I always wondered how do the great directors like Peter Jackson, Spielberg and Spike Lee get to narrate the story in a such a beautiful way and hooks the audience till the end. The answer to my question was ‘mind mapping’. In today’s class, We all were introduced to the concept of mind mapping and we had to structure a story by using graph and the importance of character in numbers.

I found out that before bursting into the script, one must narrow down the key plot acts in the story as it helps set the mood and tone of the story. One common element that i discovered was that in all of the major blockbuster movies, the highest peak point of a story is usually towards end and the lowest peak is in the middle as what the lecturer said that the character is developing in these stages and thus the reason we as audience are intrigued into the motion of the story (keen to find out what will happen next).

This is how what normally a graph would look like for a good story, unless the character is interesting enough to hold the audience.

Today we all looked at each other’s Brief 3, and had to give some feedback and criticism. So here is what my mates told me regarding my video.

Emma:Really like the opening title, it gives a hint of what it is about to come and hooked me up to see what was coming. Here is a link to her video :

Backpacking and Other Traumas from Emma Armstrong on Vimeo.

Jack: The opening shot is fresh, but the rest of the video quality seemed low, other than that, the narration and the link between the found footage is strong.
Here is a link to his video:

TAHJ from Jack on Vimeo.

Gloria: The whole brief shows an immersive experience of the character and that the found footage matches his story.
here is a link to her video:

Someone from Gloria Tanuseputra on Vimeo.

Dylan: He liked the use of subtitles as it shows the roots from where the character belongs and the juxtaposition of found footages and the narration were ironic.
Here is a link to his video:
*Waiting to be uploaded*

Yes, it is true, everywhere you see, there are signs. In one of my previous posts, I mentioned the presence of media texts everywhere and that by noticing carefully, we get to analyse the layers of information present in it. Brian talked about semiotics in today’s class. He mentioned key terms of analysis in semiotics namely, Signs, signifier, signified, denotation, connotation, codes, Myth/ideology. Then we had a small class exercise where we tried to signify the images according to our understandings. I discovered that it is really important for a media practitioner to have knowledge of semiotics as I reckon it will help me in the near future and to analyse the same information but with a different perspective to it.

In this week’s workshop, we got a hands on experience of Zoom sound recorders. We got to know important key elements in sound recording and that there are actually 4 types of sounds, General sounds, vocals, speeches and noise. We were then divided into groups and went out to record different sounds for the class exercise. As such using the equipment was pretty easy but recording a conversation a metre away was challenging as the ambience sound was kind of overlapping with the sound that Maggie and I were trying to record.

But on the plus side, the ambience sound of water and train came out great. It is really important where you place the mic and perhaps now while I’m writing this post, I realize that is the only reason why we failed in the recording, perhaps i didn’t set it right or maybe the sound levels were not properly done right so we normalized it and it turned out the original recording was far better as the normalized version made the sound clip way loud.

Nervous? Yes I was nervous when my self portrait was being displayed on screen.The whole perspective changes from your laptop screen to big screen, I wasn’t sure how will the others find it as I felt the sound of my project didn’t worked well but fortunately everyone liked it. They all seemed to get what I was trying to say in that 1 minute video. Watching others work was intriguing, things like time lapse, multiple camera edit and creative use of texts really opened up my mind. I’m sure I might use one of these creative ideas in my next project brief.