We never stop being an AUDIENCE
It’s funny because all this talk about audiences has got me thinking about my engagement from not just media artefacts but also my engagement with others.
At my place of employment, gossip is the go-to juice in revitalising the mind and body to progress through the dragging hours of one’s shift. Every seems to accept what is being said passively, and not just so, but also spread the gossip as if they had experienced rather than heard what was said.
This has made me think about how in everyday life we are an audience to the people we engage with. And we have a choice in whether to accept what is being told to us, reject it, or apply our own experience/understand to it.
With this thought, I’ve been trying my best not only to apply the latter to the stories I hear, but deliver them in such a way too.
I don’t enjoy gossip, I think it is nasty and poisonous and not in a ‘Maleficent’ played by Angelina Jolie wants revenge for being wronged kind of way. But in a teenage high school girl doesn’t have anything better to do kind of way.
But I will admit, there are times where something happens or when I encounter an altercation with another employee that aggravates me to the point where if I can’t talk about it I’ll explode.
So when I do talk about it to someone else, I make a point of ensuring the person I’m telling the story to, my audience, that this has been my own personal experience with this person and it should in no way alter their perception of them.
This has just been something on my mind for a long time. It just the lecture that prompted me to put it in words.
Linking to my contextual
The one thing that made me think today was the video at the very start of the lecture where there was a discussion about madonna and her sexualisation of herself and the acceptance or rejection from the young female fans, the audience.
This is because it linked in so perfectly with what we have been covering in my popular culture group assignment.
One aspect of the assignment is the sexualisation of women through the popular culture of pop music and music video. We talk about Miley Cyrus and Madonna juxtaposed with other artists like Beyoncè and further contrasted with those like Lily Allen. In this, we have to think about the audience and why is it that young fans specifically look up to and approve of one icon’s sexualisation of themselves and why they disapprove of another’s.
Is the media partly to blame on what side to take? Do they neutrally report on artists’ sexual antics, see how the audience take it, and then take a side. Do they report a side and then the audience passively accepts that side?
Migrane and a half
The workshop today was a migraine and a half.
We discussed our ideas to the class and some of the ideas presented were really inventive. the first group told the class they were thinking of creating an installation where the audience interact with it in different ways. Other people suggested the idea of one segment of a tv series and other sorts of creative things.
Listening to the ideas made me lose confidence in our idea, as we’re just doing a PDF.
But all in all, when its taken me this long to grasp the concept of the brief (and still slightly don’t understand it) there’s only so much creativity I can put into it without losing focus of the content, which all in all is the main part of this assignment.
To summarise I feel like we have the content covered nicely (what we each are covering) but we’re lacking in the creative side.
Starting my own blog?
Lately i’ve been really wanting to start a fashion blog or a fashion/styling site of some sort (i.e. instagram, tumblr). With this I’d post my opinion on fashion trends, post images of people I have styled and use the knowledge I gain in media classes to create short films promoting different styles.
In terms of the short films, The week’s lectorial really made me think about how we can approach alternative films as either narrative or non-narrative. I don’t just want to create promotional films on trends and styles but create avant-garde films that communicate a deeper and richer meaning that is relevant to modern society.
Using the knowledge I gained from units 3/4 studio art and 1-4 media, these types of artistic films/ads can subtly communicate a lot of things and engage the audience because of the nature of the film being outlandish and of artistic expression rather than JUST for commercial purposes.
soooo, we’ll se how that goes…
Revolution
ok so i finally had a revolution in terms of my media brief 4. I finally decided I’d cover the medium of music and talk about this medium’s giants. so record labels such as island deaf jam and all that. and then the other group members will talk about their own areas and the giants within them, so written language will be penguin and Harrington or something (those are just examples), and for internet; youtube, twitter and facebook.
Also audience participation and experience with this medium will be a big topic covered in my section of this brief. I’ve already come across some good articles I can reference which will provide richness to my area of research. The articles talk about how the consumer participate with music, i.e. buying CDs and concert tickets.
Narrative
Narrative is not as easily defined or rather, it can sometimes prove difficult to label certain films, or certain media, as either narrative or non-narrative.
From the short film “RITUAL” which depicts three different settings and three different ‘characters’ performing three very different ‘rituals’, it was proven that a film can be labeled as either narrative, non-narrative or both.
We were asked to provided reasoning as to why we think Ritual is a narrative film and also why we think it is a non-narrative film. The reasons i formulated are below.
FOR narrative:
Someone is being born, then they are (symbolically) dying, the they are being reborn
The ritual has a beginning a middle and end as categorised in the three headings above
AGAINST narrative
It doesn’t have an obvious or clear enough cause and effect, also known as causality.
Time is continuously warped
This second argument however can be argued as invalid, as many narrative films have warped time. This is evident in films that utilise flashbacks, flash forwards and replays. However I still thought it a good enough reason as the warping of time seemed to purposefully break down and destroy the audience expectations of a narrative film.
Connected
Today we got back into our groups so we could have more time to discuss whats happening with our group assignment. Unfortunately Liv wasn’t here so it made it slightly difficult because matt and I didn’t really want to move too far ahead and formulate too many ideas without Liv’s input. But we did manage to get our creative contract completed and a google drive folder set up with all of us connected so thats alright.
I’m still struggling to grasp the concept of this task though. I actually. don’t. get. it. I don’t understand why it’s so vague either, it would help if we were provided with examples especially like in our last brief – that was amazingly helpful. but oh well.
Safe and SOUND
Our second speaker today made the point of sound being invasive (as her topic of discussion was sound). It’s interesting to think about this as we never truly experience silence, only what we think silence should be. Even when you wake up in the middle of the night and sit in silence (ironically HEARING nothing, or HEARING silence), we can still hear the ringing/buzzing of our ears. Now, I may have been tricked (me in all my gullibility), but I read somewhere that the buzzing/ringing we hear is the sound of our brain (or ears) repairing itself but failing. The point I’m making, is that we never truly experience silence; a time in which we are not exposed to any noise at all. And with that, I emphasise the speakers point about noise being truly “invasive”.
She also spoke about different components of sound. That is, perspective, background, feild, figure etc.
Constructive Criticism
Today we presented our brief 3 work to the class before breaking off into groups to gain feedback. I received fairly good feedback in regards to my work, majority of it consisting of “I liked the way you used silence”, “you used silence really well” and “it was very effective”. That was interesting feedback as I was so focused on creating a piece that ran as fluidly as possible and the audio/words making sense that I didn’t exactly put myself entirely in the shoes of someone who has never seen it before to presume how they’d react. Therefore I didn’t expect the silence to be such a prominent feature to the audience.
In year 12 I created a piece in studio art that consisted of a one continuous and seemingly unchanging shot that required presentation in a single empty room projected on a large wall in complete silence (including no audio). Therefore I found this connection interesting as I wonder if it’s just a coincidence or if its a subconscious creative decision that I naturally feel necessary…?
We were also given assignment four and the groups we will be working in. I’m with Liv and Matt who I’ve never met or spoken to before so I’m really excited to get to know them and also see how well I work creatively with others I haven’t had any sort of relation to before.
Brief 3 “KASEY”
VIDEO ANALYSES
When asking my friend to describe herself and how she would identify her own character, she found it really difficult even when asked to choose four words best suited to herself. So I decided instead of bombarding her with interview-like questions, we would just have an informal chat about each other. After doing this for the best part of an hour I discovered that it wasn’t out of modesty and/or shyness that she was finding it difficult to verbally portray herself but rather, out of a genuine inability to define herself. She doesn’t know who she is yet or how she wants to define herself. During our conversation she told me a story about how she and her mother almost died giving birth to her. I thought this story was the best representation of her nativity of self-awareness because she told me how these weren’t her own memories and that it felt as if it happened to a whole other person. To elaborate, even now, a nineteen year old girl, she still feels like a child and she still remains vulnerable to change and experience.
I decided not to show her face at the start so that the audience can create their own perception/interpretation of her through her story and her voice to add more effect at the end when I do show her face.
The ending has audio already heard throughout the film as a sort of recap so that the audience can now hear her voice paired with the actual visual of Kasey
The most problematic aspect of this brief was the acquiring of RMIT equipment. It was difficult to make a plan for when to shoot, thus, when to hire and to ensure the subject was available as well. Hiring for one night made it vital to ensure workable footage was obtained the first time so editing could begin asap. One other problem was working with sound as separate footage. I had three audio clippings (1. from the video recordings, 2. found footage 3. audio recordings). Clipping the wanted audio from the unwanted and making sound natural rather than suddenly cropped proved difficult but I do think I managed well with minor hiccups.
In terms of creative possibilities, I have never worked with found footage before and seeing how well my original footage (including the audio) worked with it (for my first time) really got me thinking about other projects I could do. I had to make so many creative choices and the biggest one was deciding whether I wanted to contrast the found footage with the atmosphere of the story or to compliment it.