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“Use the site (Cockatoo Island) as a platform for hosting these walking or location based media pieces. You can build imagined narratives, respond to site histories, take any aesthetic or conceptual approach you can imagine to the Island, anything that will assist in building an interesting imaginatively suggestive experience for your audience.” 

Here is the rationale I wrote up, followed by the resulting work.

Through our Cockatoo Island video walk, it is our intention to recreate the physical history of the island through the medium of film while examining the aesthetics of natural, artificial, and accidental beauty. To do this, we will film a walking tour of Cockatoo Island, then we will effectively destroy all semblance of coherent and structurally-sound filmmaking through the process of editing and databending.

Looking for a visual foundation, we have taken YouTube Poops as a starting point for the basis of this project. Looking at YouTube Poop, editing has been taken to its most violent extreme demonstrating editing’s essence as a destructive action. Coherent footage has been cut up, spliced, diced and above all broken. However in this destruction, something new is created and formed. New meaning is generated from the destruction of old.
While this aesthetic style of cut-up and collage is firmly rooted in DADA and Surrealism, our philosophy here shares a stronger affinity with Glitch. As Menkman writes in the Glitch Studies Manifesto (2010, p. 5), “somewhere within the destructed ruins of meaning hope exists; a triumphal sensation that there is something more than just devastation…the glitch can reveal a new opportunity, a spark of creative energy that indicates that something new is about to be created.”

By destroying and reconstructing our recorded footage, we aim to destabilise all prior conceptions of the island and form new, unseen meaning. In this act of destruction, the image is released from all restraints of narrative cohesion, and in the interstice between images the unseen is made visible. Tangible space is dematerialised and reimagined, allowing new experience and interpretation to occur.

As we are dealing with heavy elements of unexpected juxtaposition, Breton’s ideas of “the marvellous” can also be drawn upon. He declares “the marvellous is always beautiful…only the marvellous is beautiful.” The marvellous can be interpreted as that which is surprising or inspires wonder. Reverdy writes in relation to the marvellous, that the marvellous image cannot be born from a comparison, but instead from a juxtaposition two contrasting images. The more distant the relationship between images/realities is, the more emotionally powerful these images become (Seaver & Lane, 1972).

Our act of destructive cutting acts to create beauty in the unexpected—the marvellous.

If we are to summarise the physical history of Cockatoo Island to its base level, it can be described as follows:

I. The Island began as a natural formation, inhabited originally by Indigenous Australians. We can assume that the Island was beautiful in it’s unadulterated natural presence.

II. The Island was subject to European colonisation. As a result, natural beauty was partially and almost entirely destroyed.

III. Natural beauty was destroyed in the name of human progress. Taking the place of the organic, was the artificial—the Island becoming a place of incarceration, ship repair and ship building. At its most active period—World War I to World War II Island served as the largest shipbuilding yard in Australia.

IV. In 1992, the shipyard closed. For a decade the Island lay dormant, falling into disrepair. The Sydney Harbour Federation Trust was then established with the aim to revitalise the Island as a significant site.

Natural beauty was destroyed and replaced by mechanical artifice, brandishing the gruesome face of wartime endeavour. However, once this artifice was left to rot and decay, a new sort of beauty has emerged through ruin and entropy. Our video walk aims to replicate this — by filming the Island as we find it (in a state of original or ‘natural’ beauty), we will take this state and destroy it in the hope that something beautiful will emerge from our created ruins.

Dir/Editor: Ryan O’Donnell
Camera: Ryan O’Donnell, Jorja Brain
Sound: Jorja Brain, Chris McKay

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BUDGET:
$500

RPO Video
http://rpovideo.com.au

DIRECTOR
Ryan O’Donnell
COPYWRITING
Amy Lester
Ryan O’Donnell
KINETIC TYPOGRAPHY
Phillip Smith
CAMERA/EDITOR
Ryan O’Donnell

The second method involves using a HEX editor. I will open mpeg files using a HEX editor showing me the video file’s RAW data in HEX form. Here I can manually damage the code by either changing small fragments of the text, rearranging it, deleting it.

The results are often quite interesting, and I like the idea of destroying something in the hope that something beautiful may emerge.

This is a short piece made at UTS 2011 for the subject Composing the Real. We were asked to make a short documentary piece, and this is the final product. It was based on a proposal that I wrote for a previous assignment. It was shot on a JVC somethingorother and a Canon 7D. This was the first experience I had shooting with a Canon 7D and it’s interesting to see the results. I have decided to purchase one of my own so I can start using that to make my own personal stuff.

Director/Interviewer/2nd Camera: Ryan O’Donnell
Production Manager/1st Camera: Jorja Brain
Sound/Editor: Joy Zhang
Interviewee: Alex Carson

Be sure to watch in full 1080p HD!

This is the promotional video for a new project I am working on called The Canvas Project. For this project I am acting as Head Writer and (occasional) Editor. I was the primary editor for our promotional video, with the exception of the crew shots at the end which were edited by a couple of colleagues. This has probably been my most challenging video work to date.

This is a short piece that I developed for a university assignment. We were placed into groups and assigned a primary, secondary and tertiary emotion. We had to develop a film using these emotions and the theme of ‘place’.

In my past film projects, I have tended to be incredibly controlling in terms of how I want the film to look and be. As such, I often wound up taking up the majority of production roles. I hoped that this assignment would encourage me to work as a group and be more comfortable with other people producing some of the work. I was quite excited to have other people take on some of the production roles this time around. In all actuality, nothing changed from my prior film experiences. I still wound up being very controlling in terms of the films content, and wound up taking the majority of production roles. This is largely because a couple of group members were particularly difficult to deal with and did not pull their weight at all. For this assignment, I wound up storyboarding, partially shooting, and editing the film. Furthermore, I composed the films sound track as well.

In the development stages of the film, our central concept centred around how grief is externalised and/or internalised by individuals. I showed a number of short films to the group, trying to demonstrate what I had in mind in terms of an aesthetic style for the film. I showed a couple of short films by Jørgen Leth, and a few by David Lynch. Leth, who was originally both a poet and anthropologist, is a self taught filmmaker. In his films, his background as a poet is made apparent as his films carry a strongly poetic feel to them. His films are clean, crisp, minimal, and well constructed, whilst also being deeply emotionally provocative – like poetry itself. It is from Leth’s filmmaking that we drew the large majority of inspiration for this work. Disappointingly for me, group members did not take too well to the work of David Lynch, and the resulting work was not as Lynchian as I would have liked. However in hindsight, looking at the film now, it was probably for the best that Lynch did not come through as an influence.

Drawing influence from Leth’s 1975 film Good and Evil, we decided that having two individuals performing similar actions, although slightly different , would be an effective way of communicating the externalisation and internalisation of grief or sadness. Sadness is an emotion that shows in different ways. It is either openly externalised and expressed (through crying, for example), or it is internalised and repressed. The first form results in a sadness that is commonly associated with despair and absolute agony. The latter form though results in a form of sadness that is more subdued, and more easily likened to a form of depression or melancholy. In an attempt to juxtapose the two states of mind, we settled on a split screen format for the film. The left would display outwardly externalised despair, whereas the right would depict an internalised form of grief. The two in a left-right placement imply a temporal narrative progression, almost like a before and after shot. It is suggested that perhaps the second form of grieving follows the first. This is further implied through the actual narrative that we settled on, where the individual in the right frame is able to continue with daily life, whereas the first individual remains in bed, in the foetal position.

Compositionally, I aimed to recreate the sense of isolation and emptiness experienced during periods of grief. Thus, I composed each shot with the idea of negative space in mind.

When I finally got down to editing the film, there were a number of issues I had. Firstly, my copy of Final Cut stopped working so I instead had to edit the entire piece in Premiere Pro. This led to a whole range of exporting and compatibility problems further down the track. Also, it turns out that we had shot a lot more footage than we needed. I had to completely rework the ending of the film. In retrospect, I like the ending that I developed during editing over the initial ending that we had planned. In the final ending, the film returns to a single screen set up, and shows the central woman leaving her house, and then cuts back to her lying in bed. On one hand, the film suggests that they are temporally located at different points, however the ending creates a sense of uncertainty and we are left unsure as to whether what has just occurred is occurring on a different temporal plane, or whether it is occurring within an imagined reality within the mind of the protagonist.

In terms of music, we initially had a composer lined up. However, due to time constraints, we were not able to edit the film and give it to the composer to write a score and record it. Instead, I composed the film’s music. I drew influence from Yann Tiersen  when I was writing the score for our film. The score begins with long held chords, sparsely played, then gradually builds upon this to a climax. This then dies down and returns to the beginning motif. There are only two primary chords used in the composition, demonstrating the two different characters and emotional states depicted visually.

Compared to my previous film work, I feel that this piece has been a development in terms of filmmaking style, practice and ability. I would have liked to have worked as a team more, but this was somewhat difficult when some people did not contribute or show up to anything. That being said however, it was fantastic working with some really talented and enthusiastic individuals who were always eager to help out. It was great having some people on board who actually knew what they were doing in terms of scriptwriting, and also the paperwork/organisational side of things.

This promotional video was produced for travel journalist, Rod Eime for Sydney-Melbourne Touring . All raw video footage and voiceover work was provided by Rod, while all editing and compilation work was left to me. I took my own personal spin with this video, while still catering to my clients needs and requests over the course of its production.

Related sites:

Rod Eime

Sydney-Melbourne Touring

Visit Walhalla

This video was produced for travel journalist, Rod Eime as an entry to a competition for Australia’s Greatest Drives. All raw video footage and voiceover work was provided by Rod. All editing, storyboarding and compilation was left to me. The video was edited and catered to the client’s requests.

Related sites:

Rod Eime

Australia’s Greatest Drives