Karolina's Research Blog

Because I of course would not be able to do both of my ideas, I had to choose one. I liked both ideas, however, I feel like that in the amount of time that I have for the completion of this project, it wouldn't be ideal to make a documentary, as it would probably be much longer than what is required and allowed. So because of these reasons, I decided that I will go with my experimental film idea. This is the presentation that I have done to pitch the idea to the class. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16z8i2J87tlhhtIMhd3WiC8UeuAt8B7ctVbSxqY8Q9nE/edit?usp=sharing

This week I visited the Tate Modern for ideas, as I know seeing other people's artwork can be inspiring as Tate has moving images on their exhibitions too, and seeing those might inspire me, as well as non-film based pieces that could help me in figuring out how I would want my film to look, considering colour and negative space in shots. The purpose of my visit was to see Christian Marclay's 24-hour film The Clock, however unfortunately, I was unable to get in. Because of this, I have decided to visit other exhibitions to make use of my visit.  Exhibitions I visited: (click photos for full size) Jenny Holzer's artist rooms Living cities Media networks Magic Realism Materials and objects Start displays In the studio This exhibition was one of my favourites as there was a lot of poetic elements in the works on show. I really liked the colours the LED lights created and it inspired me a lot in how I would want my film to look like if I ...

Because I knew my second idea would be a documentary, I started looking into Louis Theroux's work (ones that I have not seen in the past) and found that he had made a documentary film about Scientology. I have decided to watch it because I felt it was important to look at a documentary, and the fact that it was about this topic was really helpful. The name of the film is My Scientology Movie. The film consists of many reconstructions of scenarios that had happened to a former member of the church, Mark Rathbun, as well as others. Louis Theroux also visits the California Scientology base, and the church puts the film crew and Theroux under surveillance to make sure they are no trouble. However, there is a lot of confrontation as the church members try to stop them.  It was useful to get sort of an inside view of the "Gold Base" in California. It showed the type of behaviour church officials exhibit and how protective they are of their reputation, trying to sto...

As I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with the previous idea yet, I decided to come up with a "Plan B", or another idea that I was also interested in doing. This idea came from when I went to the Tate (which I will be posting more about soon) and passed the building of the Church of Scientology of London while walking to the museum. This sparked up thoughts in my head about a potential documentary about Scientology. I have always been sort of fascinated of how the whole church works and all of the bad, some would say controversial, things that are said about it. I started researching about the current leader of the church, David Miscavige, and found that his father, Ron Miscavige had quit the church because of the things that went on behind the scenes, in his experience, at the American headquarters. I listened to a podcast interview with Ron Miscavige, which was more than an hour long, and there was quite a lot of information in that. They talked about many th...

I have been given the task to find an article, book or something that could help me start coming up with ideas. Of course the point of this wasn't to immediately have an exact idea of what I want to do, but rather just to help me start a thought process. Before I started looking for something that could be interesting, I thought about what I should do research about that could inspire me. As I have recently gone to the cinema to watch Bohemian Rhapsody (dir: Bryan Singer; 2018) and I really enjoyed the film, as well as the topic, Freddie Mercury and Queen, interested me, I decided to think about ideas that would be interesting in a film. I didn't want to be too specific to Queen and Mercury, so I thought about doing research into 80s groups and pop culture, however the results on Google about this didn't interest me too much, so I decided to go back to Queen. I was really interested in why people thought they were so great, and different opinions by people who actually ...

For my first post, I wanted to introduce the blog and what it will contain in the future. I created this blog with the purpose of documenting all my research that I am doing for my Filmmaking course at Kingston Uni. This research will help me in coming up with ideas and show how I got from initial ideas to one concrete idea for a film. Documenting my research and thoughts processes will help me in tracking my progress and allows me to show the progress I made to other people. I will soon start posting.