Month: March 2015

In the entire universe we are the ones to tell stories.

For some reason I wrote this down during Adrian’s talk and it has stuck with me for a few days now. Media is entirely useless without us human beings giving it meaning and yet he also asked us to look at media as a thing without meaning. It was a strange speech and to be honest I couldn’t really follow with most of it, but it did get me thinking about the purpose of us creating media.

I was also pleasantly surprised to be thinking about Rene Descartes so soon after completing Year 12 psychology. Thinking about thinking was never something I wanted to revisit but it did get me thinking. The whole idea of thinking is impractical because it is only doing that is perceivable. For all we know some people don’t actually think and just do, while others can only think and can’t do. It also acted as a nice motto for myself, thinking needs to lead to and action which can only then lead to a completed task. I tend to find myself planning and mulling over things I need to do instead of actually doing them. The procrastination just comes naturally to me, but with all this theory in practice talk I have begun to get some of my mojo (jojo) back.

Liam’s talk personally was much more entertaining, simply because of my fascination with editing and the endless possibilities it gives us. Although I am a terrible editor, I enjoy witnessing its effects immensely and am a true sucker for almost all forms of cuts, transitions and montages. In fact montages is a movie guilty pleasure of mine, any film can have a montage and I would enjoy it no matter what. But Liam’s talk got us to explore the ideas and concepts behind editing, and understand how it can only be effective due to out social and historical backgrounds. Context is everything in editing, and a simple cut has no power until society gives it its meaning. For example when you this you know it’s a chair. But at its most basic form it is actually just pieces of wood connected with metal pieces that interlock into each other. Even breaking that down, it’s a bunch of atoms in the shape of something that we as a society have chosen to call a chair. If we sent this chair back to the Triassic period I don’t think that dinosaurs would know their backsides are meant to be placed upon it. Heck half the time pets just tear it up and stand on top of objects that we understand to be things you’re supposed to sit on, but that’s only because it’s something we were taught through society. This is just my way of interpreting what Liam said about understanding the context that has already been established for objects and ideas, and build upon those to create a story.

I find the audio and visual medium to be the most challenging part of this assessment because there is just too much to consider. Do I record in a natural environment, with the aircon blaring and my mum yelling in the background, or do I isolate myself from the world and focus all the attention on me. If I go for the former then I am exposing my personal experiences, allowing people to hear and see what I go through everyday, but if I go with the latter then I begin to feel self-conscious of every little sound and expression I make. I would be embracing the camera and revealing every little insignificant factor about me. For a while I couldn’t bring myself to put a camera in front of myself and press record, nor could I listen to my own recordings of my voice. It brought back memories of when I first produced and directed my own short film for school, and made me relive all those cringe-worthy moments I felt as I watched myself on screen perform and act. Seeing something I produced played out on screen in front of my peers was the most mortifying experience of my life and this assessment is just making me feel the same things again, only this time I know that there is only embarrassment and insecurity after I click upload. But then I think about all the fun I had when I did create something I loved. I think about why I chose to follow through with media and film-making and I remember my inspirations in life and what they have accomplished. Florence + The Machine is one of the groups that have encouraged me to attempt the obscure and trial any and every idea that lands in my head, without the fear of backlash preventing me to continue forward. Their music is experimental and incredibly unique to their own type of sound. As professionals who create such intriguing and intensely expressive concepts they show me that it’s possible to do no wrong in this industry. Sure my videos could come out as frivolous and unoriginal, or weird and eccentric, either way it’s how I express myself and my opinion should be the only one that counts to judging how accurate a piece reflects myself.

I’ve included a link to F+TM’s newest single release ‘What Kind Of Man‘ and it is truly one of the most beautifully shot music videos I have encountered in a while. It is Florence in her true raw emotional state and her dancing and expressions showcase to me that even screaming in the sky can prove to be a very efficient way of expressing myself.

4 minutes and 33 seconds is all it took for me to realize that my life is never silent. John Cage’s groundbreaking masterpiece opens my ears to the constant noise that exists around me. In class I noticed the sounds of my peers and their attempts to be as silent as possible, while at home I could hear the TV playing in the living room and my sister talking to her friends on skype about the latest ‘the 100’ episode. It was safe to say that I couldn’t truly experience the magical silence that we all think Cage was trying to achieve, but I don’t believe that could have been his intention at all. Thinking of the context presented his song, the audience couldn’t have known they would be in for a whole 4 and a half minutes of supposed silence. They would have sat there in anticipation for Cage to begin his newest piece and then became uncomfortable and anxious going through all the reasons as to why he wasn’t playing anything. I think they would have been thinking: “Why hasn’t he started yet?” “Is it very soft?” “Are we to sit in silence the entire time?” “Was being silent the song?” and my favourite scenario was “This is bloody rubbish”, but I wasn’t shown Cage’s 4’33” to hypothesize what audiences would be internalizing. What I got from listening to 4’33” was that no sound is still sound, and that almost everything in my life could be recorded to become a piece of my self-portrait. My audio clip didn’t need to be speech, or even audible, it just had to be… there. All I needed was reasoning behind it and it would quantify as a part of me. That’s why I think one of my audio pieces will have no spoken word and challenge myself to find something insignificant that I hear everyday.

Don’t think about cats. Well now you can’t stop thinking about cats probably. Once you’ve thought about something or seen something you can’t just unsee it. It’s like when someone tells you about a very tiny unseen detail in a movie and now everytime you watch that film you can’t help but notice it. Well that’s what happened today walking through Melbourne Central. Once I started to ‘notice’ the millions of tiny influences media had on our environment I couldn’t go back. It started off small, a few bike racks, a tourist taking a photo on a selfie-stick, but then you look up and notice the huge advertisements and the branding war Optus had with Telstra. Once you saw the branding you saw the complete lack of low lighting and quiet. There was just constant noise everywhere you went, especially coming from each individual clothing store or cafe. And then once you get past the lights and electronic ads surrounding you, you realize that this kind of environment can only be home in the busy CBD. All the media was so condensed and contained to such a confined amount of space that it was no wonder everyone was competing with everything else. But you could also notice the abundance of wifi-centric  signs, signs asking customers to rate them online, or to like them on facebook. At the beginning of the task I knew I was in for some mobile related artefacts but almost everything was inundated with proposals to go on our phones and digitally appreciate a store. It just reflects how much that technology has overrun our lives and with that media in general. I mean how dependent are we now on our phones, and how much do we sacrifice just for free wifi?

Anyway, some more media related things I noticed were

• billboards
• graffiti
• pop-stores
• QR scanner codes
• branded shopping bags
• minimalist window displays
• security cameras
• poster advertisements
• electronic advertisements
• free wifi signs (a lot of them)