Quite simply, in media one this week we looked at stories. What makes a story? Why do we tell them? Is everything a story, or can a media text be entirely story free? These were the questions brought up by tutor and as-it-turns-out-hilarious lecturer Daniel Binns.

At school, you get taught that stories are most simply made up of a beginning, middle and end, and looking at it pretty basically, that’s true of most media (or at least Western media). But Daniel took things a step further by exploring the idea of causality (what we in year twelve media called ‘the story element cause and effect’). Causality is pretty much as simple as it sounds: it’s the idea that one event causes another, and that in turn causes another and so on and so forth. In media, this concept – while on the surface painfully obvious – is really important to think about in depth because it constitutes the way in which we develop traditional narratives.

Daniel broke the idea of ‘causality’ in narrative media down into three parts: plot, resolution and character development. These are three key elements of narrative media that demonstrate the importance of causality.

The first of these, plot, should be fairly obvious. Causality is how we progress plots – in our primary school scheme, causality fills in the middle between the beginning and end. The Wizard of Oz would be pretty boring if we started with Dorothy arriving in Oz and then moved straight onto her getting home; in the middle we have the plot, which is made up of a chain of linked events. Dorothy accidently kills The Wicked Witch of the East, which leads to her being pursued by The Wicked Witch of the West, which leads to her being sent down the yellow brick road, etc, etc, until finally she finds the Wizard and can return home.

Which brings us to the second point: resolution. As Daniel put it, the resolution of a plot relies on causality not just because it is the last in the chain of linked events, but because it is the resolution of everything that has happened in the film. At the end of The Wizard of Oz, not only does Dorothy return home, but her companions get their wishes, the Wizard finds redemption, Toto is saved, and then absolutely everything is resolved in the neat (and rather frustrating, if you ask me) conclusion that ‘it was all just a dream’. The point is, this plot resolution was caused not just by the event directly preceding it, but all the major plot points of the film. Thus, causality is not just important in telling a story that moves from event to event (the plot), but in telling a story that follows the satisfyingly familiar Western story structure of opening, development and resolution (the year twelve media way of saying beginning, middle and end).

Finally, character development. Daniel brought up a classic storytelling phrase when explaining this point: ‘show don’t tell’. We all get told in creative writing classes to use techniques to create our characters rather than openly describing them, for example, “he squinted, his eyes adjusting to the dawn light filtering through his unusually non-bespectacled eyes” is preferable to “he couldn’t see without his glasses”. (Give me a break, I made it up on the spot.) In narrative media (for argument’s sake let’s restrict it to film and TV), this means using techniques – such as story – to highlight the characters’ attributes. For example, in The Wizard of Oz . . . oh wait . . .

Not a great example of show don’t tell. Let’s look at X-Men (the first one). When Rogue being lost and alone leads to Logan (Wolverine) taking her in, we don’t need a narrator to tell us that beneath his steely exterior (hardy-har-har), wolverine has a heart of gold.

So stories are pretty important. In fact, I’m getting distracted by one right now, so I’d better head off!

Today I had a very exciting experience; I took part in my first RMITV shoot. RMITV (as the name might suggest) is RMIT’s student television department. As a paid member (for the grand sum of $10 a year), I receive regular emails advising me of student projects that require cast and crew. A few weeks ago, I got a crew call for The Assenders, a sitcom about – well, I’m not too sure quite what it’s about yet, but it’s a locally-grown student sitcom so I’m sure it’ll be worthwhile. Considering Sundays are a good day for me, I emailed back, admitting that while I had next to no experience I was keen and eager to please.

Luckily, I heard back quickly that there was a place for me as a production assistant. Sure, in the film industry this is a fancy word for ‘go-fer’, but it still meant I would be on a real live set. And I wasn’t disappointed. To a professional, I’m sure our fifteen-strong crew of teens and young adults must have seemed almost laughable, but to me, to hear words like “rolling . . . mark . . . action!” was a very exciting experience.

I spent most of the day on the boom microphone, making sure that all the actors could be heard without maxing out the boom levels on the camera. It’s not a particularly glamorous job (especially when I fell off my stepladder into several shelves of painting supplies), but it was a job nonetheless and one I was proud to do.

It was great to be able to watch the key creative team (writers, producers and directors) go about their work. From what I could tell, they all had quite a bit of experience with RMITV and media in general; they’d worked on live shows such as Live on Bowen and other narrative shows such as Fergus in Hell:

It was great to see them at work, taking the jokes in their heads and turning them into a fully fledged TV show. Filming at Grimes and Sons paint shop in Eltham, we focussed on one scene in episode one, in which Mike (played by Mike Gorrie), a failed auteur, decides to take part in a decidedly dodgy local stand-up gig, ‘laughapalooza’. I can’t reveal too much else, because I don’t want to do a disservice to the creators and everyone else on set (including me), so all I’ll say is watch out for The Assenders!

Oh, and make sure you check out the RMITV website to have a look at some of the other awesome, student-made content that’s there to be watched. Please remember that loads of media professionals get their start with student TV, and without it many others would never get the chance to pursue their passions and have their fantastic ideas made into real content. So please support us, just by having a watch!

We had a mini-screening on Thursday; everyone’s brief threes. They were really good, and I was particularly impressed with the variety of subjects chosen, from Dusty‘s taxidermist to Patrick‘s Auschwitz survivor.

We then broke into small groups to get a bit of feedback on what worked well and what didn’t. People seemed to like the effect of the polaroid pictures in mine, making it original and fun, and they liked my presence as a narrator, giving the story an affectionate, story-book tone. There were a few issues with the audio dipping in and out but on the whole I think people were able to follow what was going on.

The other members of my group produced amazing and unique portraits that I was glad to be able to watch. Bianca was lucky enough to have a tarot card reader for a neighbour, and used a fantastic amount of b-roll to cover his unusual and fascinating possessions.

Ariff, like me, chose a friend, but used beautiful music and clever found footage to pain a portrait of a traveller. Our only issue was the unusual aspect ratio, but obviously that was a tech issue and not his fault.

Sandy was worried that by choosing her mother hers might be a bit boring, but we all agreed that her personal perspective was touching and she’d covered enough of her mother’s life to create an engaging film.

Unfortunately, Rob has been a bit busy lately and so hasn’t finished his yet, but keep an eye on his blog for when it’s all finished (hopefully about 27/4).

And that’s about it. I know this seems like a short post, but I can’t think of much to say about the films that you can’t see for yourselves by watching them. If you want to check out any others from my class (and I recommend that you do because they’re all really good), head to the blog of our tutor, Rachel, and click on the links at the side to head to the others’ blogs. Enjoy!

Yesterday’s lecture was all about semiotic theory: the idea that in all communication there are certain ‘signs’ that create meaning because of a shared social understanding of that sign. It makes sense when you think about it; an easy example to use is that of language. The word ‘dog’ doesn’t inherently mean anything; to a native Spanish speaker it means nothing. However, in English speaking countries, we immediately associate it with a small, four-legged animal because that’s what our shared understanding of it is.

In media, this theory is particularly important because we gain a great deal of understanding that isn’t explicitly explored. For example, if you saw a picture of Voldemort having never seen Harry Potter before, you could probably still guess that he was the bad guy because our society has a shared understanding that black clothing and inhuman features signifies evil.

In media analysis, we call this interpretive process ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’ (thank you year twelve media!). ‘Denotation’ is what actually, physically appears in a media product. In the above example, it would be a picture of a strange-looking man with black robes. The ‘connotation’ is the meaning we gain from this due to our shared social understandings (eg. he’s the bad guy).

We can further look at this process of denotation and connotation in terms of ‘codes’ and ‘conventions’ (again, thank you year twelve media!). A ‘code’ is a technical aspect of a media production; for example, sticking with the Harry Potter, it could be the darkness and lack of bright lighting in the final movie. The ‘convention’ is the meaning associated with this code, so in the case of Harry Potter it would be that these are ‘dark’ times for the wizarding world and that Harry is in danger.

And that, in a nutshell, is what media analysis is all about: understanding the meaning associated with technical aspects of a media product, and thus being able to understand both the creator’s choices and the effect the product has on its audience.

I promised yesterday to make up for Friday’s missing post with an extra post today about Thursday’s tute, so here it is. On Thursday, we were looking at the technical side of sound recording.

Anything you can hear on a recorded piece of media can be categorised as one of the following: music, speech, sound (eg. footsteps, birdsong) and noise (unintended music, speech or sound). As Rachel (my tutor, in case I hadn’t mentioned it) pointed out to us, you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your ears, so sound is a really integral part of a media piece in terms of engaging the viewer/listener and setting a tone.

Thus, it’s obviously pretty important to ensure that you create good sound, and while a well-loved media saying is “we’ll fix it in post”, you make it easier for yourself when you record high-quality sound in the first place. Rachel was keen to emphasise that just from listening to a recorded sound, you (and yes I mean you, not necessarily a media professional but an ordinary person too) can determine where a sound was recorded in relation to the microphone, how far away from the microphone the source was and what type of microphone was used.

So in true media student style we headed out, armed with a few nifty microphones from tech services, and recorded our own sounds. We had a big list of items to cover, from traffic to talking to taps, and then had to return to class to evaluate the quality of what we had recorded. Ali and I managed to get most of the things on our list, and I’d love to post them here but my internet’s gone a bit haywire so unless I want to sit here for five hours . . . (I don’t).

These are some of the questions we had to reflect on when we got back to class:

What problems did you encounter? Probably the biggest problem was recording the outside sounds, as there was an RUSU function on at Bowen Street that overpowered most of our sounds, creating a poor ‘signal-to-noise ratio’. Birdsong was particularly difficult to hear over the pounding festival-style music.

What were your most successful recordings? I think the train recording was particularly good, as you can clearly hear both the train announcer and the train itself, which I think gives it a really good sense of place and a story-like aspect.

What did you discover about mic techniques/setting levels? We were using an omni-directional microphone, meaning that we did not have to use the mic in a certain direction or anything like that, so it was actually fairly easy to use.

Our lectorial this week was all about how to use the library and collaboration part two, so not much to blog about that I haven’t already covered. So instead, I thought I’d talk again about one of my other subjects, textual crossings, which once again has a startling relevance to media one.

This week in textual crossings, we started looking at adaptations of real stories, and watched Todd Hayne’s 1987 biopic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. It was particularly relevant to media one because we’re in the midst of assignment three, which is once again about doing a media portrait, but this time about someone else. It’s not exactly a biopic; it’s an exploration of their personality rather than their life story, but I would say Superstar actually fit this brief nicely. Instead of telling Karen Carpenter’s life story, it focussed on a few years and her battle with anorexia, dissecting the motivation of it and in turn different aspects of her personality.

Now that I’m planning my own media portrait, it was interesting to see the innovative ways in which Haynes tried to represent Carpenter’s personality. The most obvious is that nearly the entire film consists of barbie dolls being moved around in front of the scene to represent the Carpenter family. It’s a interesting depiction not only of the Carpenters’ reputation as being the wholesome, “American Dream”-like family next door, but also of Karen’s obsession with her body image.

Having said all that, it’s important for me to say that I really hated Superstar. I thought it was really crass in the way it made a melodramatic, almost horrific spectacle of what should have been Karen’s private battles, and I thought that it unfairly reduced her entire personality down into one illness. But within the context of assignment three I was almost glad I had disliked it because it gave me an understanding of my own personal tastes when it comes to media portraits and exactly what I don’t want to do with my own work.

Of course, I’m only one person. Haynes’ film is considered by many to be a gritty, artistic film that gives the viewer a real understanding not just of Karen’s personality but of anorexia as a disease. Because Haynes never got permission to use the many Carpenters songs that appear throughout the movie, it was never able to be released in cinemas. It was shown at several festivals and awards nights after its initial release, with a mostly positive response, and then it was distributed through back-door, black market channels. Currently, you can see it on YouTube, so I’ve linked to it below so you can have a look at a bona fide media self-portrait. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think; I know I’m looking forward to the discussion in the textual crossing tute tomorrow.

One of the key things you study in year twelve media is forms of regulation. One example of media regulation that I’d like to tell a personal story about today is the advertising standards bureau or ASB. An independent industry regulatory body, the bureau takes complaints about ads on TV and judges them against certain criteria, and has the power to remove ads from air. I’m writing about it today because my dad has made a complaint.

There are plenty of criteria against which ads are judged, such as the inclusion of discrimination, endorsement of unsafe behaviour or depiction of illegal behaviour. It’s based on the last criterion that Dad has made a complaint. You might be familiar with a certain Nimble ad in which two parents are in strife when they realise they can’t pay for the DJ at their child’s birthday party. Luckily, Nimble comes to the rescue with an on-the-spot loan.

Dad complained on the basis that in hiring the DJ without knowing for sure that they could pay him, the parents were engaging in a contract that they couldn’t fulfil, which is against the law.

It may seem a bit pedantic, but I think it is fair. I mean, we shouldn’t be encouraging people to buy things they can’t afford on the basis that they can lend money to pay for it. But if you think that’s pedantic, you should see some of the ads that have been cancelled by the ASB. Have a look at these, and see if you can guess why they’ve been banned.

Give up? Ad A was banned for misleadingly suggesting that preservatives could make you glow in the dark. Ads B and C were both banned for depicting unsafe behaviour; the first for depicting unsafe road behaviour and the second because using electronics in water can cause electrocution.

Seems pretty crazy, right? I mean, surely people have some common sense and can work these out for themselves? These aren’t even the worst. If you want to see how crazy people can get, check out this Mumbrella article by Tim Burrowes about some of the worst complaints made to the ASB over the years. It should give you a bit of a laugh.

That’s right. I’m cheating today and making a post completely of other people’s work. But that’s because other people’s work is awesome!

Yesterday was the day of reckoning – showing brief two to the class. It was of course highly embarrassing but people seemed to laugh quite a lot at mine (which was my intention) so I think it worked out well.

There were some pretty awesome ones in my class though; I’m particularly impressed considering a lot of kids didn’t seem to have much experience with filming or editing and still managed to produce something pretty slick. I feel bad only putting up a few – they were all amazing – but here are the highlights.

First, we’ll start with Emma, Daniel and Gloria because I linked into their earlier briefs so I’m sure you want to know how they ended up. Emma’s starts with a really gorgeous shot out of her window and continues beautifully the theme of home. Daniel’s ambient soundtrack pulled together some of the shots we loved but felt were a bit disjointed in brief one, and although Daniel’s joke time is missing, it definitely captured what he was going for. Gloria retained the gorgeous shot of the jellyfish at the aquarium and it ties together a really peaceful video.

Lucas’s is next. I don’t know if he used a really good camera or he’s just got a knack for this filming business, but his manages to both look really professional and tell a lot about his personality.

Next up we have Elise’s and Dusty’s, which I’ve put in together for a bit of contrast. Elise’s reminds me of Lucas’: really beautifully shot, and telling a story about a transition in her life. (For more explanation of each of the films, head to each of the student’s blogs, where there should be a 250-300 word evaluation. They’re all listed on the RMIT media factory side which you can see over on my blogroll). Elises’s has a wonderfully meandering pace, which suits the decadent, natural shots, where Dusty’s frenetic pace and incredible variety of footage says a lot about her quirky, adventurous personality.

Finally, even though it was technically a little long, Jac’s uses a really clever, adorable voice-over conversation that brings the whole video into fluent narrative.

You might have noticed that the posts have been a little light-on this week; we’re on a mid-semester break at RMIT so there’s not been much to report with regards to readings, tutes etc. We’re back tomorrow so the blog will return to a normal pace this weekend.

In the meantime, I thought I’d just do a quick post linking to an Age article that caught my eye this morning: Three strikes’ anti-piracy scheme launched in wake of Dallas Buyers Club threat. 

The article is all about the hotly-debated issue of recent years that is online piracy. It seems it’s pretty common these days for the internet to be used to transmit and download illegally recorded copyrighted material. Now, at RMIT we’ve had ‘the talk’ about copyright infringement and there’s a lot to understand, but it’s probably pretty obvious that watching Breaking Bad online when you haven’t paid for it is against the law. It’s a big problem, and as both a media student (which really makes me a producer) and a media consumer, I can see both sides of the argument.

On the one hand, by stealing media you are partaking in behaviour that’s significantly reducing the amount of money circulating in the media industry. It may be difficult to feel bad about taking money away from an industry that seems to be incredibly lucrative, but it’s important to remember that there are plenty of average workers in the media industry who could be put out of jobs if the industry has to be decreased. And even when it comes to the big corporations, surely there’s still a moral and ethical right for creators to be able to control the creative work they’ve produced?

But of course, it’s all very well to talk of these things in theory. It’s difficult to remember them when you’ve just heard season five of Game of Thrones is coming out on Foxtel but it won’t be on Australian free-to-air. As a media consumer and a student, I can’t pretend that I haven’t succumbed to illegal downloading when my favourite show hasn’t been on free-to-air and I couldn’t afford the DVD (and I can’t rent it either, now that my local DVD shop has shut down). I like to think that I’ve just about stopped any illegal downloading now that I’ve gotten myself onto Stan, a pay-by-month internet streaming service, but I understand where the urge to download comes from.

However, it may not be so easy for much longer; the article hyperlinked above explains new policies established by telcos companies that may allow users to be prosecuted for illegal downloading. It’s a little difficult for me to explain succinctly (and I’m not sure I entirely understand it for that matter), but it once again provokes the interesting discussion surrounding the morality of downloading and the effect it’s having on the media industry.

As a keen Richmond Tigers supporter, I kicked off my long weekend by heading to the first AFL game of the season, the classic Richmond v. Carlton classic. Now that I’m a media student and everything is ruined by my constant observation of the media world, I noticed just how media-bombarded an AFL game is.

We started with the pre-match entertainment; as the home team Carlton were entitled to host the show and their signature navy blue glared on screens all across the stadium as their mascot danced on a hovercraft to Black Betty, blasted through the speakers all around the grandstands. Ads then followed on the scoreboards and I tuned into my FM radio to hear what the commentators had to say.

It was actually one of the commentators that brought all this media to my eye. Banner ads encircle the field, and every few minutes they would change, occasionally to a bright red ad for sponsor Carlton Draught. After an unfortunate behind that probably should have been a goal, the commentator suggested that the ad may have been distracted. “It may sound like an excuse,” he said, “but that flash of red could put you off.”

It was an interesting thought. Between the scoreboard, the banner ads, the music during the breaks, the ‘goal’ video played after every major and the pre-match entertainment, the modern game is immersed in media. Is it too much? Does it distract from the game?

Personally (and maybe this is just the media student in me talking), I don’t think so. While the advertising can seem ostentatious, it’s such a high-stakes industry in terms of money that it’s pretty integral these days. And in terms of everything else, I think it adds to, rather than distracts from, the game. I love being able to hear the commentators over the radio and I like the excitement of scoring a goal created by the scoreboard videos. I like having music to listen to at half-time and I like seeing stats such as the top goal scorers on the big screen.

I guess it’s a personal preference. But I think I can say that media or no media, for a footy fan like me there’s nothing quite like the atmosphere of a live game.