videos with 11 POCs. There are four POCs between ‘teen’ and ‘adult’ that are the same, so they can cross over. But ‘adult’ and ‘child’ and ‘adult’ and ‘baby’ have no common POCs so can never directly cross over. In this way, the K-film is vaguely filtering from ‘baby’ to ‘adult’ but with a few back and forths.
Does this make sense?
The reason that I want to stick with this idea and make all of the videos relate to either ‘baby,’ ‘child,’ ‘teen,’ or ‘adult’ is because it can only go one of two ways: a) we will succeed in making a narrative-ish structured K-film, or b) we will not. And since our chosen essay prompt is, “A K-film is not very good at making stories with clear direction, what Barthes would describe as ‘work,’ but is ideal for making videos that make visible Barthes’ idea of ‘text,’” we will easily be able to write an essay either agreeing with this statement or refuting it.
So there will be 60 videos about what “Life is…” and hopefully they will relate to experiences had by babies, children, teens and adults — people in various stages of life. I don’t believe we need to literally show babies in our videos. There are other ways of conveying these ideas than just filming a baby or a child straight up. And if we can make videos that convey these ideas of life stages and the experiences that are unique to them or that crossover with other life stages, we can hopefully put them together into a holistic K-film. And if we fail, we can talk about why that happened.
Tags: Assessment, brainstorming, Korsakow, lab, narrative, Videos