Monthly Archives: April 2017

Week 8 Lectorial

The lectorial this week (8) focused on audiences, which was actually quite fitting considering my interview with Josh Ladgrove was centred on the role an audience plays in comedy. Josh had a rather different view of audiences than the norm. In regular shows, the audience is a passive entity, watching the TV/live performance/whatever media they are consuming in full, and then reflecting upon it afterwards. However, much like the concept of “the people formally known as the audience”, the boundaries shift in his comedic shows. He uses the audience as an active participant in his productions. Similarly to the fandom audience, how they write fan fiction, enter contests etc etc, this goes even further. The audience actually becomes part of the show.

The lecture suggests that media practitioners accept that the “people formally known as the audience” new role. That they should welcome and integrate them into their content. I completely agree, having been to see Josh Ladgrove perform, being an active participant in the show as an audience member is thrilling.

Moving forward, I would attempt to think of a way to harness this active audience role in various other forms of media. Though to be honest, its hard to think of a way a big budget show could rely on such a variable concept. The show can be bad if an audience doesn’t bring it that night, and if there is a lot of money invested in this particular content, how willing are the producers/investors going to be to let the show ride on what kind of audience you have.

Project Brief 3 – Critical Reflection

Starting off with the positives, the most successful part of the work in my opinion is the focus. I originally tried to just do an interview about comedy in general, but it was too broad and all over the place. Once I honed in and focused on a much more specific topic (the importance and role of the audience in Josh’s specific brand of improv comedy) I found it much easier to create not only a succinct video, but an interesting one. There’s no jumping around of topics, and there’s no distractions, it all fits together well, as its all quite specific to a singular theme.

Obviously that could also be a downside, if someone isn’t interested in the nuances of stand up comedy, and is just looking for some laughs, this probably isn’t going to hit with them. So it may narrow the audience a bit. But it still fills its niche well in my opinion.

 

In terms of what didn’t work, I needed better cut-aways. That was mainly due to inability to get access into the buildings due to licensing though, so not sure what else I could have done there. The lighting wasn’t good at all either, I had to work with the time I could get with him, and the inability to shoot inside to get good lighting, but still I should have found some way to shift the light source a little bit, its a bit harsh on his face.

I’d also say that I should have maybe used a third camera angle. I sort of edited in a second camera angle (close up) for the final seconds, but perhaps If I just shifted the camera around a bit and shot him side-on for a couple of answers, that could’ve added something interesting. It might be a tad visually bland.

 

Something I can take away from this is the importance of preparing for a much longer interview than you need. I shot an interview that went for 25-30 minutes, and only barely pulled together enough material on this one specific topic. Obviously you are constrained by how long the subject has to give you, but the more the merrier. If you ask lots and lots of questions about a whole variety of topics, it just gives you more canvas to work with and trim down into a neat 2-3 minutes. I think what I aimed for was 10 minutes of filming for every minute the final cut would be, but I could have asked even more questions.

 

I learnt a few things that can be extrapolated out to my development as a content creator. It was good to be able to get behind a proper camera for an extended period of time, I think I’d like to move into directing, so any time spent in that sort of a role will be great experience. Secondly, If I planned the specific style of interview early, rather than just kept the questions broad, I could have got a few more usable minutes.

Planning before you Shoot

In this weeks class, we were asked to create a film without editing. It was a good exercise to focus on actually planning what you are going to shoot before you shoot it. The cameras were still able to delete footage, which was an option unavailable in years past when shooting on film, but there was no editing done in post.

The exercise is obviously aimed to stop the age old adage of just getting a shot done and “fixing it in post”. But there’s also the problem that switching to digital provides, which is an endless amount of film. Nowadays, you can carry around so much memory with you, that it would be virtually impossible to run out of space while shooting a film. I think this creates a particular problem. It is much easier now to simply go out and shoot as much as you can, then rely on your editing to get something good. Having an extremely constrained amount of film to shoot on forced a director to be conscientious about what they filmed. I think this probably would have provided the editor with a much more focused and coherent narrative to work with.

I definitely need to start storyboarding/planning my work much more rigorously. Editing software is a great tool to put together the narrative, and create things with the pieces of film you have shot. But if the shooting is done without proper planning, there is only so much editing can do to create something meaningful. If the shooting is thoughtless, the editing cannot fix that. There’s also the problem of amount of content. If the director simply shoots as much as they can, it makes the editors job that much more difficult, as they have so much more footage to sift through and find good shots. However if the director is much more focused with his vision of the film, the editor will have an easier time collating it into something worth watching.

Filming without Editing

For this weeks class we were required to shoot a quick ~1 minute film in small groups with the theme “Pursuit”. The film had to be done purely in camera, with no editing allowed. We planned our video for quite a long time, around an hour, storyboarding it and planning each individual shot. Once we were out shooting, we quickly realised that we didn’t have time to shoot what we had planned and decided to alter the ending to get it finished within the time.

Honestly the film came up quite well, probably the best I had made so far this year in class. As Paul had talked about previously in one of our lectures, when something goes wrong it always works out for the best. Serendipity.

I felt we used the cuts well, especially at the beginning of the film. We wanted to portray haste and quick movement in a very short amount of screen time, without just filming the talent getting up and running. So we used a technique that Edgar Wright often employs in his films, hitting action moments for a fraction of a second one after the other with quick smash cuts. I thought it worked perfectly, creating the sense of urgency without having to actually film very much content.

Who to Interview

So I get the camera next Wednesday for a week to interview my subject. Problem being that I have no idea who I’m going to interview yet.

A few ideas floating around in my head, but nothing concrete yet. Someone I know would be easiest, a family member or family friend or something. It would also mean I’d have plenty of access to them whenever required outside of the actual allotted time to shoot the interview. So I’ll probably end up going that way.

But I also have a few people I know who work for the herald sun and I was thinking about maybe trying to see if I could swing an interview with a sports journalist. It would make for an interesting interview but it would also mean that if I don’t get everything I need in the shoot, I can’t really just go and ask for more of their time.

Week 6 Lectorial

Another week, another guest lecturer.

This week we had Paul come in and talk to us about what it means to be a media operator, specifically referencing our interviews for the most part.

He focused a lot on something he seems to have developed a large philosophy on…Serendipity. Its an interesting concept, namely the idea that things that happen by chance are beneficial. His idea of a serendipitous action was slightly more specific though in relation to media, that being whenever something goes wrong on a project/shoot, it is always for the best. He believes that the outcome is going to be better than what you had originally planned. But not only that, he also believes that it is necessary to believe this in order to keep your project moving forward.

Its actually quite a nice idea to be honest, and actually quite helpful. If something bad happens, just will it into being something that will work out for the best.

Workshop Exercise in Week 6

Our workshop exercise this week was to split into groups and create a short video with the theme “misunderstanding”. The video was to contain one single shot (i.e. no cuts) and we had to try to rely on as little dialogue as possible to progress the plot. We actually ended up using no spoken words for the video.

Interviews

This week we had a guest lecturer who gave us a one hour crash course in interview skills, as our next assignment is to cut together an interview that we will conduct over the next week or two.
The different aspects of interviewing were cut into the Who, What, When, Where and Why questions we need to ask ourselves in order to give a proper interview. Namely, who are you interviewing, What is your interview about (the subjects history, their profession, their interests etc etc), How to actually conduct ourselves when we are in the interview and Why we chose to do an interview with this person/why we chose the questions we did etc.
As of right now, I’m not entirely sure who I’m going to interview, though I have a few ideas of what direction I might take the assignment. One is to try and interview some form of sports writer, and try to cut together a classic “quick fire round” of questions hitting a few broad topics in their sport of expertise.
Another idea could be to interview my housemate, as he ran in the last federal election. Though Im not entirely convinced I’d like to go the political route on this task.