Media One was a substantial change of pace to what I was used to in high school. The course is very fast paced, almost the moment you start you’re already thrown in the deep end. I think as a whole the course has helped me in reflectivity more than in any other area. I went in to the course having worked with clients, on larger projects, my own short films and with a degree of technical knowledge I had gained through volunteering with media makers. For me, I was in this course for the opportunity to make a diverse range of great content, and I think the course certainly pushed me to do the best with what I had.

What I have learned in Media One:

I think more than anything Media One has taught me that intense focus is not always the best way to go about things. Throughout school, we would have these moments of focus, these hot-spots of assignment deadlines and essays and long winded academic writings and study. This course has really gone out of its way to undo me, in the sense that, we don’t have long essays or even exams at all. The content we create forces us to spend a long time planning and organising, effectively undoing the “short bursts of intense focus” doctrine that school has been teaching me all my life. I think this has changed the way I create content and has taught me to rely less on talent and more on theoretical knowledge. One of the disadvantages I had going into the course was technical knowledge. I had operated broadcast cameras, professional field recorders and have been using Premiere Pro (admittedly not always proficiently) for (no joke) almost a decade of my life. In that way, for me it was the self-discovery that I found most illuminating not so much the technical training.

Learning Graph

How I learn:

I have always done my best learning, discovering on my own so this course has been a little rough starting out. A lot of the course has either been revision or things I just entirely had never considered in my life. I learn best when I am given the opportunity to explore past the obvious. I think I have, coming back to my earlier point, been able to focus intensely on a task and not been easily distracted. I attribute this to the way we were brought up in school, this has made blogging particularly hard for me.

What I have found most challenging in the course:

Following on from my last point, blogging has probably been the most difficult part of the course for me. I would have rather written an essay for each week of the course than written five different blog posts about each of it’s facets, because that’s the way my mind has been programmed by years of teaching. I would often leave blogging to too late in the game simply because in many ways I dreaded slogging out such a short piece of writing having usually written longer form pieces, this is why you might find my blog has fewer pieces than most, yet the average word count is more like 450 words. During the semester, my grandfather passed away, this made family life a little strained as my parents expected me to attend a lot of events and to be ready to take care of things at home and abroad when they needed to be elsewhere. This had a substantial negative impact on the work I was doing in the course. I tend to compare and consolidate many things I learn into singular ideas rather than a massive explosion of seperate thoughts. I think in many ways, the difficulty in blogging is just a VCE hangover but also I think I could have done better work if the blogging had been based on say, a minimum word limit than a minimum post count.

What I have discovered about my own practise:

Through the semester I was also directing the second of my festival short film entrants. I found myself using a lot of what I had learned theoretically in the course and in Cinema Studies in my direction of the film specifically when communicating with my DP. Though, on my film everyone who I worked with was amazing, the group projects I have engaged in across electives and courses has told me a lot about conflict management and also how to choose my battles wisely. In a lot of cases, compromise doesn’t have to have a negative effect on the work and the work is the most important thing.

I have enjoyed the course so far but I am very excited about Studios and being able to hone my craft in second semester. I look forward to continuing my media journey here at RMIT. Thank you to all the amazing tutors particularly Seth for supporting us through the course.

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Links:

Google and New Media

Making the Cut

Blogs with words (in a culture of noise)

The Various Philosophical Issues with Narrative as a thing

Practical response to our Audio Essay topic

Having completed two films together, many members of the production team on these films have kind of become a studio family and the task now is to try to expand to include more and more people. I think many crew members went into the film, quite honestly unsure of what to expect but came out just wanting to do another one. Having asked a few people’s help with editing and now having finally synced all the production audio, I have the monumental task of shipping data left, right and centre attempting to facilitate an online edit workflow.

Online-Offline

Online-Offline is a technique for editing tape where you would have the high quality film print made at the end of the film based on the editing decisions made using tape media. In the digital age this isn’t strictly necessary when shooting with manageable files but because this film is so long it starts to get a little crazy. The film we’re working on has approximately 300GB of footage which is barely any considering the film is meant to run 22 minutes in length. The film was shot using terrible H.264 QuickTime files because no matter how hard we hacked the Nikon SLR we were shooting on, we couldn’t escape compression (even with an external recorder, we still wouldn’t have gained any quality improvements). So here we are attempting to have three editors editing simultaneously and, it’s very difficult. The reason online-offline comes into it is that we’re all trying to edit the same footage, keeping all the metadata intact across three project files and create a workflow where we can email each other project files and simply relink the footage to our own drives and go from there.

Server

After realising that we needed some more infrastructure, I grabbed an old netbook, an old router and a 1TB WD drive I had lying around and rigged it up to be used as an ftp server for the studio. This has opened the doors for a great backup solution but at the moment it requires constant refreshes as it doesn’t back up any of the file based metadata logged into the footage files.

Unfortunately there’s no real way to combat this.

As many of you know, I have been working since the beginning of the year on a project entitled Memoriam. Having wrapped the film more than a month ago. It’s extraordinary how long it’s taken even just to prepare for post production. This is my post post, my post about post.

Syncing

Ten weeks since we wrapped and quite frankly, I’m shocked it’s taken so long to sync all the footage. We thought we would be clever and use sync slates and an on-camera shotgun microphone. In my mind, there was no way this would be time consuming, I mean how hard is it to line up some sticks in editing right? Well I was so far from correct. Having a 22 minute film’s worth of footage is one thing. Having to sync it all, is something else entirely. I am so incredibly grateful for the sync slate. Quite frankly, without it, we still wouldn’t be synced, but it begs the question, how can independent, amateur filmmakers improve their production workflow to allow faster syncing in post?

In the industry, timecode is used to sync the sound and picture with multiple timecode “lock-it-boxes” feeding into each individual device to allow LTC (audio-based) timecode to be used to sync. These are expensive pieces of equipment, most lock-it-boxes start at well over $500 and you have to have more than one or there’s literally no point. There are some cheapies out there, most notably the new Tentacle-sync timecode boxes, but even those cost about $500 for a pair (that’s a huge saving over timecode buddy or ambient). So if the industry standard option isn’t available, what is? Well probably one of the best, inexpensive solutions is wireless audio. You can use wireless receivers and transmitters to send identical audio sources to the camera and audio recorder, but even this is incredibly inefficient, requires heaps of batteries and also, is still pretty costly.

I think the best solution is to have the DP always with headphones on and have your boom operator on a longer cable tethered to the camera. It’s not the most ideal situation, especially when shooting long distance to the subject but it means you can use PluralEyes or your editor’s built in audio sync functionality to sync in post.

 

For this post, I’m exploring ideas presented in J. Van Dijck and T. Poell’s ‘Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media’, one of the course readings for the media institutions topic, which if you haven’t been around my blog is the very topic my final assessment is based upon.

Originally, when my group started putting together the video essay, we referred to the idea of Public Service Broadcasting heavily throughout the essay, but I pushed to only refer to this as social media for the reason that is though, yes, social media is public service broadcasting, the inverse is not true. In some circumstances, also, Social Media is not public service broadcasting. Me posting a photo of a cat, isn’t a service. Really. So we changed the wording. What we were originally talking about is this dynamic shift of power between big institutions and small individual humans with Facebook accounts, somehow able to draw a large amount of viewers. As many people watch PewDiePie as they do just about any Australian News Program and this is one of the ways in which the world has changed tremendously over the past few years.

In Van Dijck and Poell’s work, they explore the ways in which institutions have reacted to the rise of social media and the ways in which social media has responded to itself becoming a broadcasting platform. Though most people tend to think of Facebook and YouTube as platforms, they are as much media institutions as any non-web-based institution, so in that way, it is worth pointing out that YouTube and Facebook have ads, sponsored posts and many other revenue avenues including an enormous amount of data mining that occurs without you even knowing it. Check out my post here for more of my thoughts on that. Facebook, especially is a huge corporation, and funnily enough these online mega-conglomerates are just as incestuous as the offline institutions, Facebook owns Instagram, Google owns YouTube, in fact, between Facebook, Microsoft and Google, most people would find themselves on one of their sites all the time.

Similarly in the reading Van Dijck and Poell explore the way television has reacted to social media. Now the networks are trying to breed social media with their own content, Q&A is a great example, taking questions from both the in-show audience and the twitterverse as well as the live feed on the program. If anything will save conventional media broadcasting (which nothing will), it’s the way in which the two of them are colliding to become more involved and open.

So everyone is trying to understand how the NBN can continue to be such a huge cockup and conveniently, there’s this article about it and seeing as though it’s related to institutions, I’ll give you the low-down. Labor introduced a plan to basically just put all the best technology in 95 percept of households, everyone would have fibre all the way from the root to the premises, happy days, and two years ago we were all supposed to have gigabit internet connections, of course, being Australia that didn’t happen because there was an election and parties don’t ever agree on anything ever, so the liberal government basically said a tenth of that speed is enough let’s not waste money, this is though, it sounds bad, a reasonably good idea, but their main reason for doing this was to save time, not money and they haven’t saved any time at all and the cost also hasn’t changed that much, and in the end, we still end up with an old, dated network, still controlled by the big ISPs.

The reading on the NBN says that in contrast to other countries in the world, speed is not marketed here, in fact really the only thing that’s advertised as the difference between ISPs is data allowance. I personally find this really annoying and it permeates through almost every form of technology. Walk into JB Hifi and ask someone what Graphics Chip is in any one of their computers and then wait five minutes while the staff member goes out and checks because it isn’t written on any of the promotional paraphernalia for the product or on it’s tag, instead the Graphics memory is written there, which of course is totally irrelevant without knowing what the card is, but the majority of people buying a computer won’t know that, they see GB and know more is better. They wouldn’t know a megahert if it hit them in the face. And this is the very same thing with the NBN customers understand gigabytes, physical data, size is better but ask them about speed, they don’t know a thing and this, this lack of education is why we’re 60th in the world for internet speed. When Turnbull says “Most australians have no need for gigabit internet” he’s right, because most australians don’t know what a gigabit is.

Today in class, I played the voice track for our audio essay, which I recorded in more of a sort of persuasive online style, the sort of thing you would associate with a massive click-bait title. I wanted to come at it from the perspective of trying to stir up Australians to agree that something needs to be done about our media industry and the rapid descension into total filth that seems to be occurring particularly in television and cinema.

When playing the essay for the class I received some very polarising feedback in terms of people being really positive and really negative. Some people in the class really loved the fast, aggressive pace of it, saying that it kept them engaged, others felt it was too much. I have listed some of the feedback/suggestions I got below:

– Use sound bites to break it up – For example sound effects of Channels switching a lot

– Ask your question up front – set it up faster and more efficiently

– Start cynical – maybe on the back foot before you call your audience to action

– Propose or argue rather than state certain things to be factual

– “This isn’t just my idea, people have been saying this for ages” – back up your idea

– Build to anger, don’t be a bull at a gate

– Slow down!!!!!!!

– Be a little less dense – use “Game of Thrones” almost like a case study, not just as evidence of a problem.

– Balance – Dynamic

 

– Structurally be a little more structured – watch for flow

– Who is your audience

– Diversity of voices – be a little bit more conversational

I really like this feedback I think it give us a lot of direction going forward as we try to make the essay be a little be more factual. Seth suggested I should just go for it. Make a viral YouTube essay and follow it all the way, don’t half commit but totally commit. I think I will take this on board and simplify my argument but keep the tone relatively similar, though maybe just toning down the start a little.

The audio essay for Project Brief 4 is one of the two major outcomes for the assignment. I began writing it today and trie to stay away from a very opinionated piece, however, that wasn’t very fun so I started writing a piece about why and how the media in Australia is becoming worse and worse over time and what should be done about it. A key problem with my argument is that it fails to address the problem of money. Companies can make content that’s the easy part, they can market that content, also easy but the problem is getting people to watch who haven’t watched television in months. The sort of people who live between Netflix and Pirate Bay. The Australian institutions are putting all their ideas straight on free to air, which isn’t helping them at all and you know when the ABC is producing probably the exciting TV, there’s a huge problem! So How do you go about fixing that? I think the key is getting Australian content on Netflix as well. Get it in the same places as the overseas content and make it god enough to hold its own.

The problem then exists, how to fund such a project from the limited resources the commercial television networks in Australia have at their disposal. I think the solution lies in the content itself. I think good quality writing is cheap, you just have to find the people to do it. This is where young talent is important. There’s no reason you can’t find a young screenwriter willing to work cheap. The hard part is then turning that into an achievable idea. I think that this needs to happen especially in the screen department. One of the issues we have is that the best Australian films are made by Americans and American money and the money goes straight back there when a film or television show is successful. Take the series Gallipoli. Biggest budget Australian Television for as long as I can remember and no one even watched it. Cause I just didn’t care enough and to be honest after the first ten minutes it was boring. It was painting a picture of the war not focussing on individuals and stories that I wanted. So many mistakes are made by the out of touch media makers in the country, yet those people who have great things to say rarely actually say it.

Group Work. Ah. Here come the issues. The group chat is like a ghost town. People ask questions and it takes days for people to reply. DAYS. I am spending the majority of my life at my grandfathers bed side at the moment, in hospital and having warned my group that I might be unresponsive, there continues to be radio silence and complete lack of communication on a few people’s behalf and unfortunately I feel a lot of responsibility for it. I the being caught in the middle of family issues and uni. And I hate the fact that my group have to just deal with that. There’s no special consideration for them so the expectation is that I will just keep working even when there is a massive problem with communication.

Glancing at the Collaborative contract, I’ve noticed that all of our skills are different and a lot of my contributions are meant to be in the editing phase, so at this point, I feel like I’m not needed but because all of us are so busy, I wish I could facilitate some work because I know it’s essential that we start working on this assignment now.

One of the things that concerns me is that not even the research portion of the assignment has been done and that counts for quite a substantial part of the writing of the essay. The annotated bibliography is a required document and is due on Thursday. Not excited about the total lack of research so I’m gonna try get a little done now. Cheerio.

 

So you think you know what (a) narrative is? That klusterflop of a sentence is precisely the reason for this blog post.

After Seth’s lecture on non-narrative and the way in which non-narratives are organised and interpreted, I have come to the conclusion that there are essentially three distinctly different ways people actually understand narrative to be. And my theory is that this completely comes down to your own personal philosophical understanding of the universe (more later).

Philosophical Idea Numero Uno: The Narrative as Plot Understanding

The first way in which people understand Narrative is just straight up anything with a story, at all. I will give you an example of what this sounds like… “Oh did you watch Captain America (you know, the second one) in the cinema?” she inquired, “Yes Debra!” Phillis replied, “It was just completely devoid of narrative substance.” “What a shame,” Debra said, “I kind of hoped you were one of those people who’s really hip and cool and can be entertained by the artistry of a 50 minute continuous zoom in.”

Here, our characters Debra and Phillis are having a conversation about Plot, or potentially, Story, and people kind of turned that idea into story. I know in Year 12, I had this kind of understanding, if you’re studying the narrative of something you’re studying it’s story. If you have a book and it’s a narrative, it’s a story, even if it doesn’t have a narrator. “But all books have a narrator!” I hear you cry… yes okay Debra, I’m getting to that.

Philosophical Idea Numero Duo: The Narrative is the collection of things Understanding

This is a really good one if you’re one of the people in the world that has a compulsive need to taxonomize everything. So here you go, narrative is when a thing presents you anything. Narrative is the way in which information is communicated, narrated. In a film, this is when the Director is trying to show you that life is transient so he slaps in 14 consecutive shots of dying flowers. That’s some narrative right there. BOOM! The idea that life is transient has now been narrated to you through the narrative, there’s a narrative, there you go, TADAAAAA!

But wait! Then this blog is a narrative, I am presenting this information to you, trying to get you to think, so then what is non-narrative. How could anything be Non-narrative?!?!

Existential crisis here we come.

Philosophical Idea Numero Tre: The Narrative is all a lie Understanding

“So Debra,” Phillis said, “What is narrative substance?” She thought long and hard. She looked at the ceiling for an answer, then back to the deep purple curtains, she imagined running her fingers along all the cracks in the walls and noted that they, in a sort of subtle, yet beautiful way, represented her flawed understanding of narrative. Composing herself, she stated, “The hero’s journey”. “Codswallop!” shouted Phillis, “You know as well as I do that narrative is just a farce and that the hero’s journey is just trodden tripe screamed from the rooftops of buildings in Burbank”

Here lies the third Philosophical understanding, that narrative is in fact a lie. The acceptance that everything is narrative and therefore, nothing is. Since all art is narrating something, even if it’s a drunk man in a room spitting paint on a canvas, there is a acceptance that narrative is just nothing and everything all wrapped into one, impossible to categorise, impossible to understand, as diverse as the universe itself, impossible to understand and define.

At what point does anything become a narrative? Who decides? No One? Everyone? Beyond all the academic definitions… What actually is a narrative? Is it something that can have an ‘a’ in front of it at all? Is it a singular thing or a constantly evolving force that cannot be stopped no matter how many Debras the world may have?

Today we just got placed in groups for Project Brief 4. One of the issues with this is that I’ve spent all this time sussing out who the strong people in the class are and then just to have no say in the matter is kind of annoying because how do I know this is gonna be any good… I don’t. When you embark on a project with a group of people, you always try to collaborate with the kind of people that understand your thought process and the way you work and the people who can support you. I have no guarantees anyone has my back at all and my life is a little topsy turvy at the moment with family stuff. It’s pretty hard knowing whether or not it will all turn out okay.

I like my group though, I know I will have to help quite substantially with the editing of both essays but I feel good about that at the moment. As long as we can all do our part it will be fine. It could be a little difficult for me to come in to university to meet up with my group because I live so much further from the CBD than both Rachel and Jasmine do.

I sent them an example of a video essay that I love, by the RocketJump Film School. RocketJump is a company that began with weekly YouTube content and now they are a semi-professional studio producing feature-length content for Netflix and streaming services. They have been around since the beginning of YouTube, in the form of Freddie Wong’s YouTube channel Freddiew. One of the first weekly short film producers on YouTube. The video entitled “Why CG sucks (but it doesn’t)” has 6 million videos because of its extremely controversial subject matter.