What is creativity? [G325 questions on production work]

Taken from Media Magazine blog.

One of the possible areas you could be asked about in the exam is creativity. The projects you have undertaken will hopefully have felt like an opportunity to display your creativity, but you will need the chance to discuss what you understand by creativity and what it might mean to be creative.

The assignment options at AS and A2 all offer constraints for your work, whether it be making pages for a music magazine, the opening of a film or the packaging for an album; one of the reasons why you aren't offered total free choice is because people often find that working within constraints gives them something to exercise their creativity, whereas total freedom can sometimes make it really difficult to know where to start. It's why genre can be interesting- how has something been created which fits with certain structures and rules but plays around with them to give us something a little bit different?

The word 'creative' has many meanings- the most democratic meaning would really suggest that any act of making something (even making an idea) might be seen as a creative act. In more elitist versions of the term, it is reserved for those who are seen as highly skilled or original (famous artists, musicians, film-makers etc). an interesting third alternative is to think about how creativity can be an unconscious, random or collaborative act that becomes more than the sum of its parts.

A great shared site for creative random art with some effort is on Flickr with the shared CD meme pool. This is a game where you create a CD cover for an imaginary band and upload it to Flickr; the trick is you have to create it from 'found' materials, again following a set of rules.

1. Generate a name for your band by using WikiPedia's random page selector tool, and using the first article title on whichever page pops up. No matter how weird or lame that band name sounds.
2. Generate an album title by cutting and pasting the last four words of the final quote on whichever page appears when you click on the quotationspage's random quote selector tool. No matter what those four words turn out to be.
3. Finally, visit Flickr's Most Interesting page -- a random selection of some of the interesting things discovered on Flickr within the last 7 days -- and download the third picture on that page. (Even better: Click on this link to get a Flickr photo that's licensed under Creative Commons.) Again -- no cheating! You must use the photo, no matter how you feel about it.
4. Using Photoshop (or whatever method you prefer), put all of these elements together and create your very own CD cover, then upload it to the CD memepool

My version:

Band Name: Hyponephele Pulchella
Album Title: Then You Destroy Yourself

Post Modernism Theories & Texts

Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds Soundtrack

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: Motion Picture Soundtrack is the soundtrack toQuentin Tarantino's motion picture Inglourious Basterds. It was originally released on August 18, 2009. The soundtrack uses a variety of music genres, including spaghetti western soundtrack excerpts, R&B and the David Bowie song "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)". This is the first soundtrack for a Quentin Tarantino film not to feature dialogue excerpts. The french "The Man with the Big Sombrero" was recorded for the movie. The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, but lost to Slumdog Millionaire (soundtrack).

Analyzing 'Inglourious Basterds' tavern scene

Quentin Tarantino told the multiple stories of "Inglourious Basterds" in five distinct chapters, and we knew from the script stage the film would hinge around the set-piece in the tavern La Louisianne. The daunting task of putting a 25-page dialogue sequence, spoken almost entirely in German, in the middle of the film, weighed heavily on everyone's minds, and it all had to come together in the cutting room. Just mentioning the name La Louisianne created tension among the crew, but we needed that tension to transcend to the audienceIn La Louisianne, the Basterds meet their German movie star contact, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) for the first time, and they must all pretend to be old friends by posing as Nazi officers. Much to the Basterds' surprise, they not only find Bridget in the dangerously cramped tavern, they find the basement bar filled with drunken, celebrating Nazis, one of whom happens to be enamored with the German movie star and continually pesters their table. The tension in the group runs high as we watch the real Nazis begin to question the origin of the British Archie Hicox's (Michael Fassbender) strange accent, and we hold our breath.
La Louisianne required detailed attention to character development as well as numerous story points, all the while using the device of language to create tension. Quentin and I felt it was essential to have the characters not simply drive the scene toward a plot point, but to be fully nuanced characters, while continually building the tension that would culminate in an explosive gun battle that kills all but one. We knew the gunfight would work all the better if we could carefully manipulate and build the tension through a give and take of emotions, playing a cat-and-mouse game with our characters -- and our audience.
Our editorial intentions had to be completely clear in how we wanted the audience to feel at any specific moment in the scene -- the Basterds are screwed, wait, no, they're OK, oh, no they aren't, this Nazi knows, he's on to them, no, no, they are OK -- until Hicox makes the fatal error that unequivocally gives them all away as impostors. Every line had a layer of tension, and we needed to play their reactions to the lines as much as the lines themselves to build it properly. Every beat counted. Every second someone delayed their response gave the audience a chance to think, "Did they figure it out? Do they know?"
We obsessively controlled every moment so that in contrast, when the climactic gun battle finally does erupt, it explodes in the loudest, craziest and most shocking way possible. But again, while doing this, we always had to return to the human element -- our character development. Hicox gets a bit of a tear in his eye when he realizes he will live no longer, and if we have done our jobs correctly, so will our audience.
Another challenge was to seamlessly integrate a lot of key information for upcoming plot points without them feeling perfunctory, heavy-handed or pedantic. For example, we needed to show a close-up of Bridget's shoes so there was no doubt in the audience's mind who it belonged to later on when Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) discovers the shoe while inspecting the aftermath in the bar. We can't draw attention to the shoe in a way that says, "We're showing you a close-up of a foot," but we do need to make enough of a point of it so the audience knows it's Bridget's -- instantly. The solution was to use the shoe as character introduction, to show the style and glamour of this movie star/double agent whom we, the audience and our characters, meet for the first timeThe tavern music was another way we developed a character. The music at first works environmentally and emotionally in the scene but then functions to locate a yet-to-be-seen, off-screen character, the Gestapo Maj. Hellstrom, who, when revealed, we see has clearly been controlling the music selections. We also now know that without a doubt Hellstrom had been listening to the Basterds' conversation the entire time, and we now use the absence of that same music when Hellstrom purposefully removes the needle from the record player to show that he has taken control of the scene. The Basterds, and our audience, are now in Hellstrom's hands.
The last issue we had to contend with was the length. A nearly 25-minute dialogue scene that starts 69 minutes into the film can be a potential challenge for audiences, as most scenes by this point play considerably shorter. But it was our belief that if we could hold the scene's tension, we could not only develop character and attend to the story but actually stop the scene to allow Hellstrom to play his King Kong card game, a story in and of itself, which cinematically alludes to another oppressed group, the slaves in America. I could go on about many other layers that needed our attention, but, unfortunately, in this situation I am not the editor with final cut and must end the piece here.

Inglorious Basterds, Chapter 1

Tarantino loves to references loads of various pieces of work throughout his own, including using specific shots, whether it be taken from Spaghetti Westerns such as 'The Good, The Bad, The Ugly [1966] where he frames the forest shots similarly to the build up to the finale, or whether it be just using music from all sorts of eras irrespective of whether it fits with the time of the film that he is showing.

Tarantino also pays tribute to the Odessa steps scene from the movie The Battleship Potekim.

Tarantino also sets Inglorious Basterds as a fairy tale. He begins the film with 'once upon a time' and also he marks the start of each new section of the film with 'chapter 3' etc.  He once again uses the Spaghetti Western music in the opening part of the film.

A trait of Tarantino is to also often break the 4th wall, and also to stress to us as the viewer that what we are watching is only a film and nothing more. He does this in various ways in the opening 'chapter'. Instantly we become aware that the background that is being shown through the windows isn't actually real and that it is actually painted.
We are also shown that the room they are actually shown to be in is a filming studio, when Tarantino shows the camera actually going down through the  floor-boards to show the hiding jews. Furthermore, the camera also shows a clear ceiling, however we are shown a view that is above beams where the ceiling was shown to be just seconds ago.

Yet another shot that is paid tribute to in the opening chapter is the shot that is taken from the film 'The Searchers' [1956] where Tarantino mimics the door shot where the girl is running, this is used in The Searchers where the man walks away.

post modernism?

various definitions;

"A general explanation is that postmodernism is a contradiction in terms, as post means after and modern means now, it is impossible for anything to be after now. The term itself is supposed to be deliberately unexplainable."

"Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they can have no preferred reading and present a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously. Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern. Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function [e.g. using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video].

"Modernism proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. It is thus characterised by constant innovation. But modern art has often been driven too by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the realism of Courbet, culminating in abstact art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as Postermodernism."

"Term used from about 1970 to describe changes seen to take place in Western society and culture from the 1960s on. These changes arose from anti-authoritarian challenges to the prevailing orthodoxies across the board. In art, postmodernism was specifically a reaction against modernism. It may be said to begin with Pop art and to embrace much of what followed including Conceptual art, Neo-Expressionism, Feminist art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s. Some outstanding characteristics of postmodernism are that it collapses the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture; that it tends to efface the boundary between art and everyday life; and that it refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be."

An Example Of Bricolage