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Life on earth – as told by David Attenborough
Natural history is an interesting topic to study although whatching the documentaries can be quite challenging. Today I decided to buy a piece of documentary result and as a result I have struggled to stay awake for over two hours.
It is not that I do not like these documentaries and it is not that I have not slept enough but simply that by their very nature early documentaries make staying awake a challenge. We’re all familiar with that feeling. As children we would be trapped listening to people for up to 8hrs a day five days a week for weeks on end. It meant that we would have to find any method possible to stay awake.
That is not what I have learned from watching these two life on earth documentaries. What I have learned and what I have thought about is the nature of the documentary genre and how it has evolved over the past three decades.
When Cousteau and David Attenborough were making their documentaries they were exploring a new world in a new age of discovery. Technological innovation had made the move from exploration of land into the exploration of the sea. Cousteau spent hundreds of hours underwater learning about the marine world and David Attenborough created his documentaries over a decade later.
Cousteau spent hours and hours telling us about how his team were working and exploring the new frontier, showing how exciting it was. David Attenborough came along fifteen years later and spoke of a 24 year old Darwin who came to the Galapagos Islands to begin his studies which would lead to his theory of evolution many years later.
Documentary production, like all art forms has a natural progression with cross pollination between disciplines and nations. The dissertation I’m working on will explore this much further.
Facebook Disappointment
What makes a professional camera professional? Direct access to all of the functions without going through ten sub-menus simply to adjust the sound level or open up the iris. What was great about Facebook. Everything was available on sight, not hidden away in sub-menu.
They decided overnight to “simplify” the look but what they’ve done is forced me to think about the logical place for something to be and hoping I’m right. I wish they hadn’t changed something that was working so well for me.
Facebook, why change something that works so well. Why this obsession with sub-menus?
An academic fox for university
When you’re s student normal clocks no longer have any relevance to the way you live your life. Sometimes you go to sleep three hours after the sun rose and other times you have a nap at three in the afternoon. Occasionally you sleep from ten at night till 6 am. That’s extra ordinarily rare.
When you’re in halls this is particularly true. You’ve got an entire ethnic group in university that takes the university to be the same as school. They come in at 8 am and leave on the dot at 1900 hrs. That’s because they’re still at home and they live according to their parent’s cooking schedule. They love to play during the day.
Most of the people I know are of the night disposition. They will party all night and pull all-nighters to get work done rather than get up early in the morning to do things the way non-students do. It’s a great way of life. You might not see the sun in winter but in Summer there’s a chance you’ll be sitting in the sun soaking in the rays whilst office workers are slaving away.
It doesn’t matter, in three to four years most students will experience the same so it’s only a question of time.
Anyway, the point of this post is that I was leaving the library after doing some work on my dissertation when I spotted an orange fox lurking around. it was looking for food and that’s not hard to find where students have been. I thought that I should scare it off by hissing and stamping my foot but it remained oblivious. I decided to walk up the stairs and turned around. It was heading towards the turnstiles to get into university. Did I meet one of the rare academic foxes in North West London? Let’s see whether I see it at my graduation.
How many of you have had such encounters with nocturnal creatures?
Jaiku
Jaiku is a Finnish software that makes conversing with people easy. It’s an advanced form of chatroom and I love it. It works on the same principle as twitter with the added bonus of having feed reading and integration as a bonus.
If I’m going out for the day but I want people to know where I am at any given point in time I can send messages to twitter because it’s the price of a local phone call rather than international, as with Jaiku where the message is sent to Finland.
I added my blog therefore a summary of blog posts will automatically be added to my jaiku feed. I could add flickr, my video feeds and other feeds if I so desire and it should work.
On Jaiku I love how conversations can take place based around posts about what someone is doing. One person talked about only having 5 gigs left on their hard drive and a short conversation followed on from that post. Leo Laporte commented on his twitter identity being ussurped recently and this encouraged a flurry of activity.
It’s like many of the Web forums I’ve visited. People join a community and select their friends so that they get updates whenever someone posts. The difference is that there is a migration away from the desktop and laptop to the mobile phone. It’s becoming an integral part of people’s lives. Of course at the moment it’s for early adopters rather than anyone but over time when it becomes more socialy acceptable we should find a progression whereby information workers are no longer tied to their desks.
First thoughts
You know you’re a final year student when the last thing you think about before going to sleep is your dissertation. It’s also the first thing you wake up thinking of and to make matters worse you notice that a friend has joined a group called “my dissertation is driving me crazy, just to make you feel that much better.
It’s not that I’m doing particularly badly, after all, I’ve done all the research I wanted to do in relation to the topic I’m writing about and I am progressing. I just wish it wasn’t so important in relation to all the other work I’ve done. It’s over in a month. That’s when I can finally relax and enjoy the real world again.
How many university students a year write dissertations? At least thirty to fourty thousand I’d guess. How many enjoy it, probably quite a few. I enjoy it but it would be nicer if the purpose was to create more content for a website than to be assessed by a lecturer. I’m going to work on adding at least another 2000 words today, get it to five thousand words today. That’d mean I’m halfway to completion and it will be a really nice feeling.
Now it’s time to stop procrastinating and do something more productive. No holidays for anyone so close to the dissertation deadline.
The foam party
Last night I went to the SU foam party but I was so tired that I only stayed till 2 am. It lasted till three am but the energy levels felt wrong.
Dissertation feedback
Yesterday I went for some dissertation feedback and heard that some people have not yet been to see their dissertation and if these people have seen no one then I am quite surprised. The reason for which I am surprised about this is that it’s a new form of writing which involves getting a good knowledge of certain rules.
One of these rules was never written “Should”. Your dissertation is meant to be based on fact, on what has been documented. Anything within the speculative realm is worthless. You might as well take those sentences and write an article about them for pleasure.
The second rule is simplicity. If you’re writing a dissertation you’re writing for people who have never heard about the subject before. What this means is that if you use a technical term you must make sure to explain what it means and why it’s relevant. Assume your audience is off the street rather than some well-informed individual. In some ways getting someone to read your dissertation who knows nothing about the topic is great because they’ll point to you the error of your ways in assuming that everyone knows something. I’m going to have to elaborate on those points.
Language is an essential part of the writing process. Did you mean channels or outlets? Are you speaking about perceptions or opinions and do you know the difference. Remember that words are the only method by which to get your point across. If you use a word make sure that it is used in the right context. If you don’t you may confuse your reader but more importantly, you may set out that you are going to do one thing but due to an error in language you’re doing something which does not link directly to this.
Overall dissertation writing should be a pleasure to write and to read. It’s about taking a subject that you’re really interested in and sharing it with your audience. Over time it comes naturally but if you’re like me it’s a question of experience.
Dziga Vertov, the Kino Glaz and Web 2.0
How many of you have a digital photo camera and how many of you have uploaded pictures you’ve taken to the web? How many of you have browsed through thousand of stranger’s photographs?
I was in a lecture a few days ago and we were discussing jennycam and how it was something new, something that would lead to BigBrother. Apparently she was creating something new, something that had never thought of before.
That is only partially true and here’s the reason why.
Dziga Vertov lived in Russia at the beginning of the last century and at the time he worked in radio. His name, Dziga Vertov translated means spinning top. He began his work as a revolutionary when Lenin was still around. He was known for the programs he created. Within a short of time, he progressed onto the Agit trains and into film. The Agit trains were developed to carry information around the Soviet Union, in order to make sure that people all around this vast country would have a sense of belonging.
He developed a theory which was based around the Kino Glaz, the all-seeing eye, Kino is cinema, glaz, is glass. In other words the cinema glass. The idea which he developed, the vision he had was to get the video cameras everywhere and capture life unawares as he called them. In other words, he wanted to film ordinary people going about their ordinary lives without them acting for the camera.
This was a revolutionary concept that got him labeled by Sergei Eisenstein as a”film hooligan”. Keep in time Eisenstein’s famous sequences. Massive shadows on walls, vast skies, and highly staged video sequences. He created the theorie du montage(theory of construction – my translation) after all. In other words, he believed everything was staged.
If you’ve heard of “The Man With the Movie Camera” then you have seen “an experiment in six reels”. What Dziga Vertov did pre 1929 was do what Jean Rouch would do with André Coutant’s handheld cameras almost half a decade later.
What Dziga Vertov did first showed the theatre room, the seats animated to go down, the arc light to be set to produce a bright spark, and for the film to begin. He then proceeded to show the city waking up and continued from there. He juxtaposed the shots of the eyelids fluttering and the shutters, he got a person waking up from a bench and the city to start it’ daily activities. He was in effect not using narration in any strict sense of the term. It was nothing more than a collection of shots.
Aside from the shots, he showed his wife editing frame. It begins with nothing more than one frame, then a strip, then a person looking at one shot, another and we see it being assembled into a sequence. We see the camera move into a glass, move of its own accord, and more.
He was playing and he was setting the stage for something that would become increasingly important over time. Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will uses hundreds of cameras given to the audience to document the events (and spent three years editing the material) whilst the European Broadcasting Union had the first International broadcast in 1956. It was a moment in life seen from various capital cities in Europe. Each national audience could see that of many other countries. Vertov’s vision has just expanded.
As the technology evolved so people began to film everyday life, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, DV, and digital. They’re all mediums that allow for the capturing of life unawares. It’s the all-seeing eye. In the past five years, there’s been an explosion. Everyone has a digital camera, whether a crappy phone camera or a 12megapixel single-lens reflex. People are uploading these images to Flickr, to Zoomr, to Facebook. Everywhere. As a result of The kino glaz, all-seeing eye Vertov talked about is now mature.
The most recent event though has to be justin.tv, a San Franciscan who has decided to document his everyday life with a camera strapped to his head. No longer is the apartment enough. Now the world is seeing the daily life of a San Franciscan. Remember timecode? It’s like that but one person and live. There is no editing, no staging. I must admit there are some pranksters.
I listened to an interview he did for television where he spoke of people calling in a bust on his apartment, ordering pizza for him, and more. Quite amusing, far better than big brother.
To conclude I think that we’ve come to the All-seeing eye that Dziga Vertov was talking about almost a century ago and I find that it’s great. I love the idea that every aspect of life is being documented extensively.