An Exercise in Directing - 2014 Juliet: Women, Sex and Judgment

Link of Film to be added after editing! Please return to watch. 

For my final project for Theater 20: Introduction to Performance project under the instruction of UCLA's Brendan Hartnett I worked with 3 of the girls in the class: Sharmini Thiagarajan, Sami Zarett, SangEun Park (Ann), along with Kasia Ratajczak who I know through UCLA's James Bridges Theater and is majoring in English. We explored the topic of female sexuality, using Romeo and Juliet as a premise to explore female and male expectations of orgasm when engaged in a romantic situation, females response to asserting herself sexually, the different world views of women in relation to their sexuality and the dynamic of female friend groups and roommates. Each of the characters has a very specific world-view and interacts with each of the other characters in a specific way, which was fun to watch as it arose naturally once the actresses had stepped into the psyches of their characters and began reacting naturally, prompted by how they felt their characters would to the situations.

Personally I was motivated to do this project because it seemed a good opportunity to explore  the social ramifications surrounding women’s sexual development, as well as to try to sift through some of the reasoning behind those expectations. It was ultimately an attempt to get the audience to refocus on the freedom a woman has to decide for herself what she would like to do; by presenting as many perspectives as we could portray within 5 minutes. Without rejecting any one point of view, we created characters who fulfilled 3 prevalent attitudes towards female sexuality and allowed for the neutral participant Jamie to consider as many options on how to act as possible and choosing the one that best suited the her.  Ultimately she choses to pursue reciprocal orgasm by being sexually assertive, but she doesn’t discredit any of the other girls sexual positions. 

            During preproduction, once the script was completed and we were sifting through developing the characters, it helped me to keep in mind what was taught to us in our theater class. We needed to figure out the goals of each of the characters in the scene and what actions were taking place between them as they dealt with the material being expressed in their dialogue. We needed to give them actions that expressed their internal processes and to play with blocking to find which ways we could accentuate the emotional build up during the story in a way that felt natural, not only to the audience but to the actresses, so that they could build their own internal worlds with external support.

Kasia’s character Mona is a highly sexual, uninhibited and engaging character. She doesn’t keep within her comfort zone and she pushes the other girls to step outside of theirs as well, at times to the point of aggressiveness. She is a liberating influence and each of the other characters react to her personality in their own way. She is the story's antagonist in a way, in Mona’s attempts to try to empower the other girls to assert their passions and desires, she pushes against them. We gave her the activity of sitting on the table and leaning over it when imparting her sexual wisdom to Jamie. The table became an icon for a second body, which Mona is sexually engaging with and illustrating example through.

Sami’s character Britney is Mona’s counter balance and reacts defensively to her, due to her feelings of being morally threatened by Mona's sacrilegious attitude towards the sanctity of sex. She holds tight to the idea of eternal and monogomous love. With Sami’s performance the wounds that have been inflicted upon her character by others, due to her idealistic nature, really came through. We gave her actions to express her character; she drinks laxative tea and plays with her gold bracelet instead of making eye contact and engaging with the other girls while speaking to them. She is hiding behind her mask of perfection, her adherence to social norms of what the good life is, is alluded to standing between her finding out what would actually make her feel happy and free.

Sharmini’s character Jamie is the Juliet of our story, bringing all these female perspectives out of the wood-works. In our tale she is a loving character who accepts the various impassioned opinions of the other characters with open consideration and acceptance. She does not react to any opinion in agreeance or rejection, but rather applies their notions to her own situation, finding what suits and feels true to her and what doesn’t. For her character it was important that she remained neutral and open, she is the character in which the audience experiences the situation. She was given the activity of maintaining connectiveness to whatever woman was speaking through eye contact and attention. She does not change her facial expressions or voice at any time to convey any sort of judgement towards any of the perspectives being expressed, she is non judgmental and in the end she gets what she wants. 

Ann is the sage of our story, the character that brings a level of rationality and wisdom to the conflict. She is alone on the couch and her activity is studying, to establish her interest in knowledge and understanding. Her character is one with the dynamic of women, but also she is outside of it. She offers her input into the conversation like a word bubble of a fortune cookie and then steps out again. Only twice is her input responded to, once to say that she is right from Britney and once to say “well I’m no Juliet” from Jamie. Even then it is like the dialogue being spoken by Ann could have just as well been in the women’s head, since even when they respond to it they are not engaging with her.

We had three meetings where the script was developed, during this time the actresses read over their lines and the author Kasia took into consideration their execution and feedback so that we could better trim the excess verbiage and colloquialize the dialogue, tailoring it to the unique personalities of the characters. This was very helpful when it came to us shooting it, because it kept each character from falling into a mirror of the others, which is something that was happening during the first draft of the script when the girls were rehearsing together. Their energy would transfer and soon it was difficult to decipher one character’s motivations and attitude from the other. Line readings also helped girls maintain character mergence  because they had to work alone and did not have the influence of any of the actresses. 

We ran through the entire piece several times in wide shots to cover where they were moving in the space and to get them comfortable with their performances. It was difficult because they were not all off book, which was my fault for not stressing it as important, but as long as we had a rough estimate of when things where happening and where we were able to go into the closer coverage. I have not begun the editing process yet, so I am not sure how much I will be able to get away with in this type of shooting style, but it will be a learning experience. Thank goodness for Chelsi Johnston stepping in as AC and her notes to keep me on track. For Jamie and Kasia’s parts, because it was so dependent upon each of them reacting to the other, we did cross coverage and had the girls go through their entire interaction.

For Ann and Sami whose characters are more isolated less interactive personalities, we gave them line readings. Ann was especially a challenge because of our language barrier, she is a student from Korea studying at UCLA for the summer. But ultimately her accent and composure when using the English language, allowed for her character to maintain an air of aloofness and foreignness for American audiences. Of course in the American culture, her asian influence lended itself to an association of eastern wisdom and orientalism. Sami developed on her own a very deep and soulful take on her character and maintained it in a genuine performance, which is very difficult to get out of non-actors when they attempt a dramatic piece. Of course Sami is not a non-actor and her level of professionalism stood out to all of the members of our film crew.

The process of this project was much more focused on performance than I have had experience with in my other projects. Unfortunately I had to spend a good amount of time managing the cameras, because we had very little time to do preproduction, but thanks to the two camera men Marcus Chan and AndrewRosenstein's ability to go with the flow and get the best they could get, we got away with it. Also thanks to Priscila Alegria Nunez and a  visit from our instructor who graciously took over as sound mixer, we have quality audio for the project. Because the other actresses and I went through the Theater 20 course together, we had developed a understanding and language that allowed us to go further and develop better our work together. The experience not only provided me with new useful tools to work with actors, but also a deeper understanding of the demands and stress an actor must learn to overcome to excel at their craft.

TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT: INSTITUTION, IMAGE, IDEOLOGY (a reaction)

The Exhibit:

Security.

Validation.

Support. 

Sympathy. 

Forgiveness.

Compassion.

Justification.

Causality. 

Justification.

Predictability. 

Justification.

Loyalty.

Justification.

Spectacle.

Justification.

Intrigue.

Justification.

Pleasure.

 Justification.

Redundancy.

Justification.

Sensuality.

Justification.

Strength.

Justification.

Change.

Justification.

Neutrality.




Justification.

Possession.

Justification.

Civility. 

Justification.

Cruelty.



Justification.

Routine.

And a Response:

There were a lot of fucking words.

She really likes me. Decided who I was and that I was worth her time. Decided who I was and her definition she liked. She likes what I offer. Liked what I have to offer.

Justification. 

Entertainment. 

Justification.  

Jack lived in a burlap sack and loved his life.

The Internet: Everyone’s Neighborhood – “The Wilderness Downtown” through the Lens of Graphic Novels

Canadian rock band Arcade Fire has pioneered the collaborative relationship between musicians and digital interactive media with their hypertext experiences, experiments in the combination of music and visuals using an internet platform. Their collaboration with Google Chrome created the interactive experience “TheWilderness Downtown” (TWD) described by website Mashable as utilizing “hyper text story telling of old. ” Using Scott McCloud’s analysis of the structures and techniques of a medium truly of old (with a three thousand year history), specifically those presented in his textbook “Understanding Comics, The Invisible Art”, this essay will translate Scott McCloud’s methodologies of comic book analysis over to digital media and use them to dissect TWD. 

This essay will translate: 

the structures and techniques mentioned by McCloud, with relation to Comics - 

presented time, 

panels 

sequential art 

into, with relation to Interactive Digital Media -

rhythmic editing, 

browser windows 

narratively linear visuals 

This will enable a more comprehensive understanding of what traditional techniques are being modernized in The Wilderness Downtown’s digital construction. Before going directly into analysis of TWD it is important to know how TWD came into being and to what purpose, as well as the background of Scott McCloud and his research. This will provide the context of this essay’s understanding of the mediums of graphic and digital literature. Examples will be excerpted from the experience of TWD, providing specific insights into how it creates an affective digital experience for its audience.

The Wilderness Downtown was created through the collaboration of experts in various entertainment mediums, which adds to its multidisciplinary elements. Established music video creator and interactive video artist Chris Milk directed the video; he has worked with notable musicians Kanye West, Green Day, Johnny Cash, Gnarls Barkley, The ChemicalBrothers, John Mellencamp, Courtney Love, and Modest Mouse. The creation also involved Google Creative Lab and Arcade Fire, as well as supported by production companies Radical Media and B-Reel. By taking traditional liner story telling and adapting it to the medium of digital media, TWD is both inherently familiar and refreshingly new.

Google Chrome produced and provided funding for the experiment “The Wilderness Downtown” and Google Creative Lab lead by Aaron Koblin coded the project in HTML5; an Internet coding language developed “in attempts to solve issues found in previous iterations of HTML and addresses the needs of Web Applications, an area previously not adequately covered by HTML." This experiment was a commercial endeavor to promote Google Chrome’s browser capabilities and incorporate Google Maps. Koblin describes the motivation behind the project’s creation as “to make something data driven and customisable, but at the same time incredibly personal to each individual user” (TheFWA).

Scott McCloud, whose work is the other component of this essay, is a scholar who with the help of an avatar based on himself enters the world of “sequential art” (also known as comic books, graphic novels, ect.), producing illustrated textbooks analyzing graphic novels. He points out how the graphic novel’s form is unique as a medium and champions the graphic novel’s struggle to be acknowledged as an art form worthy of academic research and inclusion in formal education. In search of recognition the culturally dominant mediums painting, music, theater, film and literature have received; comic books and digital media are vying for a position in academia alongside them. Their newness and commonality can attribute to some of the reasoning behind scholars to pass them by. But McCloud sets out to rectify this in the case of comic books, as this essay would hope to add to the scholarly body of research on digital literature.

Scott McCloud begins his textbook “Understanding Comics, The Invisible Art” by attempting to define comics and in his efforts parallel similar struggles to define digital media. He suggests that we need to separate content from form, stating “the artform “the medium” (. . . is the message, this essay references to link the digital media article “The Medium is theMessage” to Scott McCloud’s essay) known as comics is a vessel which can hold any number of ideas and images” (6). Attempts to define digital literature have also been recently been made by scholars. An example of this is from UCLA course - Digital Literature: Multimedia Narrative, Poetics, Aesthetics, where a wiki glossary of terms has been complied by students of the course, so that it can be accessed by digital literature scholars and used to more precisely communicate on digital media.

McCloud brings up the same limitations of audience interaction with comic books and other traditional mediums of entertainment that inspired Koblin to work on TWD, “The idea that the reader might choose a direction is still considered exotic. This may, in part, be the influence of other media like film and television where viewer choice has not generally been feasible” (105). The concept that reader could chose the pattern with which to read the story is played with interactive digital media arrangement of it’s media and the route at which the interactee choses to navigate it. This is also experimented with in some graphic novel’s arrangement of their panels and text that lend themselves to be read in different patterns, such as horizontally or vertically.

McCloud ultimately comes to define comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer. . . sequential art” (99). He also brings up that the difference between animation and comics as sequential art is that animation does not have special juxtapositions as comics do. This essay using the same line of reason as McCloud, claims that The Wilderness Downtown is considered digital literature rather than simply a music video due to its juxtaposed elements and the audience’s process of meaning finding. The claim being made is that these mediums offer a more subjective, personalized experience due to their juxtapositions. ­­­

We will begin the study of these juxtapositions by taking a look at visually presented temporal progression and how that is accomplished. The Wilderness Downtown uses rhythm of editing, the configuration of browser windows timed to the pace of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used to Wait”. Comics use the size of their illustrated panels and the spaces between them to convey a sense of the progression of time. It is explained that the eye takes a certain amount of time to “read” a sequence of illustrations, which is altered based on the elements it is reading. The varied progression of reading/interpretation caused by how the creator chooses to arrange their visuals changes the experience of the piece for its audience.

The format of The Wilderness Downtown and comic books utilize space and juxtaposition between their respective browser windows and panels in a manner that leaves more room for interpretation and inference on behalf of the audience. Rather than the progression of frames in traditional film, which leaves only milliseconds for the mind to connect images into movement and nothing left for the imagination, digital media and graphic novels allow more of a gap for the audience to flex their creativity within. This is a major factor in contributing to these mediums effectiveness in creating a personalized experience.

An example from McCloud, is shown as one large photograph encapsulating many events between characters taking place at the same time. That same photograph is then broken into separate panels and now conveys a different sense of the progression of time. Speed can be increased or decreased by the space between each illustration. In one large picture there is still the progression of the eye from left to right, this is another sort of reading of the image, nun the less the image is still understood as one moment. As extended panels extend perceived time in comics, extended edits extend perceived time in video. WDT also plays with the progression of time when it takes one large browser window and breaks it down into multiple browser windows revealed in differing intervals in rhythm to the song.

The study of the visual inference is more relevant when a step back is taken from these most basic compositional elements and we continue onto the next level of construction where the design of the medium’s structures physical design can be considered. “Panel shapes vary considerably though, and while differences of shape don’t affect the specific “meanings” of those panels vis-à-vis time, they can affect the reading experience” (99). Moving into McCloud’s description of a specific element of comic books “panels” (previously paralleled conceptually with the frames of a film) are used to show a single frozen moment in time. Examination of this next level will link the panels of a comic to The Wilderness Downtown’s configuration of its browser windows.

In comics “between these frozen moments – between the panels – our minds fill in the intervening movements creating the illusion of time and motion,” it is a medium where the story relies less on inference than the novel but more than the film. Frames in film trick the mind into interpreting a progression of static images as a single moment in time with movement, on this phenomenon Thomas Edison said that 46 frames per second was the minimum need by the visual cortex to perceive continuous movement and that “anything less will strain the eye"(Frame Rate). Panel’s offer a more subjective experience due to their static nature, TWD is somewhere in the middle of the two where it presents panels of visuals that are composed of frames creating motion.

Through inference The Wilderness Downtown uses the juxtaposition of its browser windows to link scenes of your neighborhood (accessed through GoogleMaps when you provide the zip code of the neighborhood you grew up into the website) with an unidentified running character. This conveys a manifestation of a world inside the audience member’s mind where the multiple visuals being show on the screen are taking place in the same spatial dimension. McCloud offers, “The composition of the picture is joined by the composition of change, the composition of drama—and the composition of memory” (115). This is an example of a new way of implementing the Kuleshov effect, a concept documented by the study of audience members who were shown the same person with the same facial expression and then different images after, where in each pairing of photographs the audience claimed the character was making a different expression based on the second image.

This brings us to the inferred linear narrative progression of the visuals. Meaning finding on behalf of the audience creates the idea that there is a narrative to the images being juxtaposed together. As the interactee progresses through their experience in TWD everything is taking place in the present, the reveal of new visual information McCloud explains “in Comics as in Film “Real Life” is always now”(95). One explanation he offers to this method of meaning-finding is that “Comic readers are conditioned by other media and the “real time” of everyday life to expect a very linear progression” (106). For example the running character goes down streets with no geographical markers or distinguishable assets, offering no rational link between themselves and the images of your neighborhood and still it is interpreted this way.

There a timeless quality to the images of the running man who is not recognizably anchored to a time or place, this is similar to borderless panels, which McCloud explains, “bleed” into their proceeding panels. “When the content of a silent panel offers no clues as to its duration it can also produce a sense of timelessness. Because of its unresolved nature such a panel may linger in the reader’s mind. And its presence may be felt in the panels which follow it” (102). There are no logical links to comprehend why we make correlations between the juxtapositions of these scenes, yet by understanding the methods of the minds meaning-finding we are able to understand how this video is effective for the audience.

The running character that offers no sense of limit bleeds the scenes of your neighborhood into its plane of reality and blends you with them. This theme of audience identification, which begins with the running character, ends with the interactee being prompted to “Write a letter to your younger self” at the end of the experience, ending the nostalgia inducing Google Maps romp through your past. The experience has brought us through to it's completion and we now can add to the for other's by providing our letter to other interactee's to read. The process began with inference, was structured through browser panels and was solidified by satisfying the innately desired linear narrative progression. We have been moved into the song as a creator/participant and left with the experience bleeding into the memories of our past, the ultimate possibility of interactive digital media. 

Work Cited

"Frame Rate." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Mar. 2014. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

"Html5.org." — HTML Revisited. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

http://html5.org

"Innovation through Storytelling & Technology." B-Reel. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

http://www.b-reel.com

"Arcade Fire’s Experimental New Video Shows What's Possible with HTML5." Mashable. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

http://mashable.com/2010/08/30/arcade-fires-chrome-video/

"CHRIS MILK." BIO -. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

http://milk.co

"RadicalMediaâ¢." @radical.media. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

http://www.radicalmedia.com/usa

"TheFWA - The Story Behind... The Wilderness Downtown." TheFWA - The Story Behind... The Wilderness Downtown. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

http://www.thefwa.com/article/the-making-of-the-wilderness-downtown

"The Wilderness Downtown." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Mar. 2014. Web. 18 Mar. 2014.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wilderness_Downtown