We want to share methods for idea development in processes with unknown outcomes. Our methods build on collaborating with the people present, the environment, and the vibe of the times. These methods are part of the larger BLOD method x, developed through the film and research project BLOD. It is ongoing since 2017 and has to date manifested in a feature hybrid film, several short films, live performances and presentations.
The BLOD project aims to challenge content, aesthetics, and collaborative structures in cinematic storytelling. Focusing on cyclic modes of creation, care for sustainability, and subversive takes on collaborative practice, the project promotes creation of cinematic characters through improvisation, fantasy, play and collective exploration of different perspectives and biases.
We are happy for this opportunity to highlight important aspects of the BLOD project that promote recycling, incremental transgressions, mental and environmental sustainability, and conditions for vulnerable encounters. In research presentation up to now, these aspects have lingered slightly out of the limelight, but time has come to bring them to urgent attention.
We want to use intra-action as a presentation format: actively engaging the conference participants, spilling into the cityscape – hopefully involving bystanders happening to be there.
The proposed presentation is a group excursion in the NTNU surrounding area. After a short presentation of the BLOD method, we instigate a collaborative idea development process for another BLOD film – a fake documentary made from the BLOD film material: we invite the conference participants to co-create the narrator-character of the mockumentary we call “Why on Earth?”.
Premise for the pseudo-documentary “Why on Earth?”
An aging FILM SCHOLAR saw “BLOD – the feature” at LA Underground Film Forum. Hit by realizations of his own short comings and lack of understanding when it comes to the women in his life, he wants to make a documentary about BLOD.
The BLOD filmmakers have moved on and say no way. Using illegitimately acquired footage from the BLOD process, the FILM SCHOLAR proceeds to write his own narration (voice-over) and make the documentary anyway.
After sharing this premise, we start our excursion, staging the filming of background research on a character, inviting the conference participants to handle cameras and microphones. Presenter Annika assumes the role of research interviewer, involving the surrounding people in what to ask the character FILM SCHOLAR to get to know him. Presenter Kersti assumes the role of FILM SCHOLAR, involving the crowd in what to answer, what tone of voice and posture, his manner, language etc. – co-creating his background and personality, trying things out, involving the place and the time.
As the Too Early, Too Late group moves through the NTNU surroundings, we all jointly develop a character whose narration will provide an outside gaze on the BLOD project. Maybe starting with a cliché, adding or mixing it with someone else’s clichés, catching sight of our biases. Together we steer the creation of the character FILM SCHOLAR in directions we as project leaders would never have encountered with a different group, on another day, in another weather & place.
We propose an artistic research project presentation in the longer format
40 minutes followed by 40 minutes discussion
Activities:
1. Short presentation of the BLOD method
2. Introduction/premise for BLOD fake documentary “Why on Earth?”
3. Outdoors group excursion:
- Moving through the immediate neighborhood
- Staging a joint film shoot of background research
- Collectively creating a character
- Employing the BLOD method's 10 manifesto points
The BLOD project’s research practice is at the core aiming to challenge ideas of authorship, ownership, and cinematic authenticity. It proposes that it is not enough to rethink the implementation (use of time, energy, living beings, material, money…) of cinematic story-ideas, but to rethink the artistic impetus for how to create cinematic stories. It’s about allowing the available resources to generate ideas and not only about stretching the resources to accommodate a predetermined story.
The BLOD project is ongoing, evolving, layered, and different stories are, and can be, created in a variety of formats from the same pool of material. The outputs (films, papers, performances…) are incidental, not the goal of the process – simultaneously documentations of the research process and its artistic manifestations, each kaleidoscopically containing traces of the others.
A perceived research demand for novelty is also opposed on several other planes; through methods for conceptualization, methods for creation, methods for interaction with society, methods for sharing the research.
- The sharing of the research is part of the cyclic nature of the project; each instance of sharing reveals and excavates different facets of the BLOD method and its materials – it’s form, content, and modes of creation/process.
- Relation building is a key concern in the project’s creative processes and exchange with society. By exploring how inter-acting (for something to emerge) might hold a different proposal of being-together than participation (in something pre-conceived), the research seeks to develop collaborative structures and creative methods that benefit listening, decentering, and recognizing.
- Conceptualization starts from an exploration of cinematic storytelling that is not about depicting an existing world or proposing a new one, but about shifting perspectives and rearranging the conditions for our lives, deaths, and societies in real time. Working with and from the fluidity and multiplicity of the present.
The BLOD project aims to create multivocal cinematic experiences through embodied practices. The research explores relation-building through a feminist methodology of creating gaps and friction – between audience, story, time, matter, and co-creators. The project asks, how to tell multifaceted, non-exploitive stories of womb-related states of life and death, rarely depicted in cinema? And how to disturb film industry hierarchies through a collaborative practice that maintains individual artistic integrity and promotes collective authorship?
The BLOD method is articulated as a Manifesto, written to accommodate a multitude of contents, forms, and modes of collaboration, while demanding cross-disciplinarity, honesty and risk-taking. The method is non-linear, looping, and embedded in the manifestations of the research: films, performances, presentations, etc. BLOD research activities include: making cinematic building blocks that allow and induce multiplicity, improvisation, and fluidity of form; sharing personal experiences through fictionalized documentary processes; dealing with ethics in interpersonal and ecological relations.
The project proposes that critical reflection and vulnerability are integral to film production and offers examples for method development in other research projects or films – especially ones that sprawl, tangle, and defy categorization by field or discipline.
The BLOD Method: case study of an artistic research project in film
https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/ijfma/article/view/7992
Published in International Journal of Film and Media Arts