Doubt

Doubt constitutes a multi-media practice research output working interdisciplinarilly across film, photography and poetry. An unflinchingly personal exploration located between narrative independent film, documentary photography and reflexive poetry, this unique work is part of Knudsen’s ongoing world leading critical and practical exploration of ideas of transcendence through the practice of filmmaking, applied theory and increasingly photography. The Doubt Project has been poetically constructed out of Knudsen’s recent photographs, his entire body of critically acclaimed films, spanning 27 years of filmmaking, and selected reflexive poetic writings from personal notebooks covering the same period. Out of this integrated creation, he is creating of a new type of experiential narrative form exploring transcendent relationships to the creative and the spiritual

Cleft Lip

Cleft Lip is a feature film and constitutes practice research located within the field of narrative independent film and world cinema. The film forms part of Knudsen’s ongoing critical and practical exploration of transcendent narrative forms and the impact of technologically inspired independence on the telling of prototypical stories. What happens when fertility becomes a commodity in a fractured society? Oedipus reborn. Sophocles' classic of classics adapted for the 21st Century by Erik Knudsen into a contemporary tragedy about the unravelling of the most fundamental of relationships in society; that between a father, a mother and a child. Cleft Lip is set in the context of a world where donor eggs and sperm are freely traded as increasing numbers of people are having to resort to fertility treatment as a consequence of social changes, individual decisions and biological imperatives

Fear Eats the Soul: Working with Creative Content and Purpose in Media Practice Education

The paper aims to outline the importance of linking personal experience with craft skills and creative expression, specifically through one or two educational approaches. The argument is that any profound learning of media skills and creative expression can only happen in the context of an awareness of purpose, and that if purpose does not stretch beyond simply getting a job—in what is after all a fickle business—then practitioners will be doing both the moving-image medium and its industry a disservice. The suggestion here is that FE and HE institutions are one of very few contexts in which the student of the medium has the required space and environment to gain access to this critical awareness of their work. In addition, educators, must make sure that they live up to this responsibility

Heart of Gold: Fact and Mysticism in Documentary Form

This report seeks to summarise the process and outcomes of a practice based research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and undertaken during the academic year 2005/2006. The primary outcome of the project is the film Heart of Gold (40 minutes) and the purpose here is to augment and expand this primary outcome. Heart of Gold is a documentary project which took me, the filmmaker, back to my country of birth, Ghana, to explore how traditional story-telling may help shape a new approach to documentary forms. The documentary revolves around the changing relationship local people have to the precious and mystical metal, gold. By exploring this changing relationship, the aim was to discover what kind of stories are told about gold, how these stories are told, and how these stories and their mode of delivery may help the filmmaker create documentary narrative approaches which can encompass both realism and mysticism. The aims and objectives of the project, its process and outcomes, are described here and key answers identified with a view to encourage further exploration and debate

Eyes and Narrative Perspective On Story: A Practice-led Exploration of the Use of Eyes and Eye lines in Fiction Film

Eyes and eye lines are one of the key ways in which the perspective on a story is established in figurative narrative fiction cinema. As such, the eyes and the use of eyes by a performer needs as much creative and technical attention as shot composition, sound, production design and editing. Rather than thinking of the eyes of a performer as a subservient aspect of a projected performance, often driven by the dominance of dialogue-action delivery, this paper seeks to examine how, in fictional cinematic expression, eyes can be deployed to enhance an introspective and transcendent narrative perspective on a story. This exploration takes place through practice. In particular, during the creation of my latest feature film, The Raven On The Jetty (Erik Knudsen, UK 2014), in which I sought to explore how to enhance the relationship between eyes, eye lines and narrative perspective on story. In reflecting on these issues, I shall look at what is meant by narrative perspective and relate this not only to the performativity of a fiction film, but also to the relationship of this performativity to emotions and feelings. I shall then look at eyes: first looking at their behavioural importance, then at looking and seeing. I hope to show that we can think of eyes not merely as a part of an actor’s performance, but also as a window through which we can see a world whose presence is untouchable. I aim to argue that looks and eye lines are as effective as any other cinematic tool in establishing actions, re-actions, space, time, intentions and revelations and to illustrate how I have sought to challenge certain understandings and approaches to the use of eyes to add a different perspective on a story. I write this paper primarily from the perspective of a filmmaker, as opposed to a film scholar, and therefore while acknowledging the considerable theoretical work done by film theorists such as Vivian Sobchack (on phenomenological semiotics[1]), Stephen Heath (on narrative space[2]), Edward Branigan (on point of view[3]) and Tom Brown (on breaking the fourth wall[4]), not to speak of the extensive debates taking place on Catherine Grant’s Film Studies for Free Blog[5], this paper is a subjective and reflexive exploration that seeks to reveal a creative thought process in action, in contrast to a scholarly examination of the cultural theory around film language or film form. Finally, I shall very briefly summarise some of my key findings in a conclusion

The Raven On The Jetty

The Raven On The Jetty is a feature film and constitutes practice research located within the field of narrative independent film and world cinema. The film forms part of Knudsen’s ongoing critical and practical exploration of transcendent narrative forms and the impact of technologically inspired independence on the telling of prototypical stories. In the midst of parental separation, one boy's silent longing has the power to change everything. On his ninth birthday, Thomas travels with his mother to visit his estranged father who, since an acrimonious divorce from his mother, has abandoned urban living in favour of an isolated rural life in the English Lake District. As a digital native boy, Thomas's encounter with the natural world, and his gradual understanding of the pivotal connection he provides for his, ultimately lonely, parents leads to realisation and discovery. There are things his parents don't know about each other that only he can reveal. Perhaps he has the power and the means to change everything. The Raven On The Jetty is a contemplative and moving story about a boy caught in a emotional and spiritual limbo not of his making. A very visual film with sparse dialogue, The Raven On The Jetty is told very much from a young boy's perspective and touches on themes many will have had some direct or indirect experience of

Carbohydrate and lipid composition of vegetables, and bioavalability assessed in a rat model: Impact different cultivation systems

Environmental as well as cultivation factors may greatly influence the chemical composition of plants. The main factors affecting chemical composition of foodstuff is level and type of fertilizer (conventional and organic cultivation systems), location or soiltype and year of harvest. Organic foods are defined as products which are produced under controlled cultivation conditions characterized by the absence of synthetic fertilizers and very restricted use of pesticides. Dietary carbohydrates constitute a major fraction of most feedstuffs and can be divided according to glycosidic linkage into sugars (mono- and disaccharides), oligosaccharides, starch and non-starch polysaccharides (NSP). The bulk of disaccharides and starch will be broken down by the action of pancreatic and mucosal enzymes in the small intestine, while there are no enzymes capable of cleaving some types of oligosaccharides and NSP. A fraction of starch (resistant starch) may also pass the small intestine undegraded either because the starch is physically inaccessible, the starch has a structure that resist amylolysis or the starch is retrograded after heat treatment. Lignin is not a carbohydrate but is tightly associated to cell wall polysaccharides. The term dietary fibre (DF) is used for cell wall and storage NSP and lignin. Adequate intake of dietary fibre are generally accepted as linked to health benefit into a protective role in large bowel cancer, diabetes, coronary heart disease and the issue of faecal bulking. Linoleic (C18:2 n-6) and α-linolenic (C18:3 n-3) are essential fatty acids, which cannot be synthesized in the mammalian organism, and therefore must be supplied in the diet of animals and man. These fatty acids are precursors for the important longer chain higher polyunsaturated fatty acids of the n-6 and n-3 families. Although fats are essential part of the diet, but if consumed in excess, they may exert negative effects on human weight change. Potatoes, carrots, peas, green kale, apple, and rapeseed were grown by three different cultivation strategies, i.e. organic (ORG), conventional (CON), or semi-organic (ORG+) farming system. Each ingredient was treated as for application for human consumption: potatoes, mature, soaked peas and kale were boiled and raw carrots and apples were shredded, and the food was then freeze-dried and packed into airtight bags. Rapeseed oil was produced from the air-dried rapeseeds of the three cultivation treatments, and the residual was discarded. The carbohydrate fraction of the ingredients except rapeseed oil was analysed into: starch, sugars, oligosaccharides and all its constituents and lignin. Likewise the dietary lipids of all ingredients were extracted and the long-chain fatty acids determined by GLC. The ingredients were mixed with a standard synthetic mixture and were formulated to meet the NRC requirements for rats and used in a balance experiments for measuring the bioavalability of the ingredients. Carbohydrate and lignin were predominant dietary constituents with value from 584 g/kg DM in kale to 910 g/kg DM in potatoes. Triacylglycerol was the major lipid class in pea with 82 % of total fatty acids in contrast to apple with only 35 % of fatty acids of the ether extract

Simulation of waviness in neutron guides

As the trend of neutron guide designs points towards longer and more complex guides, imperfections such as waviness becomes increasingly important. Simulations of guide waviness has so far been limited by a lack of reasonable waviness models. We here present a stochastic description of waviness and its implementation in the McStas simulation package. The effect of this new implementation is compared to the guide simulations without waviness and the simple, yet unphysical, waviness model implemented in McStas 1.12c and 2.0