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Barbeque Sunrise – A Student excentricity.

Byrichard

There are many things I have done in the past but having a barbeque at five am whilst the birds are tweeting and the sun is rising is not within my normal realm of experiences. It was nice, felt more like the end of a festival night than anything else.

The party took place at a friend’s place along the Metropolitan line. We arrived at about 7 pm and that moment everything about the party was normal, all the usual features, barbeques, people, drinks and more. Not that many people ate much at the beginning of the night, preferring to socialise instead.

At the end of the night when most people were responsibly going to bed we decided to have a barbeque. It was a mission at first. We had to find out how to open the garden door. It had been locked therefore we could not go out through one door and had to get another one. After this, we had to struggle to find the fire lighting blocks. Finally, we lit the blocks and now it was time to wait for the fire to be warm enough.

By this point, the birds were tweeting more and more excitedly as the sun was rising. As the blue of the sky started to appear our fire was warm enough for the steaks. It took a little time to cook with improvised tools. The food was finally ready and those steaks were good. It doesn’t end there

A popular phrase was “there’s plenty of meat left in the fridge”, resulting in some turkey being fetched and cooked. The pieces were thicker so aluminium helped speed up the cooking process Once we had eaten this it was time for bed for my friends whilst I decided to go home on the tube.

There was just one problem, the tube station was closed and there was no indication of when it’d open. You can imagine my joy at the thought of waiting for them to open. It didn’t matter though, I walked back. It was actually a nice walk. No one in the streets except the occasional post worker. The air was nice, felt like a proper summer morning.

Finally, I was home, having no special need to go to sleep quite yet I stayed up for a little longer. By around 8 am I was asleep. It had been an interesting night.

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The Ten Thousand Word Project

Byrichard

Yesterday I woke up and within half an hour started working on my dissertation. For a few minutes, I added one or two more paragraphs of text before going on a search for interviews. I looked up Cousteau and arrived at the INA page. The INA is the french video archive online.

It’s there that I found a quote from Jacques Yves Cousteau during the 1956 Cannes Film festival where he was talking about his documentaries. There are three elements that are perfect for the purpose of my dissertation therefore I am happy to have found that resource. It’s made me feel more relaxed.

Add to this the fact that I’m up to 5800 words and you’ll understand that this current state of affairs is quite pleasant. I need to write almost four thousand more words by Sunday to be on track with my own project. We’ll see whether I achieve this goal.

I have heard from a friend that some idiots are getting so stressed about the dissertation that they going to doctors to get medication to calm them down and this goes against all logic. If your dissertation is stressing you then there’s one key element that will calm you down: Do your work!! Why are the doctors giving people drugs to calm them down when it’s a psychological problem because they’re too idiotic to relax in a logical way. The doctors are stupid for giving the medication and those taking drugs are idiots for taking them.

Rather than give people drugs why not give them time management lessons instead. That’s the real issue.

Anyway, my dissertation is going well and if I reach my target of 10,000 words by Sunday evening then I will have three weeks of revision to go through. I will see whether I can meet my module leader for one last time as soon as the April Holidays are finished to make sure that the content is correct. I want to do well so I might as well put in as much time as I can to get it finished on time and to the highest standard possible.

That’s why I’m procrastinating through the process of blogging 😉

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Life on earth – as told by David Attenborough

Byrichard

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.

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An academic fox for university

Byrichard

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?

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First thoughts

Byrichard

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.

Dissertation feedback

Byrichard

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.

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Dziga Vertov, the Kino Glaz and Web 2.0

Byrichard

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.

The advantage of being 25

Byrichard

The advantage of being a 25-year-old student is the following. You’ve been insulted, you’ve been threatened, you’ve been in trouble, you’ve shown that you’re an honourable person and more.

Tonight there was a party in my flat and I asked for the mess to be cleaned up and it has been. For such a request I’ve been labeled a fucking prick. If only it were true. That’s part of life. You make demands and get abuse for the demands. I’ve had my door banged  on at least twice in the past half hour to an hour but frankly, I don’t care. I’m not going to lodge a complaint. I just want responsibility for parties to sink through.

Anyway, goodnight, and see you tomorrow.