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Category: Production (page 1 of 3)

Exploding Genre – Week #7 – Project Brief 3

September 11, 2016 / / 0 Comments

The Friday of week #7 marks the submission of Project Brief 3 (PB3). Hence, it has been a busy week with shooting, editing, and coming up with the exegesis. In this post, I would cover a brief reflection on how the process went and some learning points that I have encountered along the making of the video sketch.

Firstly, it was my first experience working on the Sony EX3 and I must say, it is quite a big piece of equipment if you’re planning to shoot at several locations in one day. Loaning it from the tech store at building 9, together with a tripod and a set of LED panel lights, you definitely need an extra pair of hands to help lug everything around from one venue to another. Thankfully, a friend and I planned to shoot both our video sketches together to spread the weight and in some ways, seemed a little more productive as well as time efficient.

For my video sketch, I was exploring the tropes of the Western film genre, and applying it into modern contexts, therefore taking the western style of narration and several visual and shot composition, and setting it in modern times and in an urban environment. Overall, the sketch exhibits a person moving into a new city and going through certain struggles to meet her goals. She experiences setbacks and hostility from the new surrounding, but she manages to press on to reach her destination.  Like in classical western films, we see the hero or an outlaw coming into town and getting face to face with the local people feeling unwelcome and treated unfairly. The hero then goes to all lengths to overcome the challenges and restores back order and stability to what was a chaos and lawless front.

It definitely was a challenge shooting and trying to remake and capture the concept I have in my head into reality, more so that I don’t have any background in filming prior to this assignment, therefore every step was a step to unchartered territory. Again, with the help of a fellow genre exploder, she helped brainstorm certain ideas for several scenes and shots to help portray the western narrative a little better.

In general, I thought the sketch worked out pretty well, given the circumstances. Certain things I thought could have been done better would be the length of the sketch. But since it was specified in the project brief that we are only required to do 3-4 minutes length, we are restricted to the guidelines. Would also definitely like to explore other tropes of the western film genre that could be applied into modern day context, maybe develop new iconographies for modern western films, like how the cowboy hats and horses can be strongly related to classical western films.

Project Brief 4 – Reflection – Week #13

June 2, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Alas, the end has come for us to say that we’re done with Project Brief 4. Both audio and video essays are very much completed and ready to be submitted through our google drives. It comes with great pleasure to be writing this blog post, not only because it’s the end of yet another long and gruelling Project Brief, but also the end of the first semester of uni, but I will reserve my comments on a separate posts regarding that. For now, I’ll express my thoughts and feelings that occurred over the course of this assignment.

For starters, it is the first assignment that is done as a group instead of individual. This comes with a set of pros and cons, fortunately, it all panned out with more pros than cons for this particular assignment. Way back in week 4 or 5, we received a lecture on teamwork and collaboration, which I mentioned in a blog post that I was pretty baffled that even in uni we are still being taught how to work with people. Thankfully, with the stroke of luck or whatever you want to call it, my group mates and I were all within the same wavelength and it was easy communicating with one another. Even when we couldn’t agree on certain things, we managed to work something out and achieve a general consensus accomodating most of our individual opinions.

The group didn’t waste any time getting started on PB4. We sat down to brainstorm ideas and arguments related to our topic, Audience. I still remember one of our very first group meetings, we were tossing out ideas, thoughts, opinions, personal experiences, academic articles, basically anything and everything that we could think of that is related to the word Audience. Like the other topics on media affordances, Audience is a really broad topic, and we needed to streamline our ideas to a specific question to form an argument and debate around that. This was where our annotated bibliographies come in to help narrow down on our findings and find a specific topic for us to debate back and forth on. Personally, it was a challenge putting together an annotated bibliographies as I’ve not done anything like this before. Moreover going through all these academically written articles and journals, it was quite a tough read for most of them. What more, sieving out information that might be related to our essay topics, and putting it into context of our arguments.

A few weeks went by and we were ready to record our audio essay. The night before, we had a conference call over Skype to finalise on our audio scripts. Unfortunately, I wasn’t available to attend the recording as I had a lecture to attend, but I accepted the role of editing and mixing the entire audio essay, as well as adding extra textural elements and composed a starting/ending theme song into it. I guess that should count as my “voice” in the essay, since my actual voice is absent from the audio essay.

Once we got the main bulk of the audio essay down, we began planning, storyboarding, and coming up with scripts for our video essay. Since we’ve already got the main content and arguments in paper, it was only natural for us to bring those into live action. We thought of a place and setting for everything to take place, and what better way to present on the topic of audience than being a group of audience ourselves. A fellow group member volunteered her lounge room over at her place for us to shoot our video essay and that was pretty much our set for the video essay. A bunch of us sitting on a couch in front of a television set talking about the whole concept of the shift of passive audience to active audience as we move from broadcast era into the post-broadcast era. Since non of us received any professional acting lessons or came from any performing arts background, it was a challenge for us to memorise our lines and speaking right into the camera. We had to do several takes on and on before we could get a hang of it. A simple trick we did was to place one of our laptops right in front of the television and that became a “teleprompter” for us in case any of us forgets our lines. Another minor problem we faced was getting a clean audio recording. The mic that came with the Sony MC50 that we loaned from the tech store at Building 9 was too sensitive and it was picking up almost everything in the room, and since the room was not acoustically treated, it sounded really echoey and boomy in the recording. To counter this issue, we decided to record our speech on a separate device, using one of our iPhones as a audio recording device. Thankfully, the audio that was recorded using the iPhone was not as echoey or boomy as the one from the Sony MC 50.

One of us decided to take on the role as the overall editor for the video essay rough cut. However, we sat down as a group to chip in our own input to the video essay during one of our final group meetings. We booked an editing suite at Building 9 to sit down and run through the final cut of the video essay. We also took the opportunity to target any last few kinks that were in the audio essay and made final adjustments to both audio and video essays before they were ready for submission.

PB4 is definitely not an easy task to be taken lightly, and it was pretty daunting in the beginning as the tutor distributed the hardcopy around the class. To see that we had to produce, not one, but two essays, both with different content and only 30% could taken from each essays, was initially quite intimidating. Just visually, looking at the project brief felt suffocating and the list of submission requirements just seemed never ending. However, we took it one strike at a time and planned our group discussions, and what we needed to accomplish at the end of every meeting. One thing I would attribute the ease of going through this assignment was how we managed our time. Time management was crucial when it comes to producing two essays. We needed to know when we should put a pause for the audio essay to start on our video essay and also finding a common time for everyone to meet. The group had to rely on skype calls quite a fair bit on a few occasions, due to circumstances that we are not able to meet in person or the timing just does not permit us from seeing each other, however, it was these sessions that we managed to cover quite a lot of ground when it comes to coming up with our scripts, ideas, and content for both essays. I also felt fortunate that our tutor allowed us to carry out our discussion during class time therefore we had more time to ourselves to focus on other assignments from different courses.

On a personal level, I enjoyed collaborating with my group mates coming together to produce these two final products. You hear stories and rumours from other course mates about so and so not carrying their weight, or so and so is not turning up for meetings and so on, but I guess we’re fortunate enough that this wasn’t the case for us for this particular assignment. Look forward to the many collaborations I might be participating in future.

 

Feedback Feedback – Week #12

May 27, 2016 / / 0 Comments

For the last 2 workshops, we reviewed our audio and video rough cuts to our tutor during class and received really good constructive feedback from her in order to achieve the desired grade the group is aiming for.

For one, our audio essay lacked texture, and it was rather monotonous. This I can agree with, as I was the one responsible for mixing and editing the audio clips together and adding sound effects, music, and other sound clips that could lift the audio essay to sound a little more entertaining rather than just 3 people speaking. But due to the limited time in producing a rough cut, this was the main bulk that could be produced for the time being, and adding in extra textual elements would be slightly less taxing than arranging audio recordings and mixing the audio levels.

Our video essay was also coming together, but like the audio essay, it lacked extra textual elements such as found footages, still images, and maybe some minor editing techniques to make the video essay a little more engaging as well as entertaining instead of just 4 people sitting in front of the camera talking. Content wise and arguments, our tutor remarked that it was spot on and it was through provoking to the viewer, but also has a good resolution at the end.

This left the group going back to our drawing board to see how we could enhance our audio and video essays, adding extra sound effects, clips, found footages, images, and applying various technical effects to lighten up our essays to a more entertaining level. It’s easy to just produce an audio or video essay, after all, it’s just an essay with people reading out from a script through video or audio, but it’s not easy to make the final product something the listener/viewer can maintain their attention before they decide to stop and doze off into oblivion. We planned to use the remaining time frame that’s left before the deadline for PB4 to enhance our essays.

The End is Here, or issit? – Week #12

May 23, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Today marks the end of Photography 101, a school elective that I’ve enrolled back in February. It has been a long time coming, starting out from not even knowing the 3 basic parameters on the camera that will determine your exposure (ISO, Shutter Speed, Aperture), to actually getting my own DSLR from Gumtree, (funny story ’bout that, the guy who sold me the camera was a former student from the same Photography 101 in RMIT), to going out shooting and to find something really therapeutic about capturing moments, freezing motion, stopping time, all with a click of the shutter.

In today’s lecture, we were told that they are considering stopping this course for some reason, which kind of aches my heart to hear that. Personally, I always had a keen interest in photography, but haven’t gotten down to learning the ropes of doing so. Before enrolling to this course, I took pictures with my phone and posted them on social media, that’s as far as my photography skills go. After joining this course, it has taught me so much, and it is just another mode or avenue to express one’s self, much like music, paintings, or filmmaking, photography is another art form.

Where would I go from here? Well, I’ve already enrolled for Photojournalism as another school elective in Semester 2, so that’s that. But on a personal level, I am actually quite interested in joining some local photography competitions, which I might have to do some research on. Wouldn’t want to play ball with people who are way out of my league, therefore this requires some thought and help from peers or lecturers. One thing’s for sure though, you’re not going to find my camera in an ad on Gumtree, I can guarantee that.

PB4 Video Essay Shooting Day – Week #11

May 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

One of my group mates have graciously opened up her house to be the set of our Project Brief 4 video essay. My group’s topic is Audience, and what better way to present the concept of audience than being an audience ourselves. Our concept for the entire video essay would be us (the whole group of 4 of us) sitting in front of a television in the lounge and giving our takes on the change from broadcast to post-broadcast era and how it has affected the change from passive to active audience.

I don’t think I’ll be spoiling anything for anyone since this video (and audio) essay are not going to be uploaded onto YouTube or Vimeo and I doubt it’ll be shown in class. Therefore, non of us would be able to view each others’ work and the sum of research of all of us has done over the past 3 – 4 weeks on our different topics on media affordances. While it I am totally okay with that idea of not uploading our work on any online social networking sites due to the copyright issue, I was wondering, wouldn’t it be a more cohesive learning experience if we were to share with the rest of the class on what we have researched on. I’m not even thinking of a formal presentation, but just a screening and hearing of our video and audio essays, so everyone’s got a clear idea of what everyone of us has done.

I might be wrong in my last point, and I am pretty sure I’ll be slammed quite hardly if I were to express my view on a more vocal platform (like in the middle of a lecture), as different people might have different opinions and ideas. Some might want their work to be best kept between their tutors and group mates, some might prefer not to have the extra weight of thinking that their work is going to be screened and aired to the entire class, and many other reasons that might have gone passed my personal thoughts.

Okay, I just realised I have gone quite off point here with the last 2 paragraphs, so back to the video shoot. We managed to cover everything that we needed in a couple of hours. I was pretty pleased with the outcome, and am quite excited to view the rough cut which one of our group mates has volunteered to do. Though our procedures and filming techniques were pretty primitive, to hear the sound of one of us yelling, “It’s a wrap!”, had a certain sense of satisfaction ring to it. We loaned the Sony MC50 from the tech store in Building 9 and used a Canon EOS 700D DSLR provided by one of the group mates. The Sony MC50 was more or less dead center on to us, while the Canon DSLR was at an angle to provide a different perspective as well as adding texture to our video essay.

Apart from filming ourselves, we are adding some extra bits of found footages in between to elaborate our point on passive audience going back to the black and white television days. This also aids in bringing up our video essay running time to about 5-6 minutes instead of 4-5 minutes, since our group consists of 4 people, unlike stated in the project brief where each group should consist of 3.

Overall, I believe that we all had fun having gone through the experience of filming ourselves and doing several takes due to the difficulties of memorising our lines. Glad that the whole bulk of PB4 is coming together (video AND audio), and now is just putting everything that we have done together and preparing it for submission on the 3rd of June, that includes the production dossier and an 800 words reflective essay.

Documentary – Week #10

May 12, 2016 / / 0 Comments

I would not consider myself to be one who watches a lot of documentary films. Mostly just those that documents my interests such as music or sports. Hence, my knowledge of documentary films are limited to those that are about music. Documentary films such as Montage of Heck 2015, directed by Brett Morgen, Foo Fighters: Back and Forth, 2011, directed by James Moll and Amy, 2015, directed by Asif Kapadia, are just examples of the documentary films that I’ve been exposed to. The film screened this week, Grizzly Man, 2005, directed by Werner Herzog, was definitely an eye opener and left a very strong and lasting impression of the way documentary films on me. My view and interpretation of documentary films have changed after watching that particular film.

Grizzly Man uncovers the story of a man going to live in the Alaskan green forest in the summer to protect and study the bears who roam wild and free. It is almost like a documentary about e documentary, as there were 2 levels of plots in the film, or at least that’s how I look at it. We have the story of Timothy Treadwell, the man who goes out to live with the bears, and we have another story about the bears and how they live in the forest of Alaska. And in many ways, both plots are intertwined together, but in other ways, they are very much individual to their own stories, and Werner Herzog did a very good job in linking both ends together. Another story that might be slightly more subtle than the 2 in the fore would be the relationship and comparison between Herzog himself and Treadwell as well. In the film, both men endeavour to make documentary on a particular subject matter, for Treadwell’s case, it’s about the bears and protecting the wildlife, for Herzog, the death of Treadwell and the life he led. Both of them had certain things in common in terms of making a documentary and as a filmmaker, but of course, both man had their own set of thinking and ideology.

There are so many ways to tell a story, and documentary would be the most straight forward and explicit way, as oppose to maybe a reenactment or a remake of a particular event or biography of a person. The latter may be a little more entertaining, due to the extra headroom for exposing a little more creativity in telling a story. In a documentary however, there should be a certain form as discussed in the reading by Boredwell and Thompson. From my understand, documentaries can be made in 2 forms, the Categorical Form and the Rhetorical Form. Both must have a certain form of factual information of the world. They are assumed to hold some credibility and trustworthy in presenting facts about the particular subject matter. At times, the public or critics may question the truth of facts that are mentioned in a particular documentary film, but that’s for the public and critic to debate with the filmmaker, which in turn may lead to boycott or lower rating to the film.

In general, the concept of documentaries have changed over the years from just a platform where information is transmitted over the big screen to something more dramatized and well constructed in order to maintain and engage the audience’s attention. Gone are the days of documentaries on TV or film where it just shows the subject matter carrying out an activity with a voice over commenting and narrating over the pictures. There is more than meets the eye in terms of thoughts and decision making when it comes to making a documentary film just as much as when it comes to making an action film. And all these decisions are to ensure the greatest experience the filmmakers might promise to the audience in engaging them.

A Single Voice with Loud Message – Week #10

May 10, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Singapore just went through a by-election for a township, Bukit Batok, and the ruling party, People’s Action Party (PAP) won the by-election. However, that isn’t the point of this post. This post comes with interest in the whole passive and active audience that was touched on in the lectorial in week 9.

Amos Yee is a YouTube personality who expresses his strong views and opinions on the Singapore politics and how the government runs the country. I won’t go in too much on his background, but just how he uses social media to spread his views around and how he has made his name from just social media platforms well into the front pages of newspapers and headlines of prime time news.

Viewer discretion is advised, course and offensive language is used in the duration of the video.

Pause fillers – Week #9

May 5, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Have you ever listened to a peer or a person on the tram speaking and he or she is always going on and on with a repetition of a certain word? Say for example, “I was like… But like… And he was like… Like… Kinda like… He’s like…”. And when you try to listen into it even more, it’s almost kind of annoying? Well, that is pause fillers working right there.

Pause fillers comes in different forms and it varies from person to person. Some people use, “Erm…” others use, “Err…” or like the example mentioned above, using the word ‘like’ over extensively. Somehow during our speech, we tend to rely on pause fillers a lot, without even ourselves aware of it. Whether it is a good or bad thing, it really depends. Some people do it subtly in a timely manner in order to incorporate good pacing and it punctuates their sentences well. Others might use it to cover up lack of content or vocabulary to express and articulate themselves. At the end of the day, it is just how much we use it in our speech and language, and when we use it.

In a formal context when an individual is giving a public address or carrying out a presentation, the pause fillers comes out even more obvious as now that person is in the spotlight and everyone is listening. Unlike being in a conversation with a peer, where it is pretty much a 2-way street, giving a speech or when you are in public speaking circumstances, it is more of a 1-way street for most of the session, up until at least during the Q&A session. Hence, all ears are on that person and some people would really go to the point of scrutinising every single word the person is speaking. Therefore all this little pause fillers of “Erm…”, “Arh…”, “Hmm…”, “Like…”, would stick out like kinks and dents on a smooth copper wire.

How would do you get away from having pause fillers you might ask? Well, there no right or wrong method in getting rid of having pause fillers. In fact, I don’t think it is possible to completely eliminate pause fillers from your speech. It is what gives the human element in the speech and makes it less of a robotic or an announcement. However, we could always cut down on pause fillers by rehearsing our speeches and the content in front of a mirror. Being a lecturer, my dad grades his business students’ presentation skills base on how well they deliver their content and how well they manage their time to fit everything inside a specific duration, once the timer goes off, the students will be asked to stop presenting whether they are finished or not, pretty much simulating the scenario of pitching their business ideas to potential clients. One of the tips he mentioned to me was to practice in front of the mirror with your notes in your hands. If you find yourself having to refer to the notes more often than not, you’re not ready for the presentation. On the other hand, if you can go without having to refer to your notes or a minimal number of times and having to see yourself in the mirror most of the time, then you’re pretty much good to go.

Having said that, it really varies from person to person and how one articulates one’s self. So we should always experiment in front of the mirror to simulate public speaking just to brush up on our presentation skills. Who knows, your next sales pitch could make or break you just base on how many times you refer to your notes or how many times you rely on your pause fillers.

What Makes a Good Podcast? – Week #8

May 3, 2016 / / 0 Comments

This week’s workshop, one of the things covered was a podcast about sleep. It was a rather lengthy one, probably lasting about an hour, but our tutor only played the first 20-30 minutes of the podcast. Then we had a little discussion on what makes a good podcast. What are the ingredients that make a podcast interesting and keeping the listeners engaged. Having the whole visual aspect taken away, it’s always so easy to drift into another thought while the whole soundtrack just shifts to the background while your mind wanders and start to think what should you have for lunch later or if the weather would turn out great for your golf match later.

This are what some of us from class came up with that keeps the podcast engaging,

  1. Sound effects
  2. Dialogues
  3. Interviews
  4. Atmos
  5. Music

The list goes on, but those above are the main criteria to make a podcast engaging to the audience. Always introducing a new element is a good way to keep the audience on their feet, new characters or subjects to keep their mind engage like they are a part of the conversation as well.

This whole exercise is just a little starter before the main course, the audio essay of project brief 4, which in a way is quite a heavy weightage assignment when it comes to the overall grade for Media 1. And what a better way to start by analysing the work of others and start referencing and unpacking the technicalities behind it.

Peer Feedback – Week #7

April 24, 2016 / / 0 Comments

In this week’s workshop we were given feedback from our peers regarding our PB3.

I received feedbacks, both positive and negative, one of each was that the sound wasn’t mixed all that well. One of my peers found it a little distracting when my subject is speaking, her voice seems to be competing with the backing music and it was a struggle for them to focus on what she was saying. Which I found it a little odd, as I was very particular in mixing the audio levels, especially coming from an audio background, I thought it was one of my strengths in mixing audio levels in a short clip like this. I guess sometimes it boils down to the source that you’re listening from. I was mixing the audio levels on a pair of professional studio headphones, and my PB3 was played out from my laptop speakers, therefore I think there was some difference in terms of audio quality. Well, at least, now I know that I have to cater for that when mixing audio levels in future projects.

As for positive feedbacks that I’ve received, one of my peers mentioned that the subject matter was interesting and engaging with the audience. He thought it was something new and entertaining. Having said that, it was some much of a portrait video of someone, but rather more towards the subject of ‘Singlish’. Hopefully, the tutors who are going to mark my assignment would be a little lenient on that, as it is still a good representation of my subject and her background coming from Singapore and what she’s doing in Melbourne.

I believe that peer evaluation is a strong tool in gathering critical and constructive feedback, as it is from the ground, unlike coming from someone like a tutor or lecturer, there is a certain motive of wanting you to achieve a certain grade or meeting the marking criteria or assessment constraints, but coming from your peers, they are in your shoes and they can provide some views that may be beyond the sights of the classroom, such as personal experiences, trending affairs and more.

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