Being an avid podcast and audiobook listener, developing my own audio-based project was something I was just itching to do…

Breaking Cinema was a creative branded entity that would have primarily been made up of an experimental documentary storytelling podcast.

There would also have had a website, a YouTube channel and social media profiles.

I started developing the project in 2014 and shelved it in 2016.

My vision for Breaking Cinema was to break new ground in a highly experimental, educational and entertaining way by presenting a podcast that would challenge each listener to reflect on their unique relationships with film, multimedia and producing content.

Breaking Cinema would have employed an open-format that would have interwoven various points of view, discussions, projects and case-studies in order to consider and pull apart the problems and potentials of the art-and-business form that is diverging far beyond the parameters of its traditional cinematic paradigm.

The tone of the podcast would’ve been very much a fusion of personal narrative meets investigative dabbling.

Something along the lines of The Secret History of Hollywood hooks up with Serial with a quick stop off at Short Cuts, but all the while travelling around The Rings of Saturn.

Appreciation and nostalgia for cinematic heritage would have formed strong components, but – from cave art to YouTube – Breaking Cinema would have considered a bigger picture by challenging established thinking, exploring current entrepreneurial trends and proposing new conventions of audio-visual storytelling and neurobiological immersion.

Using ‘cinema’ as an illustration of humanity’s skill at ignoring reality by constructing altered ones, Breaking Cinema would have broken with the tradition of wholly isolated and objectified textual analysis, criticism and appreciation in order to creatively utilise the inherent subjectivity and freedom of the audio form to broaden the canvas of exploration.

The point of the podcast was to enable the listener to generate their own imagery and introspection while consuming the content as a collaborator in the experience’s overall final impact.

An experience with the end-goal of expanding the listener’s point of view in order to envision a bigger picture of the reality around them and of our collective and pervasive habit of ignoring that reality.

The project was called Breaking Cinema, but “Breaking Willful Blindness” would’ve been a more precise identification for what I was trying to achieve with it.

A considerable amount of work went into developing the format of the podcast and its larger branded entity.

I wrote a novel-length vision document, created numerous focus generators, recorded hours of audio discussions for it and even had some theme music composed before I shelved the project.

July, 2013 – April, 2014. Frustration and REALLY wanting to get my teeth into something constructive!

September, 2013 – present. Starting my MTA Portfolio a.k.a. ibuiltmyown.education and continuing to refine my career focus as I have progressed.

April, 2014 – May, 2014. Another idea drawn from my frustration and constructive aspirations that did not work out and which became a good idea for a podcast, see The email that started it all.

April, 2014 – January, 2015. Researching and developing a now abandoned feature length documentary about the heritage and paradigm of cinema buildings (this documentary idea had the working title of Breaking Cinema).

May, 2014 – August, 2014. Thinking about the format and focus of the podcast.

May, 2014 – June, 2015. The Miracle of Crowdfunding originally started out as a tuition crowdfunding project for a masters degree I ultimately did not undertake (thank sanity), but it very quickly grew into something much bigger while filming it and was eventually reconceived into The Miracle Mockumentary, a feature length reflexive docudrama about the process of intendent filmmaking, crowdfunding and building your identity. The project required additional footage to be shot in the summer of 2015 which I cancelled due to the unreliableness of the other member of the project and a lack of time on my part. However, many of the ideas generated in The Miracle of Crowdfunding, such as constructive storytelling reflection in relation to new developments have very much rubbed off onto this project.

August, 2014. Recording two initial test episodes on my iPad. Yeah, I needed to get a proper microphone.

August, 2014. Purchasing a proper microphone, love the Blue Snowball.

August, 2014 – December, 2014. More thinking about the direction of the podcast and the inclusion of a YouTube channel. Realising the branded entity of the project is bigger than just a podcast.

December 11^th, 2014 (my birthday and the podcast’s birthday). Seeing Interstellar in IMAX – the ‘fuck it’ incentive. Let’s just do this thing and figuring it out along the way, story of my life.

December, 2014 – February, 2015. Getting George and Ralph involved and recording some collaborative test episodes.

January 2015 – June 2015. Recorded all the test episodes to help me figure out the focus of the podcast and to amass a backlog of potentially useable material to use once I have have figure out the focus of the podcast.

February, 2015 – May, 2015. Rich and Jack coming aboard and recording even more collaborative test episodes; in addition to George and Ralph.

March 2015. Branding and logo design. Started to sketch out ideas and visualize the logo design for the podcast.

April 2015. Cave of the Binary Organ/Cave of the 8-Bit Binary Organ theme music. Conceived of the brief for the theme music and then paid to have an original piece of music composed for the intro and outro of the podcast.

May, 2015 – July, 2015. Writing Breaking Blindness: The Focus Generator and Vision Document for the Breaking Cinema Project – the original and unfinished version of this document.

July, 2015 – September, 2015. Procrastination. Taking what I had written in The Focus Generator and Vision Document and turning most of it into the first (and defunct) version of my personal website, PeterO’Brien.me. Ultimately, the exercise of using The Focus Generator and Vision Document material to create my personal website and unload a great of material from inside my head proved to be hugely useful in allowing me to more clearly conceive of the overview of the Breaking Cinema project. Productive procrastination!

September 16^th, 17^th and 18^th, 2015. Encounters Film and Animation Festival 2015 – it helped.

September 26^th, 2015. Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick – a spontaneous and flu-induced 40-minute video reflection that greatly helped in further refining the focus of the project. Reflection generation, I swear by it!

September, 2015 – October, 2015. Breaking Blindness: The Breaking Cinema Vision Video Film Thing of Lateral Thinking – a currently unfinished video essay which incorporates Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick and visualizes much of what I put into The Focus Generator and Vision Document. I learn through doing and I see through creating.

October, 2015 – November, 2015. Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness: The Sort of Detailed Overview of the Breaking Cinema Project, the first half of it anyway.

December, 2015 – January, 2016. Further fiddling and refining of my MTA Portfolio that was summarised into a full-fledged Mastser of Trandisciplinary Application (MTA). Then I logically concluded to make the Breaking Cinema project a creative project element of my MTA.

December, 2015 – February, 2016. Completing the full first draft of the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness vision document.

January – February 2016. Breaking Blindness: The Vision Video of Lateral Thinking. I cut together the unfinished vision video for the project which was my attempt to visually illustrate some of what I had written in the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness document. I also produced a 10-minute Podcast Concept video from the larger vision video.

April 2016. Outlines for Breaking Cinema Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10. Produced a more concise episode overview document from the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness document.

May, 2016. I made the decision to abandon/shelve the Breaking Cinema podcast so that I could instead focus on developing my MTA Portfolio.

May – June 2024. Collecting together the produced artefacts of the Breaking Cinema podcast together for inclusion in my Creative Technologies Sandbox final project. I also created a set of related blog posts from what I had written for the focus generator documents of Breaking Cinema.

“An attitude of indifference has largely found its way into Film Studies… it is an academic subject that is increasingly feeling very dusty. It does not invest enough energy into progressive thinking or into examining the practical aspects of how film entities are constructed… The discipline is too focused on cave-like thinking and film theory of the past; a pantheon of knowledge that is becoming continuously outdated and finding itself at odds with new advancements and diversifications”

– Me, Ways of Being, 2013:105-07

Breaking Cinema developed out of my frustration with the dominant complacent thinking of film theory and my dissatisfaction with the lack of film podcasts that delved deep into analysing the workings of cinema and our individual relationships with multimedia.

The project was heavily influenced by my own creative relationship with film and my experiences of being a Film Studies student.

I was keen to orchestrate an innovative approach to analysing cinema that would pick up the loose ends of my BA (Hons) theoretical dissertation, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle…

“Film scholars have always sought to understand the spectator’s and spectacle’s mutual pursuit of enlightenment; while they have uncovered aspects of it, there still does not exist a single unifying explanation of the profound processes of that relationship… In the current digital transition, where many of the assumptions of previous thought are having their validity questioned… a leap into the unknown is not only inevitable, it is required!”

– Me, Ways of Being, 2013:105-07

The name Breaking Cinema signified my move away from purely film-centric concerns and showed that the focus was much broader and concerned with a wider media and psychological landscape of exploration, i.e. breaking away from cinema.

It was studying the subject of film, but starting with the spectator, not the film, and examining it from their point of view, so as to expand the scope of the discipline to include a broader psychological and subjective perspective.

It is in the psychology of human beings that we can find the underpinnings and deeper correlated complexities of the collective entity we have come to refer to as ‘cinema’.

The films themselves can only tell you so much, the films plus the spectators can tell you a hell of a lot more… and this is when you start to see a bigger picture forming.

The textual-and-critical-analysis approach of considering cinema – but almost always just focusing on the two-dimensional images on the screen – is just one piece of the puzzle, it’s not the entirety of it.

“A focus on the meaningful and sociological side of Media [and Film] Studies also means that we are required to discourage the self-indulgent and pointless textual analysis which was once central to the average Media [and Film] Studies textbook. Occasionally some commentators do manage to make interesting observations about the composition or meaning of a particular culturally significant text. But requiring our students to make pretentious statements about trivial aspects of unimportant bits of media content was always a silly idea, and bound to draw sharp and reasonable attacks from critics of the discipline. The defence that this activity is parallel to what they do in Literature Studies was correct, but it’s often a waste of time there too. Our students should at least have an ambition to be on the front line of creative activity – not following along behind, making comments to an audience of no one”

– David Gauntlett, Media Studies 2.0 And other battles around the future of media research, 2011

If you really want to talk about film and what it is within reality, then you need to talk about the reality that exists beyond a film – the bigger picture – not just the two-dimensional images on a screen that supposedly make up a film and comprise the essence of cinema.

I have never bought into that way of thinking about cinema and I continue to be frustrated by Film Studies practitioners who worship it like some flawless religion.

I was hugely influenced by the works of Marsh McLuhan, such as The Medium is the Massage and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

I was also influenced by the two Media Studies 2.0 books, one by William Merrin and the other by David Gauntlett.

Another key influence was David Thomson’s The Big Picture: The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us which I quoted in the following video in relation to visuals centered around Breaking Cinema…

“It’s Muybridge to Facebook.” – David Thomson, The Big Screen, page 3.

A key incentive for creating the Breaking Cinema podcast was very much tied up with my thinking for what I termed ‘Constructive Film Studies’ which was my proposed re-orientation for the Film Studies field towards a more proactive and pioneering presence in academia and society.

Constructive Film Studies a.k.a. Film Studies 2.0 would have been focused on…

• Learning through doing and personal reflection, so there will be a lot of content creation, i.e. filmmaking, not just essay writing and discussion, the students will get their hands very dirty, theory and practice in equal measure.
• Film being brought out of its comfort zone and studied in relation to the broader media canvas of other forms of audio-visual content and the world wide web, because films now exist through extended pieces of content interspersed throughout an extended network.
• Teaching by active experience, so all of the tutors will be active practitioners and creators of their own content in order to enable and nature a culture of collaboration between tutor and student, opposed to an authority and subordinate relationship, this is how you eliminate the passivity in students.
• Fusing a relationship with other disciplines, such as business and emotional intelligence, in order to produce Constructive Film graduates who can market themselves as a brand and a service to be engaged with in whatever way they decide to use their expertise as a career.
• Be open to transdisciplinary approaches by fusing a study of film with other disciplines, such as big data, psychology and neuroscience in order to uncover and correlate the larger implications of film culture and cinema.

I very much wanted to transition the Film Studies field towards a discipline that is as much about creative practice as it is about innovative theoretical thinking.

I wanted Breaking Cinema to help stimulate that constructive thinking and creative action within the listener.

Breaking Cinema itself needed to be an example of the constructive thinking and creative action inherent in my proposal for Constructive Film Studies.

I was excited at the creative and perverse prospect of exploring a largely visual medium in an audio-based format because the audio form engages your brain in a way that the audio-visual form struggles to.

“Telephone is a cool medium or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, there low in participation, and cool medium are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.”

– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1966:36

I have found the audio podcast form to be better suited for encouraging original and creative thinking in the mind of the listener.

One of the reasons the audio form’s popularity has waned and why so many people struggle to get into podcasts and audio dramas (as indeed I did) is because the audio form requires you to work your brain a lot harder than if you were watching a film and having all of the details spoon-fed to you.

Listening to something in audio form is a much more of a collaborative experience than watching a film, precisely because you have to actively work your imagination to put images to the visuals.

When I am watching a film where my brain is constantly being bombarded and distracted by new imagery, the lack of content-visual information allows my brain more time and space in which to ponder points that have been raised in the content of the audio.

“Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility, like any other medium. It comes to us ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten chords. All technological extensions of ourselves must be numb and subliminal, else we could not endure the leverage exerted upon us by such extension. Even more than telephone or telegraph, radio is that extensions of the central nervous system, that aboriginal mass medium, the vernacular tongue? The crossing of these two most intimate and potent of human technologies could not possibly have failed to provide some extraordinary new shapes for human experience.”

– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1966:263-4

Ultimately, I believe the audio-form is better at training the listener to think for themselves in an original and creative manner.

I had an idea to make a podcast called Breaking Cinema that would break new ground but I didn’t know what shape the podcast would take to start breaking cinema.

What I did know is that I didn’t want to produce a podcast that would be yet another film podcast where a group of people sat around discussing topics that had been discussed a million times before.

So to get the ball rolling, I invited a few of my Film Studies alumni onboard to record a set of test episodes where we sat around discussing film topics that had been discussed a million times before.

I felt that it was better to start producing something, even if it was something that had been done before, and then gradually engineer and evolve into something different from there.

Recording a set of test episodes also provided the advantage of amassing a backlog of episodes and material that could potentially be used later on.

I called them ‘test episodes’ but ‘formulation episodes would be a better name for the first batch of episodes I mostly recorded with my Film Studies alumni – George, Ralph, Rich and Jack.

I also recorded an interview with another of my Film Studies alumni – Claudia – because I did want the podcast to be a male only affair.

I was very keen to get others involved in the project so that we could collaboratively evolve the project beyond something that was not just about films and embody the philosophy of Constructive Film Studies.

However, I really struggled to get the other project members on board with this approach of stepping outside of the comfort zone of film and traditional Film Studies.

It didn’t help that there was never a clearly defined approach for the podcast (because I was still figuring that out) and I made a serious error by involving other film graduates in the development stage, because being film graduates – what else, other than film, are they going to talk about?

I recorded nineteen test episodes, varying between 30 minutes all the way up to 120 minutes in length.

The nineteen test episodes were…

1. From the Women in the Moon to the Chauvinists on Mars

2. Web Series What?

3. The challenges facing aspiring filmmakers to get off their arse and just fucking make something

4. The utilisation of the web for filmmakers

5. The Technical Challenges of Filmmaking and Creative Practice

6. Is it necessary for all film students to make their own films?

7. The Memento of Memento

8. The Potential of Podcasting as a medium and resource for film-centric individuals

9. Violence on Film

10. The Seventh Seal

11. Arthouse and Foreign Films in the Multiplex

12. The Importance of Music in Films

13. The Rise of the American Gangster Film

14. The Amazing Birdman

15. Silent Comedy

16. Furiosa: Fury Road (featuring Mad Max)

17. Re-Terminator

18. Film Noir: Themes and Aesthetics

19. Interview with Claudia Ferri

Most of the episodes I recorded with others, but a few of them I did on my own.

As I was mostly recoding sit-down discussions which very quickly fell into the trap of discussing topics covered elsewhere before, my approach was to be increasingly controversial in an attempt to take the discussion into new ground.

Therefore, if we were discussing a film or topic that I felt was just regurgitating film theory or film thinking that had been said before, I would jump in with a curve ball to inspire the discussion to go in a fresh direction.

Sometimes this worked, but quite often I would experience a lot of resistance…

Eventually I accepted the fact that Breaking Cinema was never going to work via the format I was exploring in the test episodes.

If you listen through the test episodes, and listen very carefully, you can pick up on my boredom and frustration therein!

The only one I was really happy with was the interview I conducted with Claudia because that was more along the lines of what I wanted to do with the podcast, it was less about the two-dimensional images on the screen and more about the person watching those images.

All the test episodes can be listened to here

I wrote out the following twenty points when I was recording the test episodes.

The twenty points serve a reminder to myself and to the other project members of the expansive nature of the podcast, i.e. it wasn’t just a podcast where a group of people sat around discussing dusty old film topics that had been discussed a million times before.

The points are key components of the DNA of Breaking Cinema…

1) The bigger picture

2) Constructive

3) “Human beings are very complicated things. They live in several dimensions at once, not just one. And if they try to live just in one, they warp themselves horribly.”- Olaf Stapledon, Four Encounters, 1983

4) Five-dimensional thinking a.k.a. lateral thinking

5) Film history, analysis, criticism and appreciation can take care of themselves

6) Holistic = transdisciplinary

7) “The world we perceive is an artificially constructed environment whose character and properties are as much a result of unconscious mental processing as they are a product of real data.” – Subliminal: The New Unconscious and What it Teaches Us, 2014:50

8) Willful blindness a.k.a. the art of ignoring reality

9) Reflective

10) “I am not a good man and I’m not bad man. You know what I am… I am… an idiot! With a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning.” – The Doctor, Doctor Who: Death in Heaven, 2014

11) Homo sapiens are the best and the worst thing about the planet Earth

12) “[In the future], the Internet will disappear… you won’t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time.” – Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

13) Engaging with content is anything but passive

14) “All of us want to bury our heads in the sand when taxes are due, when we have bad habits we know we should change, or when the cars starts to make that strange sound. Ignore it and it will go away – that’s what we think and hope. It’s more than just wishful thinking. In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn’t exist and that we don’t have to change. We are also trying hard to avoid conflict: if the threat’s not there, I don’t have to fight it. A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compel us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflicts we just don’t want to deal with.” – Margaret Heffernan, Wilful Blindness, 2012:211

15) Hybrid

16) “Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female – female is nature’s default gender setting” – Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, 2006:36

17) Creativity

18) ‘Listen’ – if you re-arrange the letters it becomes ‘silent’

19) “my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein, – more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 2003:49

20) Us

I also wrote twelve additional and more detailed points on what Breaking Cinema was not.

“Logic is the tool that is used to dig holes deeper and bigger, to make them altogether better holes. But if the hole is in the wrong place, then no amount of improvement is going to put it in the right place. No matter how obvious this may seem to every digger, it is still easier to go on digging in the same hole than to start all over again in a new place. Vertical thinking is digging the same hole deeper; lateral thinking is trying again elsewhere.”

– Edward de Bono, The Use of Lateral Thinking, 1972:22

I had a lot of different ideas and feelings for the direction of the podcast so the focus and format of Breaking Cinema was a tough cookie to crack.

While the test episodes had been very good for showing me exactly what I didn’t need to do for the podcast, I still needed to figure out what I did want to do.

Therefore, I produced several focus generator works to help pin down the exact shape of Breaking Cinema.

Essentially, there were four key focus generator works I produced…

• A Vision Document
• A Vision Video
• An Episode Outline Document
• A Video Reflection

All four focus generators are substantial and expansive works in their own rights!

Pulling Teeth and Breaking Blindness a.k.a. the Vision Document is a 178 page document I authored which collects together all my thinking for the project into a cohesive form that allowed me to conceptualise what I wanted the podcast to be.

The Vision Document really is the be all and end all for understanding the Breaking Cinema podcast.

While the Vision Document is, for the most part, a completed work, the Vision Video is an unfinished one.

The Vision Video developed when I started to tinker with turning the ideas in the Vision Document into visuals explanations.

I did this for the benefit of other people who were already involved or who had yet to become involved in the podcast; but I also did it to further clarify the creative and lateral thinking in my mind.

At the back of my mind, I also had the idea to somehow incorporate elements of the Vision Video into a future episode of the podcast.

Even in its unfinished form, the Vision Video clocks in at one hour and five minutes is quite ambitious.

I also pulled out a 10-minute section of the Vision Video to a create an isolated video that focused solely on the concept for the podcast.

Ultimately both the Vision Document and the Vision Video(s) enabled me to reconceive the podcast into a documentary storytelling format that very much satisfied my desires for the podcast.

Authoring both the Vision Document and Vision Video also enabled me to write the outlines for the first ten episodes of this bold new format.

Although, if I’m being honest, the most concisely comprehensive overview for the Breaking Cinema podcast can be found in the Episodes Outline document.

Not only does the Episode Outlines document include descriptions for my preferred form of content, but it also includes an introduction that sums up my vision for the project.

Finally, there is Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick which is a 40-minute reflection I spontaneous ranted out one night when I was without the internet and slightly delirious with a viral infection.

I ended up quoting much of what I said in Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick in the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness document.

Ultimately, much of what I wrote for the focus generators I have since turned into posts for ibuiltmyown.education blog.

“Willful blindness (sometimes called ignorance of law, willful ignorance or contrived ignorance or Nelsonian knowledge) is a term used in law to describe a situation in which a Person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting him or herself in a position where he or she will be unaware of facts that would render him or her liable.”

– Willful Blindness, Wikipedia

The project was called Breaking Cinema, but “Breaking Willful Blindness” would have been a more precise identification for what I wanted to tackle in the project.

Intentionally ignoring the facts of a situation is a human trait that has always been a pet hate of mine.

“All of us want to bury our heads in the sand when taxes are due, when we have bad habits we know we should change, or when the cars starts to make that strange sound. Ignore it and it will go away – that’s what we think and hope. It’s more than just wishful thinking. In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn’t exist and that we don’t have to change. We are also trying hard to avoid conflict: if the threat’s not there, I don’t have to fight it. A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compel us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflicts we just don’t want to deal with.”

– Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness, 2012:211

During my BA (Hons) studies I became increasingly fascinated with how film and multimedia can be very potent expressions and further enablers of willful blindness.

Equally, film and multimedia can also expose and enable further exposure of the human tendency towards enacting willful blindness.

A key example of this was inherent in my outline for episode two…

“The concept of willful blindness will be explored in relation to mass media; to determine what are the factors which can bring about collective willful blindness, as was evidenced in the rise of Nazi Germany, and to speculate if mass media serves a role in combating and/or further propagating collective ignorance. Ultimately, the spectator has to leave this episode asking themselves: ‘What is my point-of-view not seeing?'”

– Breaking Cinema, Ep. 2 – Triumph of the Willful Blindness and its Great Dictator

Ultimately, I wanted to build Breaking Cinema into a podcast that would have empowered the listener to realise that they have a three pound perceptive and creative power house sitting inside their skulls that is more than capable of defining its own ways of being and combatting the art of ignoring reality and move beyond what the status quo demands of it.

“In the last few years, we’ve learned that the formation and maintenance of categories have their roots in known biological processes in the brain. Neurons are living cells, and they can connect to one another in trillions of different ways. These connections don’t just lead to learning – the connections ar the learning. The number of possible brain states that each of us can have is so large that it exceeds the number of known particles in the universe. The implications of this are mind-boggling: Theoretically, you should be able to represent uniqueley in your brain every known particle in the universe, and have excess capacity left over to organize those particles into finite categories. Your brain is just the tool for the information age.”

– Daniel Levitin, The Organized Mind, 2015:63.

In a sense, cinema and multimedia were the brushes and paint sets the project would have used to paint its big picture of the realities that exist beyond willful blindness.

Tackling willful blindness was a challengingly broad and inherently transdisciplinary topic, but that is the nature of reality… and I will not ignore reality, so that’s why accepted the challenge of translating it into a podcast.

Although, admittedly, it did take me a while, and a great deal of lateral thinking, to come to the realisation that tackling willful blindness was what the podcast was actually about!

When I accepted that it was about willful blindness, this is when I started to warm to the idea of the podcast being a documentary storytelling podcast, but a documentary storytelling podcast that would have an open-format meaning that it wouldn’t be tied to one specific way of exploring its topics from episode to episode.

The exploration and approach of a holistic topic such as this was also a largely unexploited creative, far-reaching, inclusive and inspirational opportunity.

A major formalistic and stylistic influence on my thinking for this direction of the podcast was W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn because, as a vehicle using film and multimedia to tackle willful blindness, I wanted Breaking Cinema to be a tapestry of an opera glass and a microscope…

“The aircraft at the tip of the trail was as invisible as the passengers inside it. The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery for Thomas Browne too, who saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond. In his thinking and writing he therefore sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator. His only means of achieving the sublime heights that this endeavour required was a parlous loftiness in his language. In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast reppertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortege in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne’s writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniet of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and look through a microscope at the same time.”

– W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 2002:18-19

Breaking Cinema had to be expansive in its scope and unyieldingly proactive in its application.

That’s why sitting around talking about films was not going to cut it.

Eventually I accepted that Breaking Cinema was never going to work via the format I was exploring in the test episodes.

Therefore, I came to the four following decisions regarding the future of the project…

• I would disband with the format, style and approach of the test episodes.
• I would adopt a hybrid storytelling documentary audio format for the podcast.
• I would lead the project and there would no longer be any co-hosts.
• I would still involve many contributors and points of view in the podcast but I would make the final decision on what content was included and what shape each episode would take.

No matter how many times I had tried to open up each of the discussions in the test episodes, we always seemed to go running back to the subject of film.

There were already plenty of podcasts and other online endeavours which were exploring the traditional topics of film.

This is what I meant when I said, in the 20 Key Points to Guide the Project’s Focus, that film history, analysis, criticism and appreciation could take of themselves.

There were already plenty of active practitioners out there taking care of the conservation of these fields and, in a lot of cases, they were doing it to a very high standard.

But Breaking Cinema was not a platform for that, it’s not what I wanted to do with the project.

I realised that the only way I could explore film beyond the two-dimensional images on the screen and provide an active example of Constructive Film Studies was to move beyond sit-down discussions and produce an open-format documentary storytelling podcast.

Initially, that had been my original thinking for the podcast as I had been inspired by You Must Remember This and The Secret History of Hollywood – Two brilliant examples of podcast that employ the documentary storytelling format to explore the topic of film.

However, I veered away from making a documentary storytelling podcast myself as I knew it would have been logistically unsustainable to even attempt to produce a weekly episode up to that quality.

But producing high quality episodes in blocks or seasons of 10 or so episodes was logistically sustainable.

I already had the technical know-how and an inherent understanding of the audio form drawn from many, many hours of podcast and audio drama content.

Ultimately, producing a high quality and more expansive product filled me with a great deal more enthusiasm than I was experiencing with the test episode format.

Sit-down discussions can generate some very stimulating points, but as a whole they can be incredibly dull and unstimulating to listen to.

I would rather extract the really strong points and use them in relation to other relevant and engaging material as part of a more polished and entertaining presentation.

A presentation that would’ve been firmly entrenched within the storytelling format podcast genre, but would also have experimented with other presentation types, such as having the occasional episode that would explore themes and topics within an audio drama.

I wanted to keep the format open and utilise a stream-of-consciousness approach, similar to what I had done in the Vision Document and Vision Video.

As soon as I envisioned Breaking Cinema as an open-format documentary storytelling podcast which I could produce in seasons of episodes, all the ideas I had for it all clicked into place and I started to prioritize quality of quantity.

My thinking was that the podcast would’ve been made up of clusters/seasons of about 10 high-quality episodes a piece that would’ve constructively explored the subjects of film and media from a lucid and lateral, but highly entertaining and quirky perspective.

Using ‘cinema’ as the starting point, Breaking Cinema would’ve break with the tradition of wholly isolated and objectified textual analysis, criticism and appreciation in order to creatively utilise the inherent subjectivity and freedom of the audio form to broaden the canvas of exploration.

Breaking Cinema was a tapestry, a tapestry of different points-of-view, which is precisely why I was keen to involve others in the project.

“The human voice can convey much more meaning through tone and inflection than the printed word ever can. It’s why millions of Americans sat, fixated, during the Golden Age of Radio – listening to everything from adventure, comedy and drama to classical music concerts, news and farm reports.”

– Nicolette Beard, Podcasting: Storytelling for the 21st Century

The point of the podcast would have been to enable the listener to generate their own imagery and introspection while consuming the content as a collaborator in the experience’s overall final impact. An experience with the end-goal of expanding the listener’s point of view in order to envision a bigger picture of the reality around them.

I believe that in order to really understand what ‘cinema’ is, you have to approach it via an indirect route, you have to take a step back from all of the audio-visual technological noise that now surrounds us and you absolutely have to get away from the over-discussed two-dimensional images on the screen.

Instead, you have to start looking at the four-dimensional beings who are just as much (in fact, more so) active creators and embodiments of ‘cinema’, as they are of the imagery and impact of this audio podcast.

As such, the podcast would’ve incorporated many personal reflections from many different points of view – this was ABSOLUTELY essential!

Ultimately, by questioning our basic assumptions about the consumption of mass media and the academic traditions of studying it, Breaking Cinema would have dissected the willful blindness inherent in the spheres of film and multimedia.

‘Cinema’ may be the starting point, but I do not believe that it is the end in and of itself. I think that with the very ambiguous concept of ‘cinema’, human beings have been trying to pin down something vastly more fundamental and universal; something that is now very clearly growing beyond just being embodied as two-dimensional images on a screen.

I believe that ‘cinema’ represents something that has always been transcendental to films and I think it has an awful lot to do with unlocking the mechanisms behind human consciousness and how that consciousness constructs its perception of reality.

This conception of cinema has an awful lot to say about our collective ignorance… and how we can overcome it.

These first ten episodes would have been a varied mix of topic focuses and presentation formats…

 

Ep. 1. My First Education

(The human being as a spectacle)

A self-reflexive documentary about my relationship with film interspersed with an examination of the 1998 film Gods and Monsters, that was a key milestone in forming my understanding of cinema.

Read the full episode 1 outline

 

Ep. 2. Triumph of the Willful Blindness and its Great Dictator

(Perverted spectacles)

A documentary that would have used the rise of Nazi Germany to explore the concept of willful blindness in relation to mass media.

Being polar opposites portraying the same set of events surrounding the allure of Adolf Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator were the two film texts that would have been analysed in relation to larger mass media, cultural, historical and psychological relevancies and media text references.

Read the full episode 2 outline

 

Ep. 3. Pride and Prejudice and Smartphone Zombies

(Segmented spectacles)

A documentary that would have explored the mass communications phenomenon and technological obsession of the smartphone. It would have touched on how the smartphone has become an additional and inseparable limb-interface of the human body and what impact this is having on our ways of being.

The smartphone revolution would have been explored in relation to the biases around using or not using a smartphone; as well as in relation to the smartphone as a new form of cultural artefact, lifestyle connector and status symbol.

The episode would primarily have been a central group discussion with cutaways of vox pop material and other relevant media content.

Read the full episode 3 outline

 

Ep. 4. In an Auditorium Darkly: The Terror of the Eye-Phone

(Cinema spectacle)

An audio drama that would have been made in the style of old time radio dramas with vintage 1950s advertising included.

The plot would have taken place in a cinema 1953 during a screening of The War of the Worlds. Specifically, the plot would have concerned the protagonist being on a date, popping out for a toilet break during the film, wandering off to have a bit of an explore in the dark recesses of the cinema and then finding the terrifying “eye-phone” and its orchestrator therein…

This would have been the first of a planned five In an Auditorium Darkly episodes that all take place in cinemas at different points throughout the 20th-century. The point of including fictional audio drama episodes was to use the fictional storytelling format to stimulate original thinking and to explore the concept of hypertextuality.

Read the full episode 4 outline

 

Ep. 5. Gamer Girls Galore

(The female as spectator and spectacle)

A documentary that would have explored the topic of adult females who play video games, a demographic which now comprises the largest collection of gamers. It would also have explored female objectification in the media and how the empowered female gamer stands in contrast to that objectification.

The female point-of-view is far too often overlooked in regards to media research and I wanted to open it up and present a thorough exploration.

This episode would have been a combination of my linking narration, contributions from the interviewed guests and excerts from other related media texts.

Read the full episode 5 outline

 

Ep. 6. Spectators of the Spectacles

(Who is a spectator?)

A documentary that would bring film theory into the real world by starting with an analysis of the spectator, not the spectacle. It would have explored the larger psychology of the film experience, as being heavily determined by the psychology and personal history of the individual spectator.

This episode would have been a combination of my linking narration and contributions from a range of interviewed guests who would all have varying interests in film. It probably would also have included clips from other related media texts and some vox pop as well.

Read the full episode 6 outline

 

Ep. 7. The Slow Motion Picture Entity

(What is a spectacle?)

A documentary that would have used a very thorough analysis of the 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Often referred to as The Slow Motion Picture, due to it’s slow pace, the first Star Trek film would have been used to emphasize the point of slowing down our thinking and expectations when analysing a film text.

Another key point of the episode would have been establishing the difference between a film text, the two-dimensional images on the screen, and the film entity, the larger culturally embellished version of a film text as it exists in the collective consciousness.

This episode would have been my narration analysing The Motion Picture that would have included clips from the film as well as other related media texts.

Read the full episode 7 outline

 

Ep. 8. Microfilm in a Day

(How to go about making a spectacle?)

A documentary that would have chronicled a group of participants being brought together and set the challenge of going off to make a short film in a single day using nothing but their smartphones.

The point of this episode would have been to explore the idea of using practical filmmaking to better understand film theory and increase the effectives of the education of film.

The episode would have been a combination of my linking narration and the reflections of the participants of the filmmaking challenge. It probably would have included some vox pop.

Read the full episode 8 outline

 

Ep. 9. The Media is the Mentality

(How spectacles go about making us)

A documentary that would have been structured somewhat like a news report and would have analysed how mass media and “the news” voices and dictates the status quo and collective consciousness in both a negative and positive sense.

The episode would have been a combination of my linking narration and contribution from a range of interviewed guests; as well as excerpts from other related media texts and probably some vox pop too.

Read the full episode 9 outline

 

Ep. 10. This is Breaking Cinema

(How to go about constructively breaking down spectators and spectacles)

A self-reflective documentary that would have brought together all the threads of the nine previous episodes and, together with an overview of the development of the podcast and its episodes, would have presented my intentions for the Breaking Cinema podcast.

My intention was to orchestrate the podcast in this particular fashion in order to illustrate and inspire a broader and more flexible approach of thinking about cinema, the media landscape and how human beings play into and grow from these things.

This episode would also have established anticipation for the next season of Breaking Cinema.

It would have been a documentary analysis using a combination of my narration and excerpts and elaborations of the nine previous episodes.

Read the full episode 10 outline

You can also read about earlier versions of the ten episodes here.

Titled ‘Cave the Binary Organ’ and later ‘Cave of the 8-Bit Binary Organ’, I wanted the intro and outro music of the podcast to be something original and distinct to this project which is why I paid to have an original piece of music produced.

The theme music was conceived and composed quite early on during the project’s development because I wanted it to set the tone for the ‘outside of the norm’ themes I was going for with Breaking Cinema.

As I said to the composer, I wanted a piece of music that broke: “with established conventions while still being interlaced with elements of those conventions.”

I almost wanted the theme music to sound like it was composed by AI (which is very easily done now, less so back then).

I had planned to put narration over the theme that would’ve been made up of a female voice identifying the podcast as “Breaking Cinema” and would also have cut in other relevant clips, such as quotes from Marshall McLuhan, that would have elaborated on the flavour of the podcast.

Then over the outro music there would have been further narration asking the listener to “like the podcast on facebook, write an iTunes review, visit the website for more info,” etc.

You can read more about my thinking behind the theme music and listen to some of the other versions here

“A great brand is not a mark burned into a product – it’s something we want to belong to.”

– Bernadette Jiwa, Marketing: A Love Story, 2014:5

Right from the project’s inception, I was always very conscious of the role branding would play in communicating the message of Breaking Cinema.

The outreach required for a podcast – or any online endeavour – to reach its target audience was just as important as the podcast itself.

“I very much want Breaking Cinema to engage other people and to be engaged by other people. Therefore, in saying that I want build something to market is not enough, really what I want to do with this project is build a community based around its focus. In short – relationships. I want Breaking Cinema to be relationship-centric.”

– Me, Page 89, Pulling Teeth and Breaking Blindness

The target audience for Breaking Cinema would have been… whoever it ended up connecting with.

Hoping that your project connects with someone you haven’t even figured out before the fact is somewhere you never wanted to be when marketing a product or service!

But as I said in the Vision Document…

“Because Breaking Cinema is an experimental project, I would rather just get it up and get it out there and then see who takes to it and then define my target audience from there.”

– Me, Page 90, Pulling Teeth and Breaking Blindness

I was less concerned with defining the target audience before the fact and more focused with building something tangible that I could put out there and use as a vehicle to find the target audience.

But I knew that putting a podcast online would not been enough, I also needed to direct people to via marketing channels.

Increasingly, as the project developed, I saw Breaking Cinema as less of a podcast in isolation and more of a larger branded entity with many outlets.

The outlets I was looking at were…

Podcast – the first and maybe central element

YouTube channel – an experimental visual extension of the podcast

Website – for hosting of podcast episodes + basic information about the project

Facebook page – necessity for wider engagement with audience

Twitter – necessity for wider engagement with audience

Google+ page – necessity for the creation of the YouTube channel, not sure how much this will be utilised, but can be utilised for wider engagement with the audience

Facebook group – private and for behind-the-scenes communications, this may change

iTunes – for indexing the podcast episodes for iTunes users

Stitcher – for indexing the podcast episodes for non-iTunes users

Peter O’Brien and my online presence – the project will naturally be extended through the me-brand as well and vice versa.

I also placed a strong emphasis on defining and expanding the Breaking Cinema brand through its various channels because the marketing of products, i.e. connecting the consumer with the consumable, would have a been a key focus in the explorations of the podcast.

Marketing is a key component of the media landscape as all marketing is reliant upon media and media channels to manifest and carry its marketing communications.

I knew the branding and visual design for Breaking Cinema needed to instantly communicate the essential message of what Breaking Cinema was all about.

I even created a video that visually illustrates my thinking for the visual design of the podcast’s brand…

The vision board I am referencing in the Visual Aesthetic and Brand Representation can be viewed here.

In particular, the brand’s logo needed to inhabit and communicate the key themes of what I was trying to explore.

One night I noticed how the light from my bedside lamp was refracted through a glass of water I had sat in front of it.

I took a liking to the pattern that was projected down on a pile of books and magazines I had sat next to my bed.

I liked the pattern of colour and tone of light it created and decided to use it to further pin down the feel I had for the logo.

I sketched a rough approximation of the logo on a piece of sketch paper and then placed this paper under the projection of refracted light.

As cinema is a medium built on the projection of light, I liked how the visual design of the logo would also have embodied this aesthetic.

My thinking for logo is that I wanted it to look like it had been etched into a cave wall.

I wanted it to evoke the idea of cave paintings being the fist visual storytelling medium of humankind; as well as the allegory of Plato’s cave.

That’s why I decided to use the refraction of light from my lamp in creating the visualization for the logo because I liked the slightly ‘firelight on a cave wall’ tone and colour it had to it.

I also saw the ‘K’ of ‘Breaking’ being the intersection of a crack in the cave wall.

Ultimately, I would have used these visualizations as the basis for getting a proper logo produced for the podcast.

My thoughts on marketing the podcast; as well as monetizing it as a digital product can be read here.

“Don’t build the perfect solution, build something that can be upgraded.”

– Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start 2.0

Time.

I lacked the time necessary to give the project the time and attention it required.

To be clear, had I stuck with the format of the test episodes and let each episode of the podcast be a group discussion, I could have easily have launched and run the podcast.

But I wanted to go with the documentary storytelling format of the proposed ten broadcast episodes and that would have required a great deal more time to bring together as each episode would need to be constructed of multiple pieces.

Furthermore, the podcast was not a commission and I would not have generated an income stream that I could have used to me support me through all the time it would have taken me to produce its content.

In the end, it all boiled down to two choices.

Either I could invest a great deal of my time into launching and running Breaking Cinema as a documentary storytelling podcast or I could just get on with building my MTA portfolio.

Ultimately I went with my master’s degree which has proven to be even more time consuming than Breaking Cinema!

Abandoning the project was not an easy decision to make.

I was incredibly passionate about this project and I felt that I had crafted it into something that would have been quite ground-breaking.

But I had to let it go.

But that isn’t to say I won’t get back to it one day…