Tag: reflection

Reflecting on ‘Itchy Feet’

July 31, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Semester 2 has well and truly begun with our first Radio’s New Wave Studio project; a peer portrait, done and dusted.  I had the pleasure of working with Emily Wade who I find incredibly chilled out and easy to chat to.  We started this assignment by sitting outside a pub with a beer (Stone&Wood get in ma belleh) and a Zoom H2n each, and simply questioned each other one at a time in more of a conversational manner rather than a straight up interview.  Looking back on the recordings, I found I had a fair amount of stimulus on Emily’s experiences living around various places in Australia and decided from there to make that my focus point.

I found the quality of some of the recordings were somewhat marred by the traffic going by us.  However, I feel the traffic noise was appropriate for the subject being spoken about by Emily – travelling.  What better way to soundtrack travel than with traffic?  Having said that, if I were to do it again I may have recorded in a quiet room and layered in the traffic to allow more room to experiment with sound and creativity.

I managed to utilise layers in the ambient sound effects of rainforest sounds and seagull cries to emphasise the point that Emily’s favourite place is the Border Ranges, where the rainforest meets the sea.  I also used layering the names of the places she’s been in the beginning, as well as when she talks about her hectic time in Sydney.

A factor I found particularly difficult with this project was simply learning a new editing program from scratch.  I used Reaper which I had never used before, so the process of editing was slow in the beginning, but Emily and I met up and managed to get the hang of Reaper faster by working together.  Hopefully in the next project, since I’ll have the basics of Reaper almost mastered, I’ll be able to do some more complex sound editing techniques and effects.

Overall though, it’s been a blast working with Emily and I’m relatively happy with the outcome of my piece on her.

H is for HOLIDAYS

June 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

This first semester on university has been a blast.  I’ve learnt so much not only about media but also about myself.  With Introduction to Cinema and Sound Design accompanying the media one course this semester, I’ve learnt much about how media is absolutely everywhere.  I’ve become a lot more aware of how media impacts my life and it’s importance as well as technical aspects of manipulating sound and, of course, I’ve learnt that I’ll never again be able to just sit down and relax watching a film without analysing every single little tiny detail about it (thanks cinema).  I’ve most recently learnt that collaborative work doesn’t have to be painful and horrible like I thought it was in high school.
I’ve found over this semester that my most effective way of learning is by doing.  I found more information stuck with me throughout experiential learning or through discussion rather than through listening to lectures.

I suppose I could combine what I found most challenging about the course with what I’ve discovered about my own creative practice and say that the part I found most challenging was the fact that it’s all creative and I find myself going in and out of creative mindsets.  I once read somewhere that creativity is like a fruit tree, it blooms only on certain seasons.  It’s very hard to force the fruit production all year round.  And I guess I could relate because my creative moods come and go where this course asks for creativity in virtually every assessment piece.  So that’s what I found the most difficult.

A definite struggle I have had this semester (which is purely and admittedly my own fault) is procrastination.  I leave things to the absolute last minute, and not just homework and assessments, I’m talking about everything I do and it’s a character trait that I’m working on eliminating for the future.  Procrastination and laziness is the whole reason this blog doesn’t have quite as many posts as it probably should so I’m going to work on that.

Here’s 5 posts that I think were this blogs highlights:

1.  Food for thought on hyper and deep attention

2.  E is for Emily loves sound

3.  Week 5’s collaboration readings

4.  Collaborative Brainstorming

5.  Dreaded Research

 

As a final cap off for the semester, here’s my ‘learning graph’.  It’s backwards but you get the gist of it.

Photo on 5-06-2015 at 6.48 pm #2

Key:

Red:   How much have I learnt about making media objects/stories?

Purple:  What is my ability to work independently in unfamiliar ways or with new systems and tools?

Orange:  How much do I understand and think critically and creatively about what I make?

Brown:  What is my understanding of the role/value of the blog?

 

Adios and happy holidays 🙂