What worked and what didn’t

What did I think was successful in this piece? I’d say one of the things I was most happy with was that we managed to keep a relatively light-hearted and humorous tone across the piece even whilst talking about some relatively heavy, hard-hitting subject matter, such as how Game of Thrones deals with gender relations. We agreed as a group at an early stage that we did not want the piece to be particularly serious, as humour was a tool that our group had come to use in the exercises we’d done during workshops in the weeks prior, and I think the piece encapsulates this pretty well – the discussion between the group is strong and focused, but light-hearted at the same time. I also feel that’s important for a podcast-style audio piece, which is largely what this ended up being, as wholly serious podcasts can often end up being dry and sound somewhat forced, or just boring, at least in my opinion.

What didn’t work well? Well, as I was the person who did the majority of the editing of this piece, I’ll focus largely on that. I think the piece could definitely have been edited a bit more cleanly – I feel like my limited expertise with Audition made this a bit of a struggle. There were a few moments throughout the piece that I felt were potentially a bit roughly cut, so I think maybe some more time spent organising a smoother transition could have been useful. I also feel like we potentially could have broken up the piece a bit more in order to properly achieve the documentary/podcast hybrid style that we were trying to achieve. There were still large blocks of discussion present in the video that I feel could have been broken up with interviews or sound bites, just to make it feel more like that hybrid style, rather than it being primarily a podcast which I feel was the end result.

Conceptually

I think the work plugs in pretty well into the themes of attention that we have been studying throughout much of the course. To be honest, I think we could have probably addressed the topic more subtly than we did, because I think we said the word ‘attention’ itself a few too many times. I think by analysing one specific television show it was never going to be possible to touch on every aspect of attention that we have touched on over the course of the semester, but by looking at how demographics (specifically gender) affected textual attention and one’s relationship to Game of Thrones, we approached a concept that had not been discussed a great deal over the semester, other than being briefly touched on. Then, by looking at the way the show is actually constructed, we managed to draw upon other aspects of textual attention that were instead related to the creators of the show, as opposed to the audience.

Affordances of audio-based media

What I learnt from this, again being the primary editor of the piece, was that there is a much larger range of things that you can do with audio-based media than I would have ever thought of, because it seems so inherently restrictive. There are many things in the edit itself that I could have drastically changed to make a different product, and many aspects of Audition which I didn’t dare touch because they were just a bit too complicated for me at this point in time. Going forward I think I would definitely like to explore more into the realms of audio documentaries, as I feel like much of my audio production has been primarily based around podcasts, a comfort zone which I stuck within for this project.

Collaboration

Communication is key. This was the biggest thing that I learnt as part of this project. When we set apart time to all get together as a group and discuss things, that was when the most work got done by far. Also, the usefulness of planning out who and when you are going to complete certain parts of the project. Initially I think our group did not have that much direction when it came to when we were going to complete things by – we set out rough dates but did not set anything in stone. Eventually we realised this, and were able to set ourselves goals in that regard, but I definitely now know that this kind of planning is vital in collaboration going forward. If you don’t set out those mini deadlines/goals, everything just keeps getting pushed back to the detriment of the final product.

As my final initiative post for this semester, I wanted to look at a really fascinating game, Emily is Away Too.

Sequel to last year’s Emily is Away, I picked this game up on the weekend expecting much of the same. The first game was fascinating, but rather basic. Boy was I surprised though. First up, rather than holding one conversation like you did in the first game, you now have to hold a conversation with two different people at the same time, both expecting near instantaneous responses. Sound familiar to anyone? It’s all to realistic. There’s one point in the game where you’re put on a timer with both people rapidly sending messages to you, expecting instant replies else they think you’re distracted and stop talking to you. It’s incredibly awkward and stressful but perfectly encapsulates the feeling you get in this online instant messaging world. When shit goes down on multiple fronts, you’re expected to deal with it without hesitation.

As someone with social anxiety, this game really hit so close to home. I think with the way we use instant messaging platforms nowadays we’ve come to see a level of pressure put on people that simply didn’t exist before the likes of messaging programs alluded to in this game. We’re so caught up in our phones that we expect others will be exactly the same, which is incredibly unrealistic. Even I myself do it to others, even if I find myself being the person struggling to respond on most occasions. There’s this expectation, even though we all know it’s unrealistic, that people will be there for us continuously without falter.

Emily is Away Too captures that, and many other extremely stressful aspects of a teenager or young adult’s life in a world of instant messaging and the Internet – it’s a masterpiece, honestly.

The rough cut presentation day. I think at this point our group was still very much in a conceptual stage, and I think our rough cut showed it. We knew the topic we wanted our audio piece for PB4 to be centred around, but not much beyond that in terms of style.

Catherine’s feedback on our rough cut, though, was very heplful in this regard. We stated to her that we were looking at possibly a hybrid documentary/podcast style for the final piece, and she relayed to us that she didn’t think that the rough cut really portrayed any semblance of an audio documentary, stating that we possibly may want to include interviews with people in the piece in order to achieve that feel. She also suggested to be very careful when using the word ‘you’ in audio pieces, as it is very powerful. It grabs the audience’s attention instantly, but it is also very direct, so needs to be used with caution, rather than overused like it was in our rough cut.

Moving from this feedback, we as a group decided to focus on a couple of specific topics from our research, namely gender and the construction of the show, rather than try to factor in all the various different topics that we had each individually researched – that would potentially have been too bloated for a 9-10 minute audio piece. We also decided to go and find clips that we could insert into our audio piece to break up long periods of discussion and therefore hopefully better achieve that documentary/podcast hybrid that we were looking for.

Week 12. The semester comes to a close.

In our lecture this week, we each created our own learning graphs. This is what mine looked like, so I’m going to go into detail on each of the different categories and give you my feelings on how I feel I progressed in each area.

Tech skills

I think all in all my technical skills have gradually improved over the course of doing this course. Coming into, I had a base level of how to edit and manipulate video and audio, and over the course of a semester’s work with both Premiere and Audition, I’ve grabbed various bits and pieces that have helped develop upon my pre-existing knowledge, but I think maybe it’s an area in which I can challenge myself going forward – I think I need to push my technical skills further in future semesters.

Conceptual

This was a touch one for me. To be honest, it ebbs and flows a lot based on the content of lectures for the week. I found that the lectures that were more based around looking at trends in the media industry, such as Dr Lobato’s lecture on television in Week 11, captured my interest the most. On the other end, the lecture in week 9, centred around collaboration and academic research, was probably a conceptual lowpoint, moreso because the content of that lecture didn’t really lend itself to much conceptual analysis.

Ways of working/learning

The high point for me in the semester in terms of developing my ways of working and learning was when Jeremy described to us how his workflow often went when producing a video, centred around three stages – assembly, rough cuts and final cuts. He really thoroughly described what should generally be done in each stage of the worklow, as well as give extremely useful organisational tips for files. The other high point was probably when Liam talked to us about editing in week 3 – it gave me an insight into some different ways of editing video pieces, and just how drastically that can affect the end product.

Practice

Overall, I think my media practice was not at a level that I wished it was by the end of semester. The main reason for this, above all else, was because over the course of the semester, I was no longer producing media outside of what was required for the course. So whilst I learnt a great deal about media practice during the semester, not much of that was actually translating into stuff outside of the Media 1 guidelines. It’s kind of a shame, as before this semester I was producing various bits of content all over the place – doing some live-streaming, producing videos, taking photos, writing on a separate blog – all of which have kind of fallen by the wayside. I’m hoping to crackdown a bit on this once semester is over – get back into some good habits in that regard. But yeah, that’s overall why I feel my media practice is at a lower level than it was at the start of the semester – I’ve learnt a lot about media practice, but I yet to feel that I’ve translated that into much outside of a couple of the project briefs for the course.

… and I liked it, for the most part. But I thought as my initiative post for this week, I’d have a look at the big part of it that I found I wasn’t a big fan of in the movie, as I feel it’s largely centred around this idea of attention that we’ve been looking at for most of the semester.

Overall, I thought the movie was pretty damn good – it captured the lightheartedness and comedic nature of the first film, which I think was vitally important. The soundtrack was fabulous, just like the first film, and the story was still definitely very captivating. HOWEVER…

… the pacing was terrible in my opinion. And I feel like this is more an overarching issue with many movies nowadays. Its total runtime was 2hr 18m – just inside that 2 hour quota that is seemingly so important for movies to hit nowadays. It really didn’t need to be that long however. Without spoiling things, the film lingered on one particular plot point for an exceedingly long time in my opinion, to the detriment of some of the other stories and relationships it did such a good job of fostering. Cut down on that, and it’s a great 1hr 50m film. So whereabouts has this ‘2 hour quota’ come from? In my opinion, a lot of it comes down to Netflix. Whilst I do think that the success of some longer films in the early 2010s was part of it – I’m thinking of Avatar and Inception, primarily – let me explain to you while I feel Netflix and other streaming services also have helped this quota proliferate.

When you binge a 10-episode long TV series with episodes of 50 mins length, you’re in a way getting an 8 hour+ film. This allows for plenty of time for character development, plenty of time for branching subplots to properly play out. With binge-watching becoming more prelavent, I get the feeling the film industry is trying to replicate elements of its success. By making your film run for more than 2 hours, you’re trying to cram as many of these subplots and as much character development as possible into and hoping that it all works out as well as that 8hr+ film a TV series can get you. But in the end, you can’t give each story, each character enough time and so distribution and weighting of stories often becomes uneven, leading to the issues that I feel Guardians and its counterpart The Avengers have been having. You solve this by either keeping all those stories and committing to not fully fleshing each of them out, or decluttering them and focusing on a few specific characters and plotlines.

I don’t know how much sense this has ultimately made – I feel like this has kind of been a stream of consciousness. But please, stop with the need for 2 hour+ films with 50 billion different subplots. That’s why I watch Game of Thrones, not why I go to a cinema.

Other than keeping up with our work in progress on Project Brief 4, this week’s workshop was centred around another audio editing exercise. It was based around the ‘title’ Can I have your attention please?, so our group decided to work around an idea of someone being too attached to their phone.

This led to me taking the role of a David Attenborough-style narrator, following a student as she undertook her daily morning rituals, of which her phone was a large part. I think in the end, the audio pieces we recorded allowed us to achieve this idea pretty well, although there were a few issues I found with my final edit.

First of all, I tried really hard to eliminate the ‘pops’ in some of the audio that I had recorded, leading to some audio being kind of unpleasant to listen to. I’m sure there is probably a way to sort this out, and I aim to achieve that when I get around to editing our final audio piece for Project Brief 4. For now, however, I found it quite difficult to find the solution we required.

Also, I felt the addition of music to the piece was unnecessary. I added it in as it was part of the exercise requirements, but I actually felt the piece held together better without the music. I also played around with the idea of just having music play in certain parts of the video, but that didn’t quite feel right to me either. I dunno, maybe that’s more just a personal editing style thing – I’m generally not to big on including music in an audio or video piece, but overall I’d say I wasn’t quite satisfied with the way it came together with the rest of the piece. Were I to spend more time on this, I imagine I would have fiddled around with that a little more – maybe tried to have find a different piece of music, for example.

Only two weeks left! I have to say, this week’s lecture was without a doubt one of my favourites of the semester. I guess it’s probably because it’s quite related to stuff I’ve talked about previously on this blog at various points: Netflix, Stan and recent changes in the television industry.

The main thing I’m going to focus on from this lecture is what I thought about what Dr Lobato said about the structural changes in TV content and culture and what they mean going forward. It brought me back to that idea that I think Brian mentioned in a lecture a few weeks back – this idea of a shift from the broadcast to the narrowcast. What Netflix, and even more so online platforms such as YouTube, is curate their libraries of videos to show and recommend to you the things that they believe you would be most interested in. On top of that, everything is available on demand, allowing for you to immerse yourself within one particular TV show on Netflix, or, for example, one particular playlist on YouTube, without interruption. I think more and more so in my own life, I’m noticing this shift in my video consumption from a broadcast model to a narrowcast one. In the past, I was a sports fanatic, and would often find myself glued to the television on somewhat of a ritualistic schedule. More so nowadays, however, I’m far more sporadic in what I watch. Every now and then I might binge a Netflix series (you’ve seen that in some of my previous blogs) but then it may very well be the case that I then don’t watch anything on the platform for a number of weeks. I might watch the odd sports game, but when it’s not accessible through the internet, there often seems to be a barrier between myself and those games.

If anything, that ritualistic manner of TV consumption that I mentioned earlier has translated itself into the way I use YouTube. I tend to come back and watch the same channels over and over, because they might cover my favourite game, or they might give me useful tech tips. I regularly come back to some of these channels, often on a daily basis, to get that regular fix of a particular kind of content. I can definitely sense a carryover from those days of watching my favourite sports team each weekend, however these YouTube channels are still very much centred around the idea of narrowcasting – they’re providing me content based on my own niche interests, and if thrust into a broadcast-centred ecosystem their content would most likely fall flat.