Final Meet Up

Finally, we as a group manage to met today. I arrived about 40 minutes due to work and train delays. It was the first time for three of us able to meet as a group since the first time we assigned in a group. Though without proper meeting before other than inside the class and other circumstances, yes we are happy to see that we managed to come up this far.

We pulled out all of our part together and made few changes in the website. I even add some of the videos showing the different between BBC coverage about Bersih 3.0 with the one that broadcast by Astro in television back in Malaysia. I am more than happy when the boys agree and say that that videos is relevant enough with our case study. We also decided on what can we improved and what other relevant videos we can put up on our website.

We can say that this is the most successful meeting we had as we were able to get everything done. Before leaving, we are all set to meet on the 11th of June. Thanks boys for the hard work.

Cheers!

 

Last Workshop!

Seems hard to believe that we are in the last week of the semester. And today’s mark the last workshop for the semester. How time flies.There are some mix feelings in me knowing that this class almost come to an end but at the same time, I was happy that there will be no class afterwards. Since it is the last day of workshop, Rachel and other classmates brought some foods and cookies to be enjoyed together in class. (cookies was nice, thanks Rachel!)

Dylan was away from today’s class since he got some stuff to be finish off at home, which left only Daniel and I to present our final draft for our research. Knowing that I missed several meeting before, I had all my part done before the class start and brought along with me all the materials I gained from my topic. Daniel were quite surprised but hey, it’s a good stuff aight?

We went through some discussions about what are the things that we are lacking off. We touched on the general format of the website, what can be done or improved. We also talked about what are the things that we could add on to make it more interactive rather than just plain text all the way down.

 

Besides, we also need to present our draft to the whole class. I wasn’t prepared for the presentation so basically Daniel and I only summarize what we already had. Rachel’s feedback help a lots as she asked us to include some videos or maybe pictures into our website and this is kind of the same with the discussions I had with Daniel before the presentation.

Before leaving, we set up another final meet up before submission due and hopefully we can smash this out!

Cheers!

I’m sorry guys

My lack of attendance for the meeting has left the boys stranded. With the due date coming nearer, we definitely to sit down together but due to my personal problems, I haven’t manage to meet them up personally. We only been communicate mainly through email and exchanging text messages among other. It was something better than nothing, right?

So in the workshop, Daniel and Dylan worked out on something with Rachel’s help. With Rachel’s help, they asked her to set up a blog so that we can put up some written paragraph that we had. Dylan also did sent me an emails and it looks like this :

Hi Ariff,

Daniel and I have discussed a lot of the ideas that we have had floating around in some depth and have defined our key focus in a way which provides a better way to frame these. In doing so, we feel that are using all of our existing ideas and presenting them in a more coherent and connected manner.

We have retitled ‘Old Media vs. New Media’ to ‘Broadcast vs. Post-Broadcast Era’, which changes how we define certain characteristics of how we define each culture. For example, Malaysia, while technically a post-broadcast era society, has many characteristics which define it more closely to a broadcast era society.

To show how we are going to present this, the following pages are planned:

–          Home Page

oIntro into Broadcast/Post-Broadcast, Rachel supplied some rough ways to phrase this:

  • “The death of ‘broadcasting’ has been largely over exaggerated, as broadcast programming still exists, just within a media ecosystem which contains a wider level of media formats”
  • The debate surrounding technological change and its effects
  • ‘We use these terms loosely as a way of framing and examining the differences for audiences if the broadcasting experience in a digital age”

–          Broadcast Era

o   Definition of the characteristics of a Broadcast era and its audiences

o   The role of the audience, the content creators/producers/marketers and the Government

o   Discussing and analysing this through audience and media theories (Many of which Daniel has researched, the agenda setting function as an example)

o   No specific references to Malaysian or Australia culture

–          Post-Broadcast Era

o   Definition of the characteristics of a Post-Broadcast era and its audiences

o   The role of the audience, the content creators/producers/marketers and the Government

o   Discussing and analysing this through the new introductions in media forms presented, and how it changes media, audience and content relationships

o   Introduction to individualised media, target audiences, the ‘prosumer’

o   No specific references to Malaysian or Australia culture

–          Case Study

o   Comparing and contrasting Malaysian and Australian cultures, and the characteristics of each ‘era’ that they have and which ones are more prominent.

o   Specific reference to the purpose of this media, reference will be made to the ABC charter (which states that content must be supplied which fosters Australian culture) and link this back to the idea of Malaysian censorship. Is this an attempt to achieve the same thing, or create a level of control over the audience?

o   How does each form effect the audience’s level of knowledge or idea of identity?

o   Key differences in these two audiences and the media supplied

o   Specific example to news broadcast programs (ie. Government controlled versus widely produced in many different formats)

Daniel and I are completing some more research on these areas and have planned to write a paragraph or two each on these first two areas in some depth.

What we would like you to do is write a paragraph for each section or at the very least expand on some ideas in the notes that you sent last night, as some of them are more relevant than others. For example, Malaysia is a post-broadcast era society, but one which does not use it for its full potential due to Government involvement. Remember, we need literature to support our ideas to some degree, so try to do a little bit of research in broadcast/post-broadcast cultures.

Daniel will send a scanned version of the direction that Rachel has supplied us with hopefully by tonight.

The audience bios have also been scrapped from further discussion until a more fully realised idea of how this could be implemented has been found. Otherwise, this will be scrapped.

The website will hopefully be up and running soon, once this occurs, I’ll format it and it’s as easy as getting content up there.

I sent some stuff related to Malaysia’s broadcast cultures to Dylan a night before. After reading this email, I knows that I need to work on something and make sure I get my part done.

Decision Made!

 

After deep consideration about the the viability of the different mediums available and how we wanted to present what we had available to us, Dylan and I decided to go with website to present our ideas. Having Dylan in class was relieving as he is a person full of creativity and ideas. We choose website as a form to present our ideas mainly because it is kind of hard to explain about our topic in different forms and also due to the lack of discussion we had among us three. But hey, at least we have come up with something which we find could be more informative since we are talking about serious issues.

Here are some of the copy of the email sent by Dylan to Daniel and I to show our progression of our ideas.

7/5/15

Alright boys, we’re finally getting somewhere!

Factoring in the brief amount of time we have to get a prototype artefact, combined with the wide range of material to choose from at this point, we’ve decided to present our theme in the form of a website. I will be developing this, and will have a prototype (lacking in written and visual content) by next week pretty easily.

Ariff and I have broken it down into 4 pages at this point:

Home Page:

  • Introduction

Understanding the Audience

  • Definition of an audience
  • Discussing audience theory
  • An interpretation of the factors that make up an audience reading

Old Media vs. New Media

  • Comparison of audience culture
  • The introduction of technology that shapes the audience
  • Globalisation of the audience

Role of the Audience

  • The media-audience relationship
  • Consumer vs. Prosumer
  • The mass audience vs. the individual  

Breaking it up in this form allows us to assign a topic to each member based on the group’s research, which we have to make available to each other on the groups google drive folder by tomorrow. The website form also allows us to make changes or expand our scope at any time, so have a think about what we really want to put up on there.

We’re hoping to another meeting next Tuesday at 12:30, most likely in the atellior space (building 9, floor 2). We can discuss more specific stuff then and decide what everyone wants to do going forward. We will also need to come up with a visual style for the site, so we’ll have to discuss colours, images, tone etc. 

Thanks guys,
Dylan’

 

‘To build upon this, each point needs to have an argumentative element to it. This isn’t a summary of these areas, we need to provide research evidence purely as the basis of our point. We have discussed the importance of case studies to present these ideas and made a couple more decisions (or suggestions, in some cases). 

Ariff will explore a case study for globalisation, perhaps based in part on his own experiences. For this reason, he’ll be assigned to ‘Old Media vs. New Media’. 

For the ‘Role of the Audience’ page, some possible case studies would be social media platforms (facebook, twitter) or creator platforms (youtube, vimeo). Changes in media usage are also relevant here (like the figures that were presented to us in the audience lecture the other day)

‘Understanding the Audience’ has a smaller scope, but we could also possibly discuss ideas based around marketing/advertising of products within this, or audience culture surrounding reviews of movies/TV/games. 

It is also possible to do an almost character-bio-esque setup for the site, discussing our own usage of the media and highlighting the differences between us as ‘an audience’ to highlight the individual element. This could be easily achievable if we break it up across the page, or even across the site as a whole (the profiles being the relevant pages that we wrote). Just labelling it as something like ‘I am the audience’ could communicate a lot.

I’ll be (hopefully) sending out a timetable for these tasks by tomorrow.

Have a think about it and let me what you know.’

 

‘And a final decision has been made!

After careful consideration, we’ve decided to place the emphasis on Ariff’s case study, so this means a change in setup and focus.

We will now be looking at a comparison of Malaysian and Australian (or Western) news. The Malaysian culture still uses a conceptually broadcast era media format to present their news, with the vast majority of news being told through a single, Government run news program once a night, broadcasting to a mass audience. We can compare this to the post-broadcast western culture, which has many different news programs available for very specific demographics, as well as a higher level of reliance on internet based news.

To go with this, the new format of the site will scrap a lot of the ideas based on audience theory. However, it will allow us to expand upon ideas of the mass audience in Malaysia against the highly individualised media that Western culture has. We can also briefly talk about censorship and the wider range of content available to Western audiences, as this forms much of the media-audience relationship that we have. A large emphasis will be placed on this comparison on the ‘broadcast vs. post-broadcast’ era.

The character bio element at this point will most likely stay, we’ll decide what we want to include in this in the future.

Due to the change, I’ll wait out on making the project timeline, and we can discuss all of this further in our meeting Tuesday. The one focus will allow us to find a more fitting visual style to the site (which apparently must be through media factory).

That’s it for today guys, make sure you put your annotated bibliographies in the dropbox by tomorrow night at the very latest. Have a think and maybe do some research before our meeting next week. 

Thanks,
Dylan’

 

 

 

By using some of my knowledges about Malaysia’s media, we were able to narrow down some of the topics that we were going to present in our websites. We can talk almost about everything since website format has been chosen. The three of us will start looking into some research related to the different of Australia and Malaysia audience culture. As for me, of course I was assigned to do some in depth research about Malaysian audience and by using some of my knowledge, I can relate it to our research topic.

Till next week!

Moving into Something

So finally we manage to get a rough ideas about what are we going to talk about for our ‘audience’ research. Listened to the lectorial we had last Tuesday make us some sort of knows what actually we can do. Dylan and I went into some depth by talking about the different sets of audience here in Australia and back in Malaysia. The prototype of our media artifact is due next week so definitely we need to have something by the end of the class.

So by the end of the day, with some help from Rachel, we manage to pull out with something. After careful consideration, Dylan and I were decided to emphasis with my case study, comparing the audiences in different cultures. Malaysian culture still uses a conceptually broadcast era media format to present their news, with the vast majority of news being told through a single, Government run news program once a night, broadcasting to a mass audience. We compare this to the  post-broadcast western culture, which has many different news programs available for very specific demographics, as well as a higher level of reliance on internet based news.

So finally we are moving into something!

Cheers.

First Meet Up

I was unable to meet up with Dylan and Daniel as scheduled before due to eyes infection. Dylan and Daniel were there in class and they are taking something in depth. They specifically fill up our collaborative contracts, talks about our group goals and what do we want to achieve in the next following week and they also did some discussions about the media artifact that we going to use in presenting our research topic.

One thing for sure is we have a strong communication among each other. Even though that I couldn’t make it for today’s meeting, Dylan did sent me an email to keep me updated and well informed of the ideas that we have been floating around. Those email sent turn out to be something crucial for us as it make sure that we do not suffer from any setback.

First and the last group assignments for Media 1

Done with presenting our project brief 4 and received the feedback from Rachel and also my classmates, we were then straightly assigned for our final project brief 4. And wait, it’s a group work. So to cut the story short, I was assigned with Dylan and Daniel. This is our first time working together and it’s totally going to be another challenging yet fun to be done with those guys.

We were assigned with ‘audiences’. We need to pick a specific topic about this topic and present it using any media artifact as long as it is presentable. So we started by doing some discussion about this topic and frankly speaking we weren’t unable to choose any specific topic research about audience at first. We put that aside first since Rachel has stress about the ‘collaborative contract’ that we need to work on.

So basically this collaborative contract is something like an agreement contract on three of us. Thinking of when you want to make movie or something, the production definitely will give you some sort of contract agreement and both must have mutual agreement. And it is basically the same. So we went on and talk about it, what do we want to achieve, what each one of us need to do in order to achieve our target and our responsibility for this group.

I found this as a good things as I have never practice it before back in Malaysia. We decided to meet up the next Tuesday to discuss more about our research.

Cheers.

Project Brief #3 Peer Review

That feeling when Rachel open up my blog to show my Project Brief 3 to the whole class was, nerve wrecking. I don’t know what to expect from my classmates since they have shown some cool and good piece of videos.

After we have viewed my videos and also others, we had some small talk in a group of 5 reviewing the work have done. In overall, they pretty much like my video but of course, there still also some improvement I can do according to them.

Maggie told that my opening shot was too long, up until 15 seconds. I agreed with her since I personally thinks that it should have be much more shorter so that the audiences doesn’t have to wait too long to know what is all about. She added that maybe I can add some dialogue overlaying the shot of Aiman playing the guitar.

Bianca said that he love the soundtrack as it suits well with the videos. Rob said he love the stock footage I have chose for this project as he can’t differentiate much between the original footage and stock ones. He also love where all the shots are properly organised and he feels like I actually do the shooting in Japan.

Here are the links of my peer’s projects. Go and check them out!

Bianca, used her neighbor as her subject matter for this project. How lucky she was to have a tarot card reader as a neighbor and able to produce an amazing piece of video to cover his fascinating and one of a kind possessions.

Here is Sandy‘s. She was pretty worried by choosing her mother as a subject matter but I can say that she have done some good work to cover her mother’s life and experiences in a 2 minutes short of videos.

I can say that the ones that I love and enjoyed watching is Maggie‘s. I thinks she have produce a good and quality pieces of videos. Just like me, she chose her best friend as her subject and the ways she portrayed his best friend was very creative. I love the way how she narrates her video and how she used flipping books to cover the life of her best friend.

Unfortunately, one our our friend, Rob was pretty busy lately and wasn’t able to upload his on time. Hopefully he can do that later and I definitely going to link in here. Stay tune for that!

Cheers!

Workshop #6

So in our last workshop, we had some exercises with the equipment we required to used for our Project Brief 3, Zoom H2(N) audio recorders. Through this exercise, I can explore more about this gadget as it would be helpful for my next project brief.

We were divided into a group of 2 and all we got to do is try to gather as many sounds as we can using the Zoom audio recorder. It was pretty interesting and challenging as we can’t get the exact sound that we need especially in outdoor environment.

All in all, we manage to gather the sounds needed and we also manage to differentiate between the recorded sound and also the normalize ones. What happen when we normalize the sound is the sound become more clearer compared to the original ones.

I really thought that I need to discover more about the audio recorder as it would be helpful for me in the future. Not to forgot, as a media practitioners, for sure I need to get a little touch on anything I learned as I will be use it later on in life.

Sound clip below is the differences between normalized and the original version of a sound.

Cheers!