It was a mix of content delivered in this lectorial.
The first third was lecture delivered by guest lecturer, Paul Richard concerning our role as media operators and the responsibilities associated with that position. A topic that covered a pretty wide section of behind the scenes considerations that we as inexperienced media makers may well overlook. While certainly not glamorous things like permissions, insurance, and ethics were introduced – all critical considerations in terms of the risk management of any production.
In terms of the immediate future, we were to utilise a participant release for Project Brief Three and all future projects requiring non-student contributors. We were also informed of location release if we wish to film/record offsite – I am certain we will become quite familiar with both and much more over the coming years. While it feels tedious, these documents are there to help and protect us.
The second third, delivered by Brian we looked at previous examples of Project Brief Three from previous students. It was notable that they had slightly different criteria to us, specifically that they had to make use of found/archival footage in their production. They were diverse and varied. Each made huge stylistic choices based on the subject matter. Personally, I noticed how important the cutaways were to each – they were not always directly related to what was being said but sometimes they would be there to add breadth and depth to the production and the characters therein. To quote Hannah earlier in the semester, ‘the sounds do not have an obligation, to explain the visuals’ – there can be more relationships than that simple binary; there could be similarities, parallels, metaphors and contrasts to be explored through breaking this attachment to the arbitrary association between the uniformity of what we see and hear.
Towards the end of the lectorical we watched a majority of an episode of The Virtual Revolutions, a BBC documentary series. The episode in question was entitled ‘The Cost of the Free’, and related directly to the Danah Boyd’s writing on the matter of privacy and information trade, particularly how much is done voluntarily due misunderstandings, indifference or convenience. Probably because I was already in the mind state of looking at the cuts and editing decisions of what we were viewing I was struck by all the segments of the documentary. It was never committed to being a fixed perspective or type of footage. From memory alone it used, interviews, speaking directly to the camera, narrations and cutaways, animated diagrams among others. The production was using these tools and techniques to serve the information it was communicating.
