◡◶▿ ROTT06 | Metafabric
🧷 How to cope with ruptures in your movie's visual membrane without getting sucked into the beyond. | Rotting the Image Week 06
Unfound Peoples Videotechnic (UPV) is a roaming absurdist film school.
You’ve found us amidst a weekly program of micro-essays on the ‘odour of a film’s look’: how to creatively mis-use cinematography and all your other tools to give your images life and, inevitably, death.
Welcome back, folks. And welcome to the new folks, too! Please sit nice and comfortably. Today, we’re going to talk about the fabrics of your film.
But first, a glance back at last week’s lesson on the thingness of a movie. We learned how:
Hollis Frampton and Peter Kubelka approached the idea of the movie as 'an object’ from opposite ends of the filmmaking process.
The weight, the metaphysical weight, and the smell of a movie have changed over the years, along with its packaging.
Today, a movie is a flighty and baseless thing - so the cinematographer might consider anchoring it visually.
And how the filmmaker can interrogate their project in advance before calibrating its ‘thingness’ through the creative choices she makes.
Remember all that? Great! In today’s filmmaking lesson, we will cover:
🧺 How to choose fabrics for your movie’s various visual elements.
💔 How ruptures in these fabrics add points of communication between the movie and the audience.
🖥️ How your movie’s visuals constitute a strange and marvellous membrane.
⚒️ How to mine the visual crust for its tremendous expressive potential.
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
It’s super-helpful when you forward these emails to your colleagues and other creative and/or engaged acquaintances. Or post the links across your favourite forums and networks. UPV is a weird film school, and we only grow by word of (weird) mouth.
Thank you! Let’s get started.
Fabrics
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept appears elsewhere in this module.
The filmmaker chooses fabrics for her movie.
Fabrics for the image surface up front.
And for the people, places, and things of the image volume behind.
She chooses fabrics that will be capable of holding the movie’s components:
The film stock or ‘digital chip’ should be capable of exposing all that needs to be exposed.
The sets should reliably support the weight of the props and allow the proper passage of light and atmospheric conditions and effects.
Most likely, each room, each false exterior, will be a salad of craft and construction materials.
On choosing a flavour of lighting, she arranges a sensible scheme for its delivery.
A location is chosen which will complement the actors.
Actors are chosen for their capability to wear the requisite costumes and emotions.
But the fabrics of a movie should also support or even participate in expressing meaning or feeling or whatever the filmmaker means to express.
Form. Function. And conductivity.
Inter-diegetic ruptures
The filmmaker chooses fabrics↑ for her movie.
Fabric of recording material, light, person, thing, place. Fabrics for strength; fabrics for their fragility. She chooses a location for the properties of its crust. Fabrics with certain characteristics. Fabrics of a certain quality or a certain crapness.
The filmmaker’s choice and treatment of surface and inner materials contribute to the ‘odour’ of her film’s look. So she chooses them very carefully.
But, since a movie is made of so many fabrics, it is likely to suffer from ruptures, stretches, and bobbles:
Digital glitches, chemical splodges, specks and stains, temporal stutters (mostly of the image surface).
Wobbles, cracks, frayed edges, and unfinished corners (of the props, set, location, or actors).
These ruptures may appear at any point during pre-production, shooting, editing, or exhibition. And particularly once the movie has been archived.
The splodge, the bobble, or the crack is a visual error. A rupture of this sort occurs due to circumstances outside of the movie’s universe. So, at its start, it is non-diegetic.1
But these ruptures do not stay non-diegetic. Such a rupture allows new meaning or feeling to leak through from where it was hidden beneath the fabric. And to flow between the world of the characters and that of the audience. At this point, it becomes sensible to consider the rupture to be inter-diegetic. It reaches between worlds.
But more: for better or worse, such a rupture draws attention to the fabric of the ruptured element. And, perhaps, the materiality of the whole project.
At this point, it becomes sensible to consider the material that has ruptured to be a meta-fabric:
A material whose properties, whose inevitable decay, reveal the closeness of the movie universe and the audience universe.
A material whose properties can’t help but reveal the beyond-place of the movie’s metaphysics and mediaphysics2.
A material that belongs to both worlds and neither world, drawing resources from across realities.
Almost as though the filmmaker had this in mind all along. Almost as though that helped her choose all those fabrics!
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Next week’s format
Ok. Next week, we’ll talk a bit about format. Great! Have a great week.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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The ‘diegesis’ is the expression of a film story’s world. Diegetic expression includes everything the audience sees and hears that originates from the film’s physical universe. Everything that happens on the far side of the screen. We call any sound, object, or atmospheric condition that occurs within the story’s world ‘diegetic.’
However, the audience might not think too hard about the source of the rupture. They might just enjoy the unexpected resonance of a meaningful flaw in the image. Or they might tut and grumble that they’ve paid for damaged goods!
Mediaphysics:
The effect of real-world media materials, grammars, and ecosystems on the lives and bodies of the pretend characters.
Media as turbulent channel between the concrete world and the collected image volumes.