Category: Study Notes

Cutting Room Floor

The biohacking video I’ve been making for film class is finished.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzW_2B5Ng4I]

Some observations for anyone making a film…

1 — I fully understood the importance of filming cutaways, and filmed lots of them. However, there was a disparity between the kind of footage I filmed (background details, close-ups of equipment) and the footage I actually needed when I was editing (people details, action-related close-ups). So cutaways should be collected as part of a specific vision of how you want the shot to look.

2 — I read online that it’s best to leave colour correction until near the end, but I wish I did it earlier. Many of my clips were heavily fragmented, and although I was able to block paste corrections in, it was a struggle to get consistency across the footage. It was still a major improvement though, a lot of the original lab footage was too dark and too green.

3 — I filmed 180+ minutes and used 12 minutes in the final version. That’s a lot of telescoping, and I found the way to get the ball rolling was to build the intro sequence. This allowed me to experiment with a few different styles. My initial hope had been to build the film around a biology/biopunk aesthetic, where text would almost “grow” onto the screen, plant-like, then shrivel away. However, the mockup looked cheap and powerpointy, so instead I chose a more cyberpunk, hacker aesthetic, with rave music, red dot matrix font, and greyscale transitions. That got me enthusiastic about the film, and from there I was able to quickly build a first draft.

4 — Cutting is painful, especially when you’ve put time into editing something and it just doesn’t work.

5 — There are very different types of feedback, and they’re useful in different ways. The first feedback I had was mainly from people who had been following my progress with the film from the outset. That was great for technical tweaking and ironing out style issues. I then showed it to people familiar with the biology, and they were able to confirm the science was sound. Finally I sought the opinions of people who had no idea what the film was about, and weren’t necessarily experts in molecular biology (ie I showed my family). It was a really rich seam of feedback, they picked up on narrative gaps that other viewers had been able to ignore because of their familiarity with the subject.

Coding Freedom — Gabriella Coleman

In the spirit of the movement it describes, I am “open sourcing” my reading notes on Gabriella Coleman’s excellent book Coding Freedom, an anthropological study of the Debian community and the wider software ecosystem in which it operates.  I’ll also leave the Google Docs version open for anyone in case anyone might find it useful.

You can read the book itself here, in PDF format.  Coleman generously released it under Creative Commons licence BY-NC-ND, but those who can afford to should consider thanking her by buying it! Continue reading “Coding Freedom — Gabriella Coleman”

Pierre Bourdieu — Distinction (Part I)

A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

In this book Bourdieu argues that cultural choice, or taste, is closely related to social position. The thesis is built on a series of surveys and interviews conducted in France in 1963 and 1967-68, but as I read it, everything still feels relevant to the 2012 Anglosphere.

Firstly, a definition of terms. Bourdieu puts all domains of culture on a spectrum, from the “legitimate” to the “personal”. The legitimate domains relate to art and what we usually call “high culture”. The personal domains involve decisions which have a functional element, and are usually more closely related to domestic life, such as food, furnishings, and clothing. I’ve plotted these domains on a rainbow graph, to demonstrate that there is some element of progression between them, but there are qualitative and structural differences between the different domains. On the y-axis I’ve included a simple lower-to-higher continuum relating to status and class, although this should be taken as an initial postulation. As we see later the reality is far more nuanced (specifically, the tastes of the avant-garde top rung on the cultural ladder tend to correlate with the disenfranchised bottom rung). Continue reading “Pierre Bourdieu — Distinction (Part I)”