So the one time I actually miss a lecture, we apparently go through our next project brief, which would have been great… if I was there to go through it. I was initially freaking out because we have a week off and I won’t be hearing about what the brief actually is until next week until I remembered this thing called Facebook, where you can magically ask people things!!! So I just asked a friend so a copy of some notes. All is well.

Reflection

I’m still learning about who I actually am as an individual, and I actually am finding that these self-portrait briefs are helping me achieve this, or helping my attempt at it.

I’ve always loved the cheesy side sweep shot of picture frames to introduce a character, and I feel like that’s what I am, just a character in other people’s lives. That’s also why I wanted to include the video of my friend doing a blind portrait of me, to show that it’s important to me how my friends perceive me.

A more shallow meaning of myself in this video is the three videos of my three dogs, which I included because they mean a lot to me, as much as a household pet can mean to its owner. As well as the use of guitar and singing in parts of the video, show my love and passion for music.

I also knew that in order to create a self-portrait, I needed to include my best friend, because she has really shaped how I grew up and who I am as a person today, because I’ve known her twelve years.

Having received feedback after project brief 1, I learnt more about myself from others in my group. Most members of my feedback group actually said that they could really grasp my strong connection to my family and friends, which was really interesting to me, because I have never really seen myself as “family orientated” in any way.

I have never really been one to want to constantly surround myself with people, but as I grow older, I have more of the desire to meet people and become closer to people. I tried to explore the possible representation of this with the use of an audio clip which consisted of multiple conversations happening at a busy park I visited, and both with an audio clip with friends, that I also used in project brief one. The use of the still photographs also captured my love for film photography and using it to portray experiences.

Although I believe that this self portrait summarises aspects of my life, I do not think that this is exactly what my self portrait should be like. In comparison to the first brief though, I was able to include more depth by editing sequences together to show more of a mood and feel to who I am. I feel like the simple editing of the images worked well with the flow of the video, but I also believe that the mixed audio tracks and overlapped each other worked with creating layers, layers that represent a bit of chaos in my life and in my mind. But this chaotic feel could have been worked with more in editing, as I don’t think it portrays the amount of chaos I feel.

This week’s tutorial consisted of going over project brief 2, and making us really think about how we can successfully represent ideas visually. I’ve always thought that I can communicate ideas visually, but these ideas have never really been myself, as a subject, so I’m finding it difficult to see how I can approach this project.

The editing practices for this project are supposed to be “creative and meaning-making” which is going to be quite difficult, considering I don’t have a great deal of experience with editing, just the basic stuff. The video we are to make is only a minute long so everything I deem necessary will need to be squished in to the time frame, which shouldn’t be too bad, especially since we can use editing for this one.

We are also being marked on texture, which is a diversity of media materials, but I don’t really understand this part of the project, I assume its just maybe different pieces of audio with photos and videos integrated with each other, maybe some examples of print media, but I don’t really think I can incorporate that.

For editing I was thinking I could do some tests with overlays of different pieces of footage, and still trying to make it look smooth, not awkward and unappealing. I could also do some tests with warmer and cooler filters on the footage.

I don’t want to do that generic blog post that literally just states what this week’s Media 1 lectorial consisted of, but I honestly don’t think I’m witty enough right now to come up with any other ideas.

So this week we had a guest speaker to go over the dos and don’ts of copyright, which I would say was quite interesting if I hadn’t already learnt it for most of the theory for VisCom 1/2 AND 3/4, but I mean it is obvious that I’m going to have to learn about things I’ve already learnt about so I guess I just have to be patient.

Copyright is very important and can, most of the time, be very confusing and hard to comprehend and that is why we hire people for copyright issues, but learning about this could possibly save me some $$$ so that’s a plus.

It is necessary that we learn this sort of stuff though in the early weeks of this course, because we are now approaching the due date for our next, more complex self-portrait, which cannot breach any sort of copyright, as it has to consist of all of our own material.

I guess I didn’t really do the generic lecture blog post…I don’t even know what this is.

Ok so recently it has been a bit of a roller coaster, with the issues surrounding WA Premier Colin Barnett’s announcement that the state had “no option but to review the viability of 274 small indigenous communities”, which I am completely devastated about. Although, I am quite pleased with how the majority of major media outlets are dealing with this situation, by giving Indigenous people all over the country, a chance to voice their views, and their protests.

It is quite a devastating time for all Indigenous people, because it is putting us all back into the time when our ancestors were taken advantage of and families were taken from their homes, when right now, the same thing is happening right now, families and whole communities are being taken from their homes and it is being labelled simply as a budget cut. 

I mean I think it is pretty amusing, when our government has spent billions of dollars on detention centres for refugees (who I have absolutely nothing against, but am using them for this argument), but are not willing to protect this countries original inhabitants, I think is absolutely disgusting.

It was quite refreshing finally being able to present my self-portrait, although I am not going to deny that it made things much more comfortable just presenting in front of 4 people.

Hearing other people’s opinions on my work and how they now see me really surprised me. I was very nervous coming up to present because I felt as if somehow my work would not even compete with anyone else’s, even though it wasn’t being marked at all. Others in my group seemed to believe that I was “family orientated” which was weird to hear because I’ve never considered myself in that way. I believe I could improve by just explaining things on my blog more, and explaining the deeper meaning behind the individual’s pieces in my self-portrait.

Even though we were asked to define ourselves just with a few files in a folder, I believe that it is more beneficial for both me, and others to actually present our self-portraits, and talk through the work, so things aren’t really misinterpreted and are understood more thoroughly. Although after hearing how other people defined themselves in such a deep and personal way, I feel as though my work now seems a bit shallow, and only representing who I am on the surface, so if I were to do this project again, I would try to explore the more definitive personal aspects of who I am.

I’ve never really been put in a position to really define myself, with the exception of the simple “get to know you” games, I haven’t ever really thought about how to do it. Presenting this self-portrait now seems really ridiculous with what I’ve created.

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I wanted to communicate different aspects of my life so with these four photographs and hopefully I was able to do this successfully.

First image – Communicating my Aboriginal background

Second image – Showing my interest in capturing obscure scenarios

Third image – Abandoned building that my friends and I go to often

Fourth image – I just really like my dog

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For my two audio clips, I thought it would be interesting to ask two of my friends to say their favourite story I’ve either told them/ or they have of me.

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In these two videos, I wanted to include both my house and my neighbourhood, because where I live is obviously a big part of who I am. In the first video, it is just a short clip of my record player in my study, which I listen to quite often because it was passed down in my family. The second clip is of my street at night.

Lectorial exercise – ‘Media is everywhere’

For this exercise, we were put into groups of 4 with the people within the lecture, and we were sent to Melbourne Central to observe the use of Media in everyday life.

Actually looking around, looking for uses of media, it was quite interesting to see how much influence media has on people’s lives, without even noticing.

From “up high” in Melbourne Central, is was quite easy to see this hanging screen with rotating advertisings (below).

On the ground, there were not many examples of media, but we found a mat that advertised the Nandos store. This is a use of media because it advertises a store to both passer-goers and also customers of the store.

Examples seen mid-ground in Melbourne Central are the screen that are eye level and are also rotating through different advertisings.

Also seen at mid-ground is posters hanging on this wall, which change almost weekly, and are usually related to events.

Some more examples we had of the use of media in Melbourne Central was actually down in the subway where the use of media was heard through the broadcasts of the information of the trains.

“As multi-sensate begins, we are inundated with sense impressions all the time, but only some of them ever register in conscious awareness”

Some different types of noticing are the following:

-Intentional noticing

-Conscious noting

-Disciplined noticing

Most of the examples I provided in this post are intentional noticing because they sources of media are usually giving information that audiences need to continue their day.

For the media 1 practical class this week, it was more of an informal session because of the public holiday on Monday meant that some students would go without a class and it would be unfair for others to have a class and possibly put others at a disadvantage.

So at the start of the class we were allowed to go to the library, go take photos/videos/audios or stay in the class. I thought it would be the most beneficial for me to actually go out and shoot some photographs for this current assignment. The assignment is to create these works in an attempt to form a “self portrait”. For one of my photographs I wanted to just have a flying Aboriginal flag, because I believe that this would communicate how important my background heritage is to me. So I walked around the city and found some buildings with the Aboriginal flags but it wasn’t very windy so it was difficult to get a good photo so I have to continue to work with that idea.

At this point, I’m more confident in what I can communicate about myself through photographs but I am slightly concerned about how I am going to capture an essence of myself through numerous audio and video clips, especially since there is no editing allowed to these works.

At the start of the lecture we were asked about the first 5 things that come to mind when I think of ‘media’. At first I thought about the things I learnt about in media 3/4 last year, such as representations, radio broadcasts, audience, technology and consumption. Other people mentioned things such as propaganda, society and so on, and it was interesting to hear all the different things people thought of. After this activity, one of the lecturers said that media is actually not a ‘thing’. This confused me for a second, but then I kind of understood that you cant rely define media with just a few things that are associated with it.

“The media is not so much ‘things’ as places which most of us inhabit, which weave in and out of our lives. Their constant messages and pleasures seem to flow around and through us, and they immerse most of our waking lives”
-Branston and Stafford 2010, the media student’s book, 5^th ed, NT: rout ledge.

The standard equation of media is…

Sender – Medium – Message – Receiver

…But this is just the mass communication tradition, which assumes the media has the power to have a fairly linear one directional flow to an audience. I’m quite looking forward to looking more into the relationship between the media and audiences, because I enjoyed studying media’s influence in previous years of study.