Home movies|modern memories

HOME MOVIES: REEL TIME

Home movies have escaped the domestic confines of family gatherings, lounge-room walls and dark cupboards, to enjoy a renaissance within contemporary, image-saturated society. Why this relatively recent shift in attitude and representation of historical home movie footage within media production and archival practice? I’m interested in exploring how home movie footage and aesthetics have been incorporated into Australian screen practice, particularly documentary film and screen-based art, since 1998. By focusing on several case studies and examples of work, I want to see who is telling stories; how they are inserting home movies back into public history and what are the social implications.

That’s it…a four-line abstract that sums up what I hope to achieve this year when exploring home movies in contemporary life. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. While I don’t presume ‘the rest will be easy’, I do feel that now I have this statement, things will fall into place a lot easier.

Am still here

I’ve just spent a couple of hours getting up-to-speed on what everyone’s doing and thinking in ‘Labsome-land’. What a busy bunch! Reading most of the blogs kind’ve assuages my guilt about not actually writing anything in my own blog. Maybe next week…

Honours – what’s it all about

I’m still working on the ‘what I hope to achieve’ concept in Honours.  I’ve always thought of it as ‘the icing on the Undergraduate degree cake’.   Surely I can come up with  three little reasons?

1. To refine and enhance my research skills.  Although I really like making films, I’m slightly addicted to learning and discovery, so want to do it proper-like!
2. I want to consolidate all I learnt in my Undergrad degree and produce a project or thesis that has a place in the ‘real world’.  In a nutshell, I’m keen to align myself with an existing project or do something that’s useful to industry (possibly with The National Film and Sound Archive?)
3. I want closure.  Ooh yes…and become more tech savvy.

Research

What do I think it is? It’s discovering and learning about new things; or a tool that enables me to work out how to do things I already know…better, or faster, or more thoroughly. It’s something that I enjoy, but my methodology can do with some refining, as I find it frustrating when I get ‘bogged down’ in research that leads nowhere.

Week One

First week of Uni out of the way and things seem to be ticking over nicely.  The biggest impression of Honours (so far) is the people undertaking it.  It feels a definite step-up from undergraduate years and I like the idea of tapping into knowledge from this elevated, intellectual playing field.