Recording x Collaboration Collab

We as a group met up on Tuesday to muster up some sort of a rough cut for the Thursday class, and what we ended up piecing together felt pretty good. There was a general blueprint of what we wanted to achieve, in that there would be this search for the Netflix Bigfoot/Bingefoot, as well as some sort of discussion revolving around binge watching and it’s nature.

We’d booked the room for perhaps slightly too much time, I’d heard as much but wasn’t able to come in on Monday to change it, but I think it was resolved in that we ended a little earlier and we were able to tell someone they could check back at around 2 to use the space, so that was fine.

All this audio/podcast related study stuff actually got me thinking for the first time in a while (approximately 7 months actually) that I needed to listen to some podcasts again, and I ended up trying to listen to some Aaron Chen related material, which ended up being in the form of an Aunty Donna podcast (fell asleep), and also some more This American Life and The Flop House. The status I posted below ended up being pretty great for my friends to tell be some things I could be listening to, and The Flop House I felt was perfectly relevant for lots of aspects, and also was quite entertaining. My friend Jack told me about some interesting history ones, but then about how he managed to get nightmares from them, specifically this Genghis Khan one (mind blanked just then, had to search “mongolian evil guy”), so I might stave off that one for now ha. Slow steps I reckon!

At The Record: (Club and Non-Club Music) Club starring by Gotchy and Zac sponsored by At The Music with Zac and Gotchy

The video that I assisted in for Poncho ended up getting uploaded, and it seemed to come out alright, though initially I thought Matt and Zac may have come in again to rerecord portions of it due to the camera’s slightly different color-grading, but I don’t think that suspicion was correct and I was just being a little to skeptical.

However the video did show that there was still a lot to learn, I was operating the live camera and trying to anticipate who says the lines was slightly more difficult than I thought it would be, or perhaps I got the yips or something like that. Probably not though, just a sign of the work in progress that comes with this all, and there was a lot to learn from it all, like making sure I learned how to keep a straight face, or to maintain a greater degree of poise, even when it was my mates that were being funny, cos I guess a lot of this will involve just that, my mates being funny, if I make some comedic material, and it’ll probably be pretty important not to react so instantly to slightly funny lines or something like that.

Rough Cut Feedback

Ben, Maddy and I got our Rough Cut looked into Jon from The Wheeler Centre, and we got to listen to Erin, Annie and (forget..)’s rough draft too, it was pretty funny trying to get the multiple headphone splitter device thing sorted but it was all worth it in the end.

I thought their Rough Cut, or what they had so far was quite good for what it was, Erin I knew had previous experience in something, I think it was SYN, and it was a cool little edit, almost sounded like something you’d have to spruce up on Ableton.

Anyway, it then got to us, and while I’d listened to the Rough Cut already I hadn’t listened to it with the knowledge of potential scrutiny from my peers and also an independent mediator who was to tell us what he thought of what we’d produced so far.

I knew that the whispers and haunted house excerpt was pretty good, and I found my own lines roasting a fictional town/suburb called Parkland was also pretty solid, but something I didn’t realise until listening to the rough cut in that instance was realising just how long drawn my diatribe about Netflix and how binge watching mediums kind of evolved in fact was, immediately feeling an urge to re-record and reformat that little bit, and Jon seemed to agree, but also appreciated or seemed to appreciate the bits that I set out. The static is something that to me feels like an audio version or fade transitions, which seems slightly ironic, but also I guess they can be necessary at times.

Learning about Soundscapes

I found Kyla’s lectorial thoroughly entertaining on both a learning and normal scale, with the tips that we gained for the Project Brief we’d be undertaking, as well as some of the crazy and unreal podcasts that we listened too, giving us a pretty good idea of what we would want to aim to achieve from our sound recordings. Hearing such a full on non-fiction soundscape describing an incredible situation in the class was pretty incredible, and I felt as if it really was able to amplify the situation to, it gave me a lot of think about in terms of how I felt I should do this Project Brief of my own, though it would of course be lacking in as enthralling a non-fictional soundscape as that. At least I think so.

I think the fact that one of the tips being that there needs to be more than one texture is pretty solid considering I feel like my interview was lacking due to the fact there was just the talking head sound, (Brian did warn me about this). The reading goes a long way into contextualising how the textures can be laid out, like immediate, support and background, which placed me into an interesting journey in my head and online of what suitable podcast music existed, because for me podcast music falls into the trap of either being something I don’t think I’d ever be able to find/shazam, as well as music I normally listen to be way too unsuitable in that sense as well.

 

Week 11 Lecture

For the Week 11 Lecture, Roman Lobato, a media and comms professional was a guest speaker, and came in to speak about many aspects related to the television world, but the thing that I noticed the most was that an aspect of it happened to tie in extremely well with our project brief, which was the part that focused on Netflix. We were at a point positioned to consider what our last watched television program was, and I think the vibe in the air was Master of None? Which of course was a Netflix show.

There is a lot to be said about the ease at which VOD services like Stan and Netflix can be consumed, at the discretion of only a few clicks, we can choose to watch such a large media library, if we want to, at any time. Which at a lot of times during a Broadcast Television’s schedule throughout the day is eons better than anything you could be watching, no more midday movie, so to speak.


The statistic that was pointed out in the lecture by Roman that the average Australian consumes 2.7 hours of television per day with a massive chunk of it, 2.2. hours of it being broadcast television baffled me, but then I realised the excessively high levels of reality television consumption I hear my friends consume, on top of say wanting to remain informed with the news. Couple this with the fact that people don’t really binge too much television in multiple goes throughout a week, like you could go through 6 episodes of Master of None in one week and 7 the next, and that would pretty accurately satisfy this statistic, giving you plenty of time to decide to watch some Next Top Bachelorette or Biggest Kitchen or My Block Rules throughout the week.