Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick: Constructive Film Studies & the Point of my Podcast

I have been developing a film related podcast project called Breaking Cinema that has been having some teething problems. 

Primary among these problems is a lack of a clarity in regards to the specific focus of the podcast project and it is for this reason that I have not until now detailed the Breaking Cinema podcast on this blog.

However, the project now has a focus that is becoming clearer by the day!

A rough approximation of what the eventual logo will look like. Probably.

For the longest time, the best description I could provide to the other project members was that...

"This podcast is not just about films." 

Essentially what I have been trying to say with this statement is that the focus of Breaking Cinema aligns itself with what I was gunning for in my award-winning undergraduate theoretical dissertation, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, and my continuing transdisciplinary research project, Ways 2 Interface.

And that focus was concerned with moving the study of cinema beyond textual critical analysis of two-dimensional images on a screen and placing greater transdisciplinary emphasis on the wider and empirical implications of the spectator's involvement and human culture as a whole.

"The fundamental focus of the project is the idea of an interfacing process - the introspective and expressive capacity inherent to us all - that we have always interwoven throughout our day-to-day existences and that we continue to do so at a formidably greater capacity in our contemporary digital realities. By examining the habits and manifestations of our cognitive, corporeal, cultural and connected ways to interface, 'Ways 2 Interface' will aim to build a unified understanding of this interfacing process - the brand at the heart of all our stories." 

- Welcome #2Interface, Ways 2 Interface 

Now, after nearly a year of actively working away on this project and recording various test episodes, I am now in a position where I can say that I very nearly have the project's focus and format fully figured out. Finally!

And this epiphany was in great part assisted by the following spontaneous forty-minute reflection I produced while I had a touch of the flu and was in a hugely lucid state of mind...

Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick, A Flu-Induced Reflection by Peter O'Brien

Sometimes all you need is a bit of flu!

More coming soon.

Encounters 2015 - Cameo #12

I have produced another microfilm using Vimeo's Cameo app on my iPod Touch based around my three days at the Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival in Bristol.  

This microfilm is more of just a collected of clips opposed to a micro narrative because I just did not have the energy to capture nearly as much footage I would have liked at Encounters. However, I did enjoy being a spectator of the festival.