In the workshop this week we were given our first exposure into some sound recording equipment, in a Zoom Mic, and it was really interesting how much it seemed to enhance the sound around you, almost like a hearing aid or something, but I guess microphones serve that purpose, to amplify the noise around it.

We watched about half of the classes films as well, and they were pretty enjoyable, made me feel a little annoyed that I realised a matter of minutes too late that I might benefit from renting a lens to compound that which I already had, or a camera. Though I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out, my friends enjoyed it I think, and Cal thought it was nice. Though it still baffles me as to why he’s decided that F1 is “his sport”.

The collaborative contract was something we slowly pieced together, we took a little longer to do it than first thought, though we didn’t really end up recording much of an intro sound exercise, though we were able to get a pretty decent feel of the Zoom and learn how to avoid say allowing it to lead to clipping.

Ended up doing another shoot kind of thing, for Poncho, which was rather amusing because It was a show my friends featured in, and the reasons it was met with issues that were amusing, that make me think I wont be going back there, because I forgot one thing, that my friends were funny, and operating a camera live on the tripod that requires zero hand movement when it needs to be static, is an issue that i should have probably known how to deal with, but i guess my friends were a little too funny

They do this show At The Music, and its a pretty good show in the sense that it is really similar to Tim Heidecker’s on cinema. Also used a Zoom H4 for the first time, and it was a fun experience, because we’ve been learning about the H2 but the same kind of reasons that I had never used a external sound recording element really before, due to reasons of almost pure laziness based on like the complications I felt existed, but like failing forgetting to press the record button twice. First to arm, Second to record, simply clapping at the beginning of the take seemed to me like an ingenious way to ensure a sync of audio and video if the audio was separate, but I then realised it made just so much sense

The podcast we listened to in class was extremely interesting, the subject of lobotomy was something I had thought about or at least been aware of through the Jack Nicholson film, and the novel that it was adapted from, but that was more extreme I guess as it was to essentially kill or make brain-dead Nicholson’s character, so I felt pretty captivated by the subject, who was also the host, trying to piece together in this audio how the lobotomy had effected him, like assuming it led to that monotonous voice or something.

Maddy didn’t make it to class, but Ben and I fleshed out more of an understanding of what we are thinking of doing. After spending a while deliberating and thinking, viral videos, memes and the like, we ended up thinking that focusing around the concept of binge watching could be good, perhaps incorporating something Brian mentioned, which was to incorporate this such of the biggest binge watching, idolising this Bigfoot kind of style binge watcher, and this feels like something that will both allow for a degree of creativity. I guess then, also making it sound like a cool podcast-sounding succinct in style which will be fun.

We’ll see how Maddy feels about the idea.

The first two performances (out of six) that I filmed at Triple R last weekend got uploaded to YouTube and I gotta hand it to the editor or the video producer, they did a pretty good job with the footage I filmed, as the same constrictions i felt existed in the production or filming part kind of was dealt with quite well, particularly the framing of the shot in the Shabbab queen shot, as there was that portion that was out of the frame.

For the Hi-Tec emotions performance I feel like I might have spent too much time focusing on one shot, struggling to deliberate where to go and how to do it, and then when I finally decided to change shots felt as if it was necessary to divert back to the original shot. But this is all part of the learning process I guess, or at least as they say, and all in all I thought it was extremely fun.

Though I’m not sure it would have fit, it was a shame that the part of the Shabbab’s performance that delves deeper into the immigration issues and the issues that the lead singer and people of his ethnicity have had to deal with, a pretty long, and I felt meaningful monologue was excluded from the uploaded video, even though I recorded it, though I guess it still would have been broadcasted on the radio and be looked back on, but I feel youtube is just that much more accessible in a way.

I feel like for the most part, my technical skills increased as I was required to be more well versed in something that I was learning, like for the Project Brief 2 as I was meant to acclimatise to Adobe Premiere a little more, I learnt more about it, though as Project Brief 3 was rather similar in style, not too much more was learnt, however for Project Brief 4, for something that I was required basically Learn how to do from scratch, the sheer tenacity of how many new things I was learning, for instance, how to use a Zoom H2, Adobe Audition, and the fact that there was more collaboration

Further, my practical skills kind of similarly I feel improved the most for this last Project Brief as there was more to be understood

In terms of my professionalism I think the fact I immediately went back to uni after coming back from Japan, meant that my level of professionalism was slightly low until I was being made more accountable to work in a team with other members in the class

Finally, in terms of conceptual ideas, I feel like my thoughts and concepts for the first two project briefs were thoughts that I toyed with, and again the nature of collaboration has lead to some more creativity in the thoughts, or trying to think of things that other members in the group would think is a good idea

This week in the lectorial we were positioned to consider the concept of collaboration, emphasising the importance of teamwork in our post-graduate prospects, which I feel is honestly a pretty good means of starting things off in first semester, to really make us think about it now, how we collaborate with others, whether we’re willing to take other ideas in and other things on. While I welcome it I’m not sure I have in the past been as collaborative as I could be.

In the past one thing springs to mind which was this group job interview I had to do once at the Melbourne Recital Centre, where there was this group exercise, and while we completed the exercise, I kind of commandeered it, perhaps a little too much, and of course did not end up working at the Recital Centre. Further, I kind of spent a lot of the interview making a friend, who at the time was studying at RMIT doing this very course (I think?).

Anyway, it’s probably beneficial for me to think about it now, as a flow on effect of me constantly pondering it in class from now on. It’s definitely important to consider the good and the bad experiences that result from this scenario also, and I feel like it’s really necessary to share ideas to lead to a win/win in order to avoid someone end up doing all the work as theres a mutual interest in the project.

The audio exercise that we were required to do this week was pretty fun, if only purely in the sense that we were able to learn how to use to the Zoom a little more, and then also be required to learn how to use Audition basically from scratch, which was really fun, I feel as if I would have benefited to have learnt something which I learnt later, that the wav files didn’t need to be cropped, and there was a razor cut button at the top of the screen, would have been beneficial, however I think the cut of the audio exercise still turned out fine.

It was amusing to be able to make it meta also, and create an audio exercise based on the prompt we were given that was directly related to the act of having to do the exercise itself, which I amused myself by. I think it was also a good way of first learning how the make up of our group would work in terms of what we were going to do.

I think I would definitely benefit from learning how to use Adobe Audition a little more, though the understanding I have gained will put me in a pretty good position to at least be able to contribute what should be done for the final project.

I found this Project Brief 4 audio piece to be one of the most interesting of the semester, and I feel like there were a few contributing factors, such as the nature of the project itself and the aspect of collaboration, essentially becoming the first collaborative media project I’d done for this course.

An issue that arose throughout the semester whenever we were tasked upon completing an exercise, during the workshops, the groups we formed were struggling to see eye to eye on a particular idea which led to exercises being slightly rushed, or at least prematurely thought out, and I felt that while it was initially slightly problematic that we, for this exercise, were struggling to work out how exactly to focus on attention, thinking of stuff like Adult Swim, memes (as we kind of agreed everyone was kind of being encouraged to consider), before deciding on binge watching, which I felt was a successful aspect, binge watching has been in the public consciousness for long enough that there are quite a few studies on it which made it quite easy for us to gather an understanding of what we wanted to achieve, not only from the literature but also our own experiences of binge watching, related to attention.

Translating this knowledge and research of binge watching to an audio piece however was another step to make. Brian implanted an interesting concept in our minds, which was this search for a bigfoot (in nature) binge watcher, the illustrious, “biggest binge-watcher”, which was a concept we tried to deliver, which I feel was executed relatively well. However it may have taken too much of time, leaving not enough time to include a discussion of binge watching, at least I feel as if that may have occurred.

It was rather serendipitous when in one of the later lectures there was a lecture that very thoroughly dealt with the topic of Netflix and binge watching, which was able to further contextualize, at least for me how genuine a concept or issue had arisen in terms of binge watching, with so much of the class partaking in the activity so casually being aware of the fact they binge watch, as if it was so thoroughly streamlined in today’s society, which I guess it now is. Though this may have been slightly distorted in the sense  that this was a class full of media students, though I honestly don’t think so.

In terms of things I felt I learnt from the exercise, which was quite a lot, the most intriguing thing was in the scene where we were trying to envisage this soundscape of a scary/haunted house, and Ben and I whispered quietly as Maddy was to question what the noises were, creating almost a 3d sound with the whispers, and that kind of almost 3D sound was something I’d heard before, but I hadn’t really thought of audio pieces being more than likely to really be the only platform in which more 3D sounds could be pursued, because for such a thing to take place in a video the audio device would, if we were not to try to dub the sound, kind of have to be in the midst of the shot, which is I feel a rarely thought of advantage of audio, almost allowing an audio piece to be more vivid than video in this aspect. That said it definitely wouldn’t be impossible to create a 3d soundscape in a film, it would just be far more difficult I believe.

I felt that in a collaborative sense, the three of us did quite well, and worked quite well as a team, each understanding or at the very least quickly adapting to the roles we realized we needed to undertake in order to make the completion of the Project a reality, which in that sense worked out quite well. One aspect which I realized could have been an issue had it not been for the internet was distance, as we all lived on different train lines, Maddy and Ben at the end of two, Frankston and Cranbourne respectively, and I lived in Elwood, which meant that if we didn’t communicate online and commit to pre-organised dates to meet in the city and record, it would have been unlikely for much to have eventuated from it all. But it did, and I feel like it sounds alright.

I remember when I first did Media in high school when we were doing Media Influence and I learnt about the hyperdermic needle theory I didn’t shut up when I thought someone had been impacted in such a way. I guess in hindsight in a way I was influenced in a hyperdermic needle theory way to pine about people being affected by the hyperdermic needle theory.

It’s kind of interesting to think of Fandom, then, as a portion of people kind of influenced by a specific portion of media, preferring their texts over more proper texts. Kind of like with the big craze Television shows that existed in Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, the fandom is so widereaching that any stylistic element that is even so slightly touched open, fans will immediately be in rather loud adoration of it.

Portlandia paints a really accurate portrait also of the extent to week we consume media now on a regular basis, where we try to take way too much in in such a small amount of time, like there should probably be like a 30/70 split of media consumption at most or something (30% media consumption, 70% other things [life?]). But I guess that’s just the way things are now.