REEL REALITY
Development:
Week four and six are videos, and week five is an audio production. The theme of the fourth week is SIGHT(vision), the primary sense, which largely reflects what we accept. People always say that “seeing is believing”, so I wanted to overturn that concept. Used voiceover reading my dairy, telling the story of an nonexistent day, when day and night is upside down. The fifth week is about hearing, so it’s an audio file. The piece requires headphones and is recommended to be listened to two to three times, with only the left ear and then only the right ear. This audio is about an ordinary journey, at the landmark Carlton Garden. One channel USED sounds that people think should be there, and the other channel USED sounds that people think shouldn’t be there. But they both exist. The sixth week is the last in this collection, about the concept of balance. The existence of the cat is used to describe the state of balance, and the funny sock is used to describe the real time difficulty in distinguishing the true from the false. Behind the sudden change in tone consciousness of the change in form. The balance between ship and land is shown in this video. In fact, at the end of the day, maybe stable imbalances are equilibrium. For example, the rocking caused by the waves, instead of balancing, makes a point.
When I finished the first three groups of works, I found that everything I made had anti-reality content in it, or I was looking for the meaning of reality. I wondered if we can reverse the reality, whether the reality we know is real reality or just a so-called restraint. In this case, from week 3 to week 6, I tried to break the perception and create my own reality. So my theme is “your perception is not exactly reality”, REEL REEALITY. I don’t think there’s a direct connection between the real and the perceived. We are taught from an early age when what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false. It turns out that it’s subjective factors that influence our judgment. Our bodies were so trapped in this system that we only see and experience what the system expected us to see.
A collection of 6 short media works:
here’s a link to my website
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Reflection:
When I looked back at the first week’s reading, one sentence caught my eyes, “Embodied knowledge is inherently and unapologetically subjective, celebrating—rather than glossing over—the complexities of knowledge production.” (Laura L. Ellingson, 2012). The word unapologetically gives me a very interesting impression, as if a confident but naive little girl, at the same time, I also think this word conveys a theory that there is no right or wrong. Here’s when I got the idea try to break the rule of perception or say, reality. The first three media works only explored the concept of perception and the style of shooting/editing techniques on a personal level. In this assignment, I tried to find different senses to bring different true and false feelings. According to this idea, I proposed the theme of the second assignment.
In this outbreak, the chance and time to go out to film is reduced, and the available filming and recording equipment is very limited. In the last three weeks, I tried to get relatively satisfactory content in a limited environment. First of all, I tried the difference between shooting with mobile phone and shooting with camera, recording with camera and recording with mobile phone. At the same time, I made my own sound library. In the sixth week, the video of fix camera can emphasize and highlight the balanced theme, and the fixed frame makes the movement of the objects in the frame more eye-catching. In the work of the fifth week, hearing is used as the research content, so the audio format is used. If moving image is used, the audience may not put the center in the hearing, in this case, the audio format can make the audience pay more attention to the feeling brought by hearing. In my future work, the sound library will bring me a lot of help, and I will keep this habit.
The fourth week, I shot with my phone, so I used the template and changed the frame. It doesn’t show rough quality, but I’m still not satisfied. I like the diary form of narration, bring intuitive feelings. Week 5 was an audio piece, and I found the dual channel setup is interesting, but at the same time, I thought it would be better if the content could be richer, because at this point, I only went out and recorded once. The last video on balance is one of my favorites. The first half is what I am not satisfied with, I think it can be more detailed in the plan. And the feedback I received from peers is that it is hard to really understand what’s it talking about. The sound design in the second half is something I really appreciate.
All the videos I watched in class were interesting and impressed me deeply. Overall, sound design, background music have huge impact on what we see. The use of lighting and how to balance voiceover and background sound help to highlight the hearing because other senses were weaken. In the video of the fifth week, the dim light made me pay attention to the sounds. Lighting in different directions can bring different feelings, this especially works on portrait. In week four, I noticed that the movement of the camera, and the movement of the person in the frame, is particularly important. Frame can enhance emotions; motion can enhance emotions as well. In future works, these techniques can build my professional skills as a media maker, and I will try to follow these ideas on my later assignments.
At first, I didn’t think about what it meant to be embodied, but as I read deeper, the first week of tactile underwater navigation left me with a deep impression. “When diving, what do you touch or what touches you? What comes to mind if I say the word ‘touch’ or ‘texture’ to you in the context of diving?” (Elizabeth R. Straughan, 2010) Those questions attracted me, I had diving experience before, and when I saw this problem, I realized that I had never thought about whether I was touching something or something touching me. Since then, I tried to explore the feelings that I never noticed before. Then, when nostalgia was introduced in “taste” and “smell”, I noticed how proprioception affect inner feelings.
In the following assignment, I still want to continue to explore the relationship between our bodies in reality and non-reality, or say, post-reality. As Laura L. Ellingson pointed out “The researcher’s body—where it is positioned, what it looks like, what social groups or classifications it is perceived as belonging to—matters deeply in knowledge formation.” (2012). What will happen if we place them in different place, give them different meanings, and divide them into different groups? What’s more, one idea from sound studies said they seeks to further engage social concerns by examining the exchanges between environments and the people within them as registered through experience (LaBelle B, 2011). In conclusion, I would like to further explore the relationship of environment, body and reality.
Links to weekly blog posts:
Reference:
Ellingson, L. L. (2012). Embodied knowledge. In L. M. Given (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods, SAGE publications, Thousand Oaks, p. 245.
Straughan, E. R. (2012). Touched by water: The body in scuba diving. Emotion, Space and Society, 5(1), p21.
LaBelle, Brandon. (2010) ‘Introduction: Your Sound is My Sound is Your Sound’. Acoustic Territories : Sound Culture and Everyday Life, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, New York: xviii