Week 8 tutorial

This week was our first class with our whole group present, so we started to do some brainstorming of ideas. Our media idea that we received was “technologies”, and we needed to start thinking about what we could do for our final media artifact, which we all agreed on doing video. We were having some mixed ideas of what we wanted to get out of this. I was thinking of doing a similar thing to what we were to do in project brief 3, and use both a mixture of our own footage and found footage, but Jack was thinking more of making something really big and with our own footage, something he could use in his “film reel” thing at the end of the course. Helen was pretty neutral to ideas at this point. After some research we did in class, we found a video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPzgl2C7cZY. We obviously ignored the music used because it was unrelated to what we wanted to do, but we all seemed to like the idea of having this sort of layout for our final product, filming in one take and having this sort of screen dominated set, as our media idea is technologies, this would relate our content with the projects intention. With this in mind, we all started to figure out what we would each concentrate for our annotated bibliographies. Helen was going to focus on virtual reality and social media, Jack was focusing on film production and editing techniques and I was going to be focusing on desensitisation caused by technology, and violence in video games and television. Because all of our topics weren’t really connected we were struggling to figure out how we could all connect them in script, but I think we will leave that for next week.

week 8 lecture

This week our lecture was on narrative. Exciting. We were asked what is story? What is narrative? How do we go about structuring this vast expanse of time and experience that we call life into something that it feels right for credits to roll up after? Well from my understanding, narrative is a sequence of events, that has a beginning, a middle and an end, and although there are a few films that challenge this formula, it is pretty conventional. Although story and narrative are different, “everything is story and story is everything”, and I think narrative is the way a story is portrayed to an audience.

Causality is like the wheels on the film…bus??? Ok well causality is cause and effect, and this propels the narrative logically from A to B. For example, people have to actually go to an abandoned cabin for them to actually be murdered. If they didn’t, the movie would be completely different, or wouldn’t exist at all.

I mean most of the things we covered in today’s lecture was covered in Unit 3 Media, and because that was only this time last year for me, I can remember a fair amount of it, so this lecture was just a bit of a refresher.

Not-so-Super Mario bros.

This was a final for an assessment I did for my elective Sound Design. We needed to create a design document for the implementation of a sound design for the Super Mario Bro’s game level provided. We needed to include a list of the sounds required and the roles these sounds will play in the sound design, and also how we will find or create the sounds required. Actually creating this document seemed like an easy task, but as I started to watch the video of the level provided, I realised that there was a significant amount of sounds used that I had never even noticed before, I was shocked. Some of the sound effects that I heard were: jumps, smashing empty boxes, smashing filled boxes, upgrades, shooting gun, sliding down winning pole, points calculating and the flag going up. They are just a select few of the sounds. We also needed to create our own music for both the background and the end winning sequence that has a different piece of music. I’ve never actually created music myself so this was a difficult experience. I used Logic Pro to create the music, and it wasn’t as hard as I was expecting because there were many music samples to work with. I was quite happy with my final project, but there were definitely things I could improve on, such as the music and getting the sound effects to match with the visuals perfectly. I feel as though my sound design was clear, balanced and work together to create a great experience for the game player.

Week 7 tute

During this tutorial we went through each of our project brief 3 finals, but this time we weren’t allowed to say anything about our work, Dan just pressed play and we had to sit back and freak out. I mean I didn’t freak out as much as I did for project brief 2, because I was much more confident in my final for this one because I put in a significant amount of more time and effort. It also seemed easier to do this on someone else because I am much more of who the subject is (because I know Christine, and I am not sure I know myself enough to do an accurate self portrait), and it was easier to spend longer on shoots because I think Christine is an interesting subject and it was intriguing to listen to her actually talk about herself in this setting, rather than just a social setting.

After we watched everyone’s finals, Dan assigned us to groups and we met and had to do a written feedback on a group member’s work, but because Jack wasn’t at this tutorial, Helen and I gave feedback on each other’s.

I really like the way Helen split the video into “segments”, and this was distinguishable because of the use of sound as the music changed for each part. When I think of a portrait of somebody, I assume there will be dialogue, but it wasn’t till afterwards that I realised that the subject didn’t actually speak, and it was quite interesting that dialogue wasn’t actually needed in this because I feel as though I learnt a fair bit about her without it. At the beginning, Ekey was shown in a very abstract sort of way, through the distorted editing used by Helen which changed the way her face looked in the first shot. I believe this is a great way to show a different side to the subject rather than just focusing on her hobbies and what she enjoys doing. Helen did a really good job on this project brief, especially since she said she didn’t do any media work at her high school, it is very impressive.

reflection for project brief 3

i) The most successful part of this media portrait, is that Christine’s art style is portrayed both through original and found footage. The soundtrack also works well with the pieces of footage as well as the recorded sounds, as it has no vocals and is successful in being a background piece. The most problematic aspect of this is probably my poor use of the time frame, because if there was more a longer time limit then it would have been more beneficial in terms of learning about the person in this portrait, but because I was limited to two minutes, I did not portray her personality and her life as well as I wish I could have. Another problematic occurrence was the static that was present during the voiceover, this stood out to me because you can hear it as soon as the voiceover starts, and it noticeably disappears when the voiceover stops.

ii) Some key learning discoveries that I made in the process of this project was that there are different ways, visually, that a story can be told. Even by using found footage that are completely unrelated to each other, given the context they are in for this video, they suddenly work well with each other and can relate to a story they are contributing to tell. Another discovery made, is that even though this is sort of an interview, it can still be considered a narrative, whilst treating “Christine” like a character. It was also unnecessary to have a script, which I didn’t think would be the case, so it made shooting this very more simplistic in pre-production.

iii) One specific thing that I learnt in the making process, is that if I do multiple shoots for an interview (or scene), I need to make sure that I recreate the first shoot for the next., and even though I am used to doing this visually, I did not think about doing this with sound. It wasn’t until the post-production stage that I came to the realization that I had changed the sound environment in the second shoot, as I had windows opened and doors open which lead to more background noise, which I didn’t have in the first shoot. This also made things difficult during editing, because if I wanted to merge two audio clips, then I had to have something between them (whether that be no audio or another piece of footage), so that it wouldn’t be obvious for the viewer.

Lectorial week 7

‘Texts’ seemed to be the main focus of this weeks lecture, which I didn’t really understand until I found out about project brief 4, and how the next few lectures will be focusing on the ‘media ideas’ for this project. This lecture seemed kind of like a “tbt” to year 12 media, which was bound to happen because well… they are both courses on media.

There was one thing Brian said in this lecture that I really took notice of, he said “Communication is a gamble”, and this means you can try and communicate themes and ideas but there is no guarantee that the audience will consume it in the way you initially intended it (again, a “tbt” to year 12 media, and yes I mean you, bullet theory). It is quite interesting when you focus not only on a media product, but on how it can be interpreted. For example, Kath and Kim’s target audience would probably be Australians, of a similar economic status (not 100% necessary but it could be if it was specific), but imagine watching some kid from the other side of the world trying to understand the humour of the show. This text would be interpreted in a completely different way than intended, because they would not be used to this “Australian” sort of humour that is commonly used.

There was a lot of talk on ‘signs’, which I still don’t really have much of a grasp on, but apparently, ‘signs’ have two parts:

The signified and the signified.

The example used for this was a dog. The signifier in this case, would be both the word ‘dog’ and a picture of a dog. Whilst the signified are mental connections that you make with the word or picture, like a memory of your childhood dog or a cute dog you saw at the park last week.

I’m sure this isn’t all that was covered this week, but these were the stand out points for me.

audio tests

During this week’s tutorial, we worked on a workshop exercise, which consisted of recording a series of sounds. We worked in a group of three, and initially when we got the microphone, we just couldn’t figure out how to use it. It took a while to even find the “ok” button, when sorting through menu options (apparently you just push the middle of the up/down button, but I personally think it should just be a button that says “ok”, there would be much less confusion). Luckily, Dan provided us with a “dummy’s guide” to the Zoom H2n, which helped us work through the basic operations on this foreign device.

We set the sensitivity level to 7, and decided to keep that for all of them, as see which ones it worked for, and write down whether it worked or not, which I believe was more effective then changing them on the spot.

The most successful recordings were the clips that were recorded indoors, in a quiet environment, with the subjects talking being relatively close to the device. These stood out because there was minimal echo or background noise, which didn’t distract from the vocals. They also stood out because they were very “clear” sounds, which had a good signal to noise ratio.

In order to find the most and least successful audio recordings, we created a table that summed up strengths and weaknesses of each clip, and whether or not they could be used or not, if we were in the situation to choose. Later I also made a video with samples of the clips that we recorded.

Audio log

 

lecture

This week’s lecture consisted of a sort of “walk-through” of the RMIT’s library portal, in hopes that this will help us with research. I’m not going to lie and say that I was thoroughly intrigued by this, but it certainly made me want to look into some of the things that were discussed, such as “Lynda”. Lynda will help in the future as it has tutorials, which will be beneficial if I ever need some visual assistance with any projects using software I am not too familiar with. There was also some talk on “scholarly” sources, but I hope we don’t have to think about that for a while.

There were also some triggering ideas raised in this lecture, mostly just talk on group work. I’ve always liked the IDEA of group work, because its supposed to be about people coming together and creating something that may not have been achieved on your own, but in reality, it’s a hot mess. I’m sure some people have had some great experiences with group projects, but I am not one of those people. If there was an option to either work in groups or as an individual, I usually chose the latter. It is not even that I don’t think I can rely on others in a group, its mostly that I am not confident that I would be able to work up to other peoples standards. Sometimes I can work really well with people, but that’s when I’m motivated, but when I’m not motivated, I don’t really work well in a group, and working by myself kind of takes away that stress.

trials for brief 3

I think I’m going pretty well for this new project brief. Instead of freaking about what I’m going to do, and who I am going to focus the project on, I jumped straight into it. I chose to do a doco on one of my closest friends Christine, because she is very visually inspiring to me and I wanted to capture that. I am also lucky enough to be able to use her brother’s music, as he creates music and has given me permission to use some of his tracks.

I’ve already done one test shoot with Christine, which consisted of me asking her basic questions, and then questions that focused more on her work. I have also started to test out incorporating found footage into parts of the interviews. So far it has flowed pretty smooth which is a good sign.

In a few days I am going to be filming the real interview for the film video, which I hope turns out as well as the test shoot.

Below are two possible tracks of Joe’s that I will use for my film piece. I have tested both and they both work pretty well because there are no vocals and they flow pretty well, but I’m leaning more towards ‘Citrine Tigers’ because it is more relaxed and won’t be too distracting during and draw focus away from Christine.

 

presentations… yay?

I know I’m not the only one that dreads presenting their work to a group of people. For this specific occasion, going into class to present our self-portrait videos, but because I had watched through it so many times during the post-production stage, I naively thought to myself, “this isn’t too bad, I won’t be embarrassed by ANY aspect of this. Although, this changed quickly when I saw my name on the screen, not first or second, which would have been fine because I would have gotten it over with, but almost last, which means while I sit there enjoying everyone else’s work, I have this sick feeling in my stomach. Come my turn to present, I’m shaking as I try to explain the meaning behind some aspects of my video, but I choke and do the most shallow explanations I can think of, as quickly as possible, to get everyone over with.

If I were to learn something from this, it would maybe be to present a piece of work that I am more proud of, and perhaps show some of my friends and family and get their honest feedback on what they think and how they think I should go about changing anything.

Although it was quite interesting seeing other peoples work. Especially since I haven’t actually spoken to many people in this class, so its kind of strange but refreshing to kind of have this opportunity to “meet” them without actually speaking to them… but that could also be a bad thing I guess.