◡◶▿ Autumn term: Paid subscriptions + Rotting the Image
◡◶▿ Autumn term: Paid subscriptions + Rotting the Image
🎁 Two big announcements, two free gifts, and a glance back at our noisy summer.
Unfound Peoples Videotechnic (UPV) is a roaming absurdist film school. Each Monday, throughout term, email subscribers receive one or more micro-essays offering new and wrong ways to look at filmmaking. Meanwhile…
Hello, hello.
This week’s letter is a vessel for important and fascinating information. Things you need to know as we move from our summer school romance towards the mulch of the autumn semester.
We will cover, as succinctly as possible:
🎁 Paid subscriptions and a gift.
🍂 An announcement regarding the autumn term’s subject matter.
📚 A glance at what you may have missed or forgotten from UPV’s summer sound design school.
📖 A note on last term’s module, Advanced Amateury.
Saddle up!
🎁 Paid subscriptions and a gift
Good news! You can pay me now. The option for you to convert to a paid subscription to this UPV newsletter has been activated. Thank you, Bursar!
Here’s why and how much and what it means:
In late spring, over 12 weeks, I delivered 45 micro-essays detailing arcane, absurdist filmmaking techniques and processes. Plus, sundry exercises, funding opps, and gossip. Next week, we will return to this format: multiple micro-essays in your inbox at croissant time each Monday.
I enjoy the work. And seeing the reader numbers grow has helped me form a picture of who you are:
a seminar room1 full of filmmakers, artists, and cinephiles,
athletically mediocre and creatively marvellous,
curious about new, wrong ways to make/see your peculiar films.
But it is painstaking work, and I spend a lot of time (im)perfecting it for us all. I hope it is valuable for you. If you find value in it, and you would like to reciprocate using a different type of value - freshly printed cash note value - here’s your chance to do so. I will be ever so grateful, and you will be helping UPV to continue and flourish.
These fees are entirely voluntary. You will not be hounded off campus if you can’t or won’t upgrade to a paid subscription. Whatever your choice, you will remain a highly-valued UPV student2:
Unpaid subscribers - self-awarded scholarship students - will receive the same, full 12 lessons as paid subscribers. Plus, my eternal gratitude for gracing these digital pages with your eyes and minds.
Paid readers will receive the joy of supporting my time and hard work with honest currency. Plus, first choice of boom poles when we open the apparatus cupboard.
The price is £4 per month. For our many U.S. students, that will translate as $5. For you in the Eurozone, €5. If you pay for a whole year at once, you get two months for free!
I know that for many of you, the mere opportunity to send money to UPV is a gift in itself. (That’s a little joke. But actually, it is a nice feeling to pay for thoughtfully constructed things.) However, I would like to offer a more concrete gift for the first ten paid subscribers. A Trojan sort of gift: open it up, and you’ll find I’ve smuggled a horse’s worth of secret esoteric filmmaking knowledge into your house.
The horsey gift? It’s my paperback book. The first pages contain a restored text from time-travelling record producer Harley Byrne’s memoirs, The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum. The final pages contain my filmmaking diaries from our live-action adaptation of Byrne’s tale. We filmed it on Super 8 in a chapel in Bourges, the “anus of France.” And by god, did we find treasure3 in there.
One caveat: I can’t promise how soon the lucky ten supporters will receive their book. It was published as a ‘temporally limited edition,’ available for only three weeks. I will need to retrieve some leftover copies from the Norwegian landfill where they’re currently rotting when I next visit Oslo in a few months.
Which brings us to the next topic of this email.
🍂 Rotting the Image
The anticipation is over. Autumn term begins next Monday. October 2nd! The module is called Rotting the Image: The Odour of a Film’s Look.
Rotting the Image is a guide to breathing life and death into your movie’s images. All too often, filmmakers embrace a sterile, untroubled, untroubling image quality. These bland visual textures adhere to one or more of three notions:
Realism. The idea that putting too much imagination into image texture makes a film too artificial, and that this is a bad thing.
The Quality Imperative. The idea that a crystal clear or well-defined image, showboating the latest in high-fidelity technology, lends legitimacy and/or an aura of excellence to a picture.
Normalness. Not to scare off the audience by making the image quality (their first point of contact) weird.
“To make your film live,” the course texts reveal, “you must give it the capacity to rot.
“Perhaps your film will rot in front of the audience’s eyes. Rotting as the movie unfolds. Or perhaps the film will play in a state of perpetual rot. A rotten situation.”
This rot creates an odour: the odour is your film’s mouldering image quality and all that hangs in the air around it.
Over 12 weeks, we will learn:
how to make your film live and slowly die,
the architecture of the movie image and how to perfume it,
the bonds between your film’s look and its physical presence:
the concrete (film cans and cables),
the intangible (light and code), and
the metaphysical (ghosts and lies).
how to explain the stench of your film to parents and other dubious but engaged audiences.
The module should be particularly useful for:
Film- and image-makers looking to modulate the pungency of their pictures.
Other artists and doers who find inspiration in lateral approaches to the crafts of doing.
Parents of filmmakers; others who find themselves bemused by weird cinematographic patinae.
Tell your colleagues! Tell your students! Tell your mum!
📚 Summer sound school is over
What did you make this summer? What did you break this summer? Let us know in the comments!
While you were away making films about seashells and salt pans - or, like me, attempting to achieve meaningful exposure on Super 8 film in a suburban Helsinki carwash - ten short emails about sound drifted into your inbox. I’ll summarise them briefly here, in case you missed them:
Sound: a silent killer. Your audience’s earhole as security vulnerability.
The loneliness of the sound recordist. What the boom operator knows will terrify you.
No silence. Your audience is noisy - let’s make them work for you.
Silences. How to build silences with sound.
Room tone. The butter on the bread of the sound design bap.
Music of the sphere. The sonic flavour of the filmmaker’s world.
Small sounds. The sonic granularity of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The diegetic membrane. A dog barks in the woods and pulls the whole universe inside out.
Rhubarb. What we talk about when we talk about Automated Dialogue Replacement.
A mutant garden. You can design your sound as hard as you like - it will still do strange things in your audience’s minds.
Ok.
📖 The loving continues
Briefly: you can now access a complete, annotated index to last term’s Advanced Amateury module. All those micro-essays and exercises on “being better at being worse.”
A fresh opportunity to:
revise forgotten techniques,
dip in for casual learning, or
share with a friend.
We learned so much!
I have lots more to tell you. But this is the last moment of your summer break. And I’ve already filled your keen, intelligent eyes with so much information. So, I’ll let it pass.
Anyway, here’s that upgrade button one more time.
See you next week. Get ready to rot.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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Some of your faces, I know. Some I have to reconstruct using the assortment of letters with which you present yourself. I have no doubt that all of your faces are first-rate.
We’ll see how it goes in the future, but there will always be something, in fact, most-thing, for free subscribers.
Counter-intuitive techniques, mysterious negatives, new friends and colleagues, and a good, affordable Chinese restaurant.