Filming for Broadcast Media

This week I submitted an evaluative assignment on this blog for my class, Networked Media. In this evaluation of my blogging, I was forced to put down on paper a thought which I have managed to supress for a while: I could be using this blog better.

As far as an educational tool goes, blogging is a big one. An academic blog is like an archive of categorised and archived notes, portfolio pieces, opinions and ideas in one. Everything is linked in a linear way through chronology but also in non-linear ways that would be far more significant for learning. It also stays online to be reflected on later, even years later as paper notes and jotted ideas do not. Not only that but it is all writing practice, after all it is published, public writing, and is therefore practice for committing yourself to something, both the blog and the educational boost that it promises in the long term.

I haven’t used the blog to its best educational ability. In order to do that I would need to write and integrate more blog posts on other work from other classes, other readings and material that I find out of class that I find relates to class content- which is growing every day.

So today I will start trying to use the blog better. Starting with this post about my lack of utilization so far and also about my other summer subject, Broadcast Media.

Today we didn’t have classes, but my group and I did a lot of work on one of our major assessments which is filming and producing a current affairs segment for Today Tonight. The theme is summer and we have chosen beach safety as a topic.

Today we were filming on location at Mill Beach in Mornington. It was a beautiful day, the location was fantastic and everything went smoothly. We were lucky to have very accommodating and helpful interviewees who were patient and allowed us to boss them around and move props around and even assisted us in re-enacting a beach rescue (for which I rather embarrassingly had to play the victim). This made the day flow so easily, but it was a great learning experience nonetheless.

As I film weddings and have seen current affairs pieces filmed before, I thought everything would be a breeze, but there were things to think about which I didn’t expect.

We had to change the direction of the subject and the camera to get the right lighting as it was an outdoor shoot, we had trouble levelling the tripod because it was on sand, the microphones were extremely sensitive to the sounds of the ocean and so we had to swap microphones and be careful of the direction. The angle of the camera in relation to direction in which the speakers were looking and the composition of the frame. All these were things that we’d discussed in class that seemed like common sense were things that you really had to think about in the field.

As we had planned to get all our shooting done in the one day on location, we couldn’t afford to get anything wrong and wanted to get the best possible shots with every piece of recording. However, once you start recording you tend to just point and shoot and forget about some details, the details which make the overall piece look professional.

It will be interesting to see how it turns out. I think there are little things that we could have been more conscious of that will really separate our piece from professional work. Our content is going to be fantastic, our interviewees were amazing and so were our vox-pops, and although I didn’t see our re-enactment as I was the actor, the others said it is looking good as well. Over all the day felt like a huge success for a first time filming this type of current affairs segment. Having watched this segment from Today Tonight since returning I have noticed the small things they do which we took no notice of. On the other hand I think our content is more relevant, interesting and significant than many of their topics and so maybe that levels us out.

There are things I would do differently if I could go back, one thing in particular is to have the presenter standing next to the camera so that when the interviewee speaks he speaks almost into the camera but not directly. This technique is just a minute detail, but it makes Today Tonight, and indeed much TV journalism, more professional now that I think about it. But I think that’s a good thing that I’ve noticed this now. I will be more aware of the details next time, and that’s what the first few times of doing anything is all about.

Trial and error on Social Media

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of posts, I currently work as a freelance photographer and videographer. I love my job; I love capturing true emotion on film. This is what I’m good at and I hope to one day turn my passion into an alternative creative media company.

What I’m not so great at is the business planning side of things. I started freelancing just by putting an ad on Gumtree and I have gradually been growing the business ever since.

Today I decided to set aside the day to set out a business plan. I divided this into three categories.

Business goals
Here I set out the things that I want to achieve in the short term and long term, and outlined the steps in achieving them
Work efficiency
This category covers all the boring organisational stuff. Payment methods, booking sheets, editing software, file organisation and backups etc. The stuff that no one enjoys in but it needs to be done in order to work effectively.
Advertising and social media
All my advertising is done online, on free ad posting outlets and through social media. I intend to create more work opportunities and contacts by putting more effort into my online presence.

Advertising and Social Media should be the area that I most enjoy working on, but I quickly found out that it is more difficult than other people make it look.

I already have a pretty decent website up. I’m quite proud of it because I did everything myself through Adobe Muse. I also have a work Facebook page and I occasionally use my personal Twitter and Instagram accounts to post work related content.

View my blog here.

Today I set out to make the tools I already use more effective and to integrate other popular social media tools in order to reach a greater population.

I was inspired by Linh Luu’s work, he’s a classmate of mine who happens to be an extremely talented photographer and possibly an even more talented social media tycoon. His Facebook page has over 27 thousand followers.

I’m also inspired by Lakshal Perera, a wedding photographer whose work I follow through his Facebook page. Other than admiring his work, I really love the way that Perera uses his blog on his website to connect with fans of his work. He reflects on every wedding he photographs and his blog is a reflection of his amiable nature, talent and also genuinely caring work methods. This is so effective that he doesn’t even need to advertise.

I genuinely love filming weddings, and I feel a connection to the couples that I capture on film through the emotion that I sense on their big day. But this is something I find very difficult to get across, not in my work but when I talk about my work. Letting the work speak for itself isn’t enough online.

So today I went about adding a blog to my website. I had a long series of issues with embedding the blog, I tried multiple platforms and landed on one that worked. Then I had trouble uploading the photos, I couldn’t upload them how I wanted them no matter how many different methods I tried.

I decided to give that a rest and move on to something else. Adding new social media profiles. There are so many visually engaging sites that people are using these days which I could utilize to promote my work, such as:

Facebook pages
Tumblr
Pinterest
Twitter
Flickr
WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, LiveJournal etc
Instagram

I want to get my work out there, but posting individual photos to each of these platforms would just be too much work. I decided to use IFTTT in order to integrate some of these processes. Again, I had a lot of trouble. I ran into problem after problem and after five hours of work, I feel that I have accomplished very little.

I expected it to be difficult and time consuming, but I didn’t expect to be right back where I started, only with less options and a throbbing headache, after hours of work.

However, I am determined and I am going to jump right back into it. I am hoping that once I find something that works, with practice and effort it will become much easier. So adios, I have tutorials to watch, questions to Google and code to attempt. Trial and error until I find something that works, and it could be a long night.

Oh and here is a great blog post about creating great content rather than flashy content. Once I figure out how to get my content online and integrated, maybe I’ll be able to take the advice!

The best thing I’ve ever done.

Gavine, a strange fellow who never speaks but hums Bollywood songs when he hangs out the washing.

This is Bikkie, he ignores you for the most part, but if you sing his name enough (Oh Bikkie you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind Hey Bikkie) he’ll turn and face you with a huge grin.

This is Chotu, one of the sweetest boys you’ll ever meet, and Atul, one of the two carers who lives at the hostel literally 365 days a year. He gives up a regular life and the opportunity to get married in order to work there.

Raju and Babu, the best of friends. Neither can speak or use sign language, but they communicate all the same.

Raj Luxme, a 24yo woman with cerebral palsy. She was the little girl left by her parents on the train tracks and is the reason that the IID began.

Gomaal and I. She is sassy as sass comes, it took about half an hour of throwing around clothes for her to choose an outfit everyday. She pretended to hate being tickled but secretly she loved it, look at that smile.

And finally, Babu. The sweetest boy I’ve ever met, with the most beautiful smile. The only man for me.

While in India, I lived and volunteered at the Integrated Institute for the Disabled (IID) in Varanasi. The IID is a hostel, school and university for children with special needs. I worked in a classroom with the most severely disabled children in the school 30hrs a week for four and half months, and during my time off I cared for the sixteen children who I lived with at the hostel.

Now I don’t consider myself to be a particularly charitable or humanitarian person, I took the trip because I received a scholarship for it and was scared shitless for the first two weeks. It quickly became the most full on, confronting, fulfilling and joyful experience of my life.

I’ve never experienced happiness as blissful and pure at those four and a half months spent at the institute.

But it wasn’t all butterflies and roses. Out of just a handful of my students, one regularly had seizures, one vomits after every meal, three soil themselves multiple times a day, three kids will eat their poo if given a chance and as a result their hands are tied when they go to the toilet, four kids would have random violent outburst, several boys were sexually abusive towards other students and that’s just scraping the surface.

The kids rarely wash their hands, their environment is unhygienic, they often get sick, they eat the same meal three times a day, (rice, dal and potato) and don’t always have access to clean drinking water.

These issues are serious, but the staff at the IID is doing the best it can to take care of the kids while it is extremely understaffed and lacking in resources and finances.

But, all the while, the kids are extremely happy. These kids don’t realize the shitty hand that they’ve been dealt in life. Most of the children living at the hostel have been abandoned by their parents, one girl was left by her family on railway tracks, but their new family is the IID, and for a while it was my family too.

I would wake up to the strange sounds of the screaming children, many don’t speak but make strange noises constantly, and we’d go downstairs and they’d greet us with the most amazing smiles. Chotu would shout, “Didi, Didi,” meaning ‘older sister’, Raju would indicate for me to check out his outfit, generally all denim, he’s such a little dude, and Vatsal would come and hold both my hands for several minutes for no apparent reason, without making eye contact and then casually walk off again.

That was my life for four and a half months. Feeding the kids (with our hands, no cutlery in India), brushing their teeth, clothing them, cleaning up after them, playing with them, lulling them to sleep, helping a little girl with cerebral palsy learn to walk, teaching Chotu to count, playing cricket with makeshift cricket bats and balls, buying bananas in bulk and trying to stop Shantiman from snatching other kids’ treats.

It was incredible. After my long trip in 2012, I had to visit again in 2013. And my little family was still the same; some of the kids even remembered me. The IID is an incredible place, and it taught me so many important things about myself and about other people that I never expected to learn. They always say that true happiness comes from helping others. I didn’t exactly find this true, at times looking after the kids was exhausting and we sometimes felt under-appreciated, it was seeing the other kids happy that was the most rewarding of all. And earning their love. The way that Raju’s eye lit up when he saw us come down the stairs and the way Vatsal would push my legs open so that he could sit in my lap and play with the fabric of my pants.

That’s about as corny as I’ll ever get in a blog post, I hope. But it’s all true. It’s a sad and confronting place, but also the most loving and happy place that I’ve ever experienced. Here’s a video that I made in order to raise money for the Institute. It isn’t completed, but it’s the draft of what I’m working on at the moment and offers more information about the IID itself rather than my experience there.

IID Video Draft from Mardy Bridges on Vimeo.

Miley Cyrus, Charles Manson and Rich get Richer

Overall, I found the reading, Rich get Richer, boring, repetitive and more technical than it aught to have been. Barbarasi spent a lot of words reiterating that: 1, networks grow (apparently this was some sort of revelation), and 2, the nodes of the network have a power structure.

What is this supposed to teach us? It is obvious from observation that networks grow. Even Charles Manson’s cult started with a few members or nodes, then attracted a few more, then a few more, a few died in mass suicide incidents and somehow, due to this preferential attachment of international interest they are replaced by more new members.

It is the same in all networks. I’m struggling to think of a network that doesn’t grow and evolve in a number of ways, except unsuccessful networks or those that once grew and are now waning.

The power structure of these is a little more interesting than the rather unsurprising nature of network growth. Online in the modern world, preferential attachment is a huge power play between the big corporations on the net battling for clicks, and the occasional little guy who manages to get an adorable video of his cat doing something hilarious. These days big corporations will pay some little guy and his cat to do something adorable and hilarious, just to get page views. And the more views that guy gets, the more new nodes are created that link to that node, and his brand becomes more popular and the rest of his nodes become more linked to as well.

It’s like high school all over again. Vying for schoolyard popularity on the big bad net. Using hashtags, commenting on popular sites, talking up the big topics on Twitter, all these things are examples of people fighting to work their way up in the unendingly massive network of power play that is the internet.

How can we use this knowledge of preferential attachment and power laws in order to get to the top of our desired network hubs? That’s the important question here, and the one that everyone is trying to get to the bottom of. Understanding the problem with Barbarasi’s scientific explanation of power plays changes my view of the game but I always knew the game was there.

At the moment rising to the top of a networking hub is pinnacle to the ongoing development of any kind of online presence, and it is what most money making endeavors and ambitious creative projects and hopeful writers/photographers/Youtube sensations aspire to. In order to be well known, you need to be well known online.

So, how do you get there? How do you rise to the top. If you want to follow Barbarasi’s equations, get in early. Create something that a lot of other people are going to want to link to. In his examples he stated that a new node will automatically and naturally be attached to two other nodes, manually attach it to more. This would be known as spamming. Something that Barbarasi doesn’t account for. He talks about quantity but what about quality. He completely neglects to mention that the quality, content and originality of the link is going to be the reason that new nodes are created in relation to it.

That’s where Miley Cyrus is a genius at creating online hype. Over the past year she rose to the top of online power play. Countless Tweets, Facebook statuses, news articles, opinionated blog posts and snide Youtube comments were posted about Miley Cyrus-both negative and positive nodes. Either way her name sky rocketed to the top of the online network by being the topic of countless nodes.

This is one method of self promotion online, creating controversy, and perhaps one that is only suited to a person hoping to sell records through a wild and unconforming image.

For creating a well known professional online presense, the answer would be to create original and relevant industry content, and as Barbarasi’s findings teach us, post it fast and link it to the source of interest early to boost the preferential attachment to your nodes. (Nodes is a terrible word, online texts would be a much better way to put it in this context.) The amount of links attached to your online texts would then cause your personal and professional brand’s status to climb the online power ladder.

Excellent advice.

Sometimes I forget that the greatest resources you have are the people around you. This is possibly the simplest life hack of all time but also an incredibly helpful one that people often choose to ignore: Ask for help!

And I mean with everything and anything. At uni, if you’re having trouble with one aspect of work, or you want to know where you could improve; ask a teacher, another student or someone else who knows that they’re talking about.

If the slightest health issue is bothering you, you have a headache every morning when you wake up or you think you’re more stressed than you should be, talk to a doctor about it!

Unless the person you’re asking is a complete arsehole, you’re not likely to be turned down.

Often you’ll find that your problems, as small, insolvable and insignificant as you think they might be, have the most simple solutions.

And all you had to do was ask!

Hypertext

The word, hypertext, before I learned its meaning, sounded to me as if I was in a spacecraft, flying past words and sentences at the speed of light.

It turns out I was kind of right. In my imagination I was navigating the ship around space and through the networks of words. Coincidentally in a very similar way to how people surfing the internet navigate their way through links on pages to new find and absorb and filter new texts.

That’s how we surf the web. It isn’t linear, everything is connected. Every person’s path through the web is different.

This is a fantastic way to learn. In fact, I remember being very young and Googling Roy Lichtenstein, from there I was linked to pop art, from there I discovered Andy Warhol. From his biography I was linked to Edie Sedgwick, where I was linked to Poor Little Rich Girl on Youtube, where I was linked to a trailer for the 90s movie Clueless. It was an interesting path and it perhaps didn’t land in the most educational place, but until Youtube it is a good demonstration of learning through hypertext pathways. I still remember a lot about Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, pop art, Edie Sedgwick, that black and white ‘art-house’ film, Poor Little Rich Girl.

This is a little superstitious, but I believe that because the brain is made of billions of tiny connections -synapses- making connections is the best way to learn. Connections between our experiences and old and new knowledge.

I’ve really just covered my personal connection with hypertext rather than really focusing on the reading. For a really, really good summary of the reading on hypertext check out Li-Wen’s blog here.

Playing the sexist “PMS” trap

I should have learned by now that voicing my political opinions on Facebook is never a good idea, but I did last night and as a result, a man I went to school with came back with, “Someone needs to change her tampon.”

I wasn’t even being overly emotional, I was voicing a reasonable and evidence-based argument that Tony Abbott is a bit of a moron. I have to admit that I did use some naughty words, but that was more for emphasis of my distaste for certain racist political campaigns and some bad decisions in relation to certain environmental and educational budget cuts.

And then he pulled the PMS card.

It’s a trigger attack. Obviously this line is going to enrage almost any woman even more, and by becoming furious, as any woman would be entitled to be, she proves the man’s point.

It’s a trap that sexist morons have been leaning on for years. She can either retaliate, proving him ‘correct’ or back out, giving the man a false sense of having ‘won’. I backed out.

A friend kindly pointed out that any man who needs to use the PMS line is obviously lacking in any kind of intelligent argument or general decency. That friend happened to be a woman and this man’s response was, “Cycles are in sync.”

This happens to women who voice their opinions all the time.

It’s unfair, it is blatant sexism and even as a joke-at a woman’s expense-it reinforces the inequality that men and women have been working towards straightening out for decades.

A woman can’t be emotionally invested in an issue without some dumb arse somewhere telling her she’s “on her rags”. It’s sexist, it’s unfair and it needs to stop. It should have stopped about 40 years ago. It should never have started! But it did, it continues and it needs to stop.

Even when men use the line just to push a woman’s buttons, it genuinely does stop women from voicing their ideas. It really does.

There are women and girls out there who don’t want to stand up for themselves and their opinions because they don’t want to be seen as an unattractively emotional and angry feminist.

There’s an unfair stigma around the word feminist so that instead of simply meaning, ‘a believer in gender equality’, it implies ‘angry and emotional bitch’.

It shouldn’t be that way. If you believe that men and women are and should be treated as equals; congratulations, you are a feminist. It’s not a bad thing and no one should be embarrassed to admit it.

In fact, every decent person should consider themselves a feminist, perhaps not an active one but a feminist at least. By not doing so you’re suggesting that you don’t believe that men and women are equal and you are probably not a very nice person. Gender equality is a sensitive issue, stay away from an argument by simply saying that you believe we’re all equals, and mean it and act like it.

And don’t ever put a woman’s (or a man’s) opinions down to a by-product of PMS. Very, very uncool.

And if you were wondering, this is the video that I posted that started it all.

Falling for Jonathan Harris

Before our workshop and the introduction to our Niki topics, I had never heard of Jonathan Harris. A couple of days later and I’m 90% sure that he’s the man of my dreams. The 10% of uncertainty is due to the fact that I’ve never met the man, but he’ll be in Australia quite soon so who knows.

Jonathan Harris can be described as an innovative new media artist/network developer/ideas man/anthropologist philosopher/designer.

His work includes an array if interesting and varied projects including CowBird, “A public library of human experience”, and I Love Your Work, an “interactive documentary about sex work”. His work can be viewed on his website, here.

The thing that I adore about Jonathan Harris is his way of life. He doesn’t have the average job description, instead he has ideas and he makes them happen.

Not only that but his ideas are focused on creating empathetic connections between people and using technology to strengthen human relationships rather than weaken them.

He also spends a lot of time trying to understand other people, immersing himself in lives completely seperate to his own and lands very distant from his home, in order to better understand himself and other people.

He’s also wise:

Spend time alone in nature. If your ideas still seem worthwhile in the presence of natural solitude, then they are probably worth pursuing.

Jonathan Harris

He is also ethical and altruistic:

Remember that businesses were initially created as a way to solve social problems, not just to make money.

Most businesses nowadays have become like monsters.

I agree with a lot of his ideas and I love his work. I’ll be creating a Niki page on him with Esther and James, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Connecting travel to design fiction

Two of my last posts are about Design Fiction and my travels to India. While writing my post on India, during the period of time that I was studying Design Fiction, I was struck by a connection between the two-albeit an abstract one. (Very abstract.)

I live in Australia and I live an Australian lifestyle that is very separated from the lifestyles of Indian people living in India.

For me, India is another world, almost like the speculative worlds that we discuss in Design Fiction.

I was almost like the product, the design that was thrust into a speculative world to see how I would react and how I affected the world around me.

The flaw in this theory is that I am not a piece of technology or a design, I am one person and I didn’t have a huge influence on the society around me. However, the society did have a big impact on me.

Travel is like reverse Design Fiction.

Indian Culture in Varanasi

I returned from India less than two weeks ago. It was my second trip to the wonderful country, having decided to spend December there after living there for six months in 2012.

India is a world away from Australia. The sights, smells, tastes, colours and noises are all more intense and everything works in a completely different way, but it has that familiar sense of community that gives a place its substance.

India is an incredibly diverse and interesting country. Thousand of different dialects, a myriad of devout religious communities, extremely varied cuisine, arts and fashion are just some examples of the diversity of the culture. And just to scrape the surface of the landscape there’s the coastal areas such as Kerela, the desert in Rajasthan, the mountainous areas of Ladakh (described to me once as “heaven on earth”), the entrance to the Himalayas and then there’s the Holy City, my home in India, Varanasi.

Varanasi is, in my opinion, the most cultured city in India. Where other cities of Varanasi’s size are becoming increasingly less traditional and more westernized, Varanasi is doing it old school. This is because the Holy City is situated on India’s holiest river, the Ganjes. Every year millions of pilgrims come to Varanasi for religious festivals and cleansing. It is an extremely holy place. As a result there is no alcohol, women choose to mostly wear traditional Indian sarees or Punjab suits, cows roam the streets (literally strolling down extremely busy roads, without a care) and most religious traditions are still thriving.

Living in Varanasi for six months, I became very close to several families. One woman who I was particularly close to, Mumta Ji (Ji is an Indian mark of respect) was very interested in Australian culture and we would swap stories about our cultures, she would laugh at my choice of clothing and the fact that I get so excited about elephants, and I would show her photos from home and marvel at how different our cultures in fact are.

As a woman, Mumta Ji lacks many of the freedoms that I am privileged to enjoy in Australia: dating, wearing what ever I like, talking to whom ever I please, deciding where I want to live and who I will marry, drinking alcohol and eating meat to name a few.

Mumta Ji isn’t all that bothered by this, for the most part, she finds my lifestyle a novelty. She is most shocked that I don’t intend to have children until I’m in my late 20s-if at all; this she cannot comprehend.

However, as many differences there are between Mumta’s culture and mine, there are so many similarities. The most important thing that I learned while in India is that people are the same, despite their differences, where ever you go.

Sorry for the paradox, but it’s the simplest way to put it and it must be simply put. Where ever you go, you will find the same office politics, kids who are loud and giggly and shy kids who hide behind their parent’s legs, community gossip, affectionate teasing, the same willingness to help out a stranger, the same laughter, the same terrifying and passionate mothers, the same friendships and the same conflicts and the same

While our cultures differ, our emotions and our connections are the same.

That’s the brilliant thing about India. It’s a whole other world, the sights, smells, tastes and sights are all more intense, everything works in a completely different way, but there’s that same sense of community and it still feels like home.

Mardy Online

Exploring and creating content on and about the online world.

Monthly Archives: January 2014