In our final lecture, we discussed how we’re feeling about the course so far. We briefly touched on the studio’s and created graphs regarding what we’ve taken from the course so far. It was difficult to put a number on what I’ve learnt from the course, because I felt I have developed my skills as a media practitioner since I’ve started the course, and I can’t imagine that anybody has got worse since beginning the course, so I could only really have the lines on my graph going up.

However, I don’t think my style of learning has really changed, and I would like to learn new ways to take in information and produce work effectively and efficiently.

Recording With Audio

Re-examine what you’re listening to

Stories are more like a string of beads than a tapestry, ensure that there’s a space for people to breathe, rising and falling in intensity. A piece should prepare you for the end of its story, and a bad audio piece will often abruptly end. You can take a lot from a tone of voice. The way your voice reacts in different scenarios, (eg Hallways, bathroom, outside, in car etc) is relevant to an audio essay. Take fully into consideration the huge variation of inflections in the voice. It’s important to take into account how the sound is Mediated, as sound is very clearly different depending on whether its recorded on a cassette, or a CD, or Vinyl etc.

Listening to this example of a radio story, the combinations of sound include the scribbling of a piece of paper, cars driving, etc. As well as music to fit the scene.

An Interesting piece of audio was following a young girl grow from being a baby into a young woman called Nancy Schwartz, it contained a piece of audio of each every few years of her life, learning how to talk, and growing into a young woman with a distinct way of talking and articulation.

Siobhan Mchugh example: ‘Jan Gaham’ The audio is full of white noise, but the audio is still easily heard. The story depicts a man in war and his legs blew off, and as the girl cradling his torso and head as he slowly died pretending to be the wife that the man mistook her for. The audio depicts her experience talking about that with the man’s wife.

CBC Radio: The Wire ‘intro’ is crammed with heaps of different subject matter in sound, combining a bunch of little musical clips initially, but then Gymnopedie is set to a beat and played in the background of a bunch of “um’s” and “ah’s” Music can be very overdone, and it is important to have areas in an audio essay that use the effects of silence. Music slowed down can create a “new, secret story”

Don’t try to use numbers in sound

Adding sounds to the actions that the narrator is describing works well

Red hot Tips for making a Radio Show

• Movement: Movement is the thing that makes a sound
• When Editing, work with what you’ve got, rather than what you could’ve got
• Begin with the strongest most interesting parts, and then try to find audio that can come from that.
• Start with the sound followed by the voice describing it. (eg- Sound of a train whizzing past, and then have the narrator talking about a train halfway through)
• When Mixing, make sure that it’s well levelled, and there’s not a huge change in volume throughout the piece.

How to be a Media Operator

When conducting you need be very tidy, an hour and a half early, and you need to leave the place tidier than you came.

Consider

• Communication
• Location Release
• Insurance
• Location
• Performance Release
• Safety
• Nightmare
• Serendipity

Project Brief 3

Examples of some good interview material

One Minute Wonder

There’s many panning shots of various nearly random material to add interest. Even random shit like just filming the hands on her lap.

My Favourite Picture of You

A bunch of old photos and even an old video recording. The interview plays over a bunch of old photos and videos conveying memories. The interview sounds like it’s conducted by someone who knows this woman. “Sometimes it’s kind of fun to back and talk about where we’ve been” The whole interview actually seems to be a bunch of old photos and videos of this woman Matilda growing up and living life.

Oliver

He’s made this video about his little brother really interesting with just with the use of camera angles, close ups of eyes, videos of interesting material like pets, old source material of cityscapes and stuff. He’s really made this really boring kid look interesting and makes the interview look quite meaningful with the use of music, some really cool over the shoulder camera shots, and just shots capturing facial expressions from various angles. Really fantastic work by Lucas James.

Haha Bryan said “Maori it up”

This other interview where the guy stuffs animals also consists of a bunch of photos and stuff as well. There’s even some pretty seemingly unrelated videos of just animals like tigers walking around and doing tiger stuff.

Most of all these interviews rarely just have the interviewer just sitting down listening to the interviewee talk. It’s lots of other source material and music to keep the interview interesting.

An interview about “retinitis pigmentosa” or colloquially Tunnel Vision, seeing life through a tunnel, shows a depiction of how the vision might appear for the person being interviewed, with a fuzzy static and just a small space in the middle where you can see the material like mouths moving and eyes. The interview ends with a small shot of the man himself, and finishes shortly after.

Epsiode 3: The cost of the Free

The virtual Revolution

This source is a documentary, and it once again talks over a lot of just visually stimulating almost unrelated stuff. This documentary simply states the internet has people distributing pretty much everything you post for profit. There’s a lot of just shitty visual effects of lens flares on people’s faces. There’s also heaps of scenes of just little closeups of faces.

There’s actually only very few scenes where people are filmed talking about the topic itself.

The host of the documentary goes to various different places and to talk about her topic like the beach, even though it doesn’t really seem related to her topic, but it does keep the documentary interesting and a lot more stimulating. The music in the background that pushes the documentary forward also helps to keep the interview interesting. There’s even just shots of her just driving her car down the road, and just random shots of the city, that doesn’t even look like their footage. Other shots of her just sitting on the ground drinking a coffee with her laptop. Or sitting in a bar on her laptop drinking something, with shots of her just looking all surprised and shit by the crap she finds.  Each shot suggests something like “This is a big thing” or “I’ve been studying this topic a lot”

Overall the topic is pretty dumb because it’s just old people freaking out at the idea that the evil men of the internet are spying on them, when it’s really just computers scanning for key words in order to make advertisements present you with stuff you’ll actually appreciate.

“This is the beating heart of google” -_- It’s just a bunch of servers.

Shots I see a lot of:

• Crowds of people walking
• Host walking towards the Camera
• Random establishes shots of the city and just the environment.

Skills of Interviewing

The who?

• Do they have something to say?
• Are they credible?
• Can they deliver ‘on camera’?
• Are they good ‘talent’?
• Who is my audience?

The what?

• What are you going to ask them?
• Research- reading speaking observing
• Write Questions
  • Simple, as short as possible,

open ended, check wording (bias)

• Practice

The Why?

Closed Ended

• Do you get on well with your boss?
• Who will you vote for in this election
• What colour shirt are you wearing?
• Is the highway going to affect your business?

Open Ended

• Tell me about your relationship with your boss?
• What dod you think about the two candidates in this election
• Why did you choose to wear that colour shirt today?
• How do you feel about the highway being built?

Leading Question

What problems do you have with your boss?               Questions are bias and implies fault

How did you smash your car?

The where?

Location would be important, whether to interview at home, work or other.

You should consider things like light, sound and background when doing the interview.

The When?

When interviewing you need

• To brief the subject
  • Repeat the question in your answer.
• Maintain Eye contact
• Listen (nodding, expressive etc)
• Be flexible/adaptable
• Be respectful and show empathy
• Stay focused
• Be quiet. It’s not about you.

 “If someone comes up with a great answer it’s probably because they had a great question” `

Media 1 (Lecture notes)

• Get access to Adobe Creative Cloud
• Complete some workshop survey? (https://goo.gl/forms/8Is0V78lHMKlO8AB2) restricted?

• https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/shared-with-me (TICK)

You’ll have to choose a class to jump into and learn about, the list of classes that you can choose will come available sometime today on what I assume is either the blackboard or google drive. It’ll be up today. 8/03/2017

What is Media?

1. Information presented through film, sound, or written language
2. Triggers for experience
3. Creativity, how the information is told and expressed
4. Shaping/Manipulating, thought provoking
5. Mass Communication

mass communications tradition:

• -assumes a fairly linear one directional flow
• -behavioural or effects model (influence of psychology/ marketing)
• -technology/institutions more important to study than reception and content of message
• -content analysis was main extent of ‘textual’ interest

“Our lives are, to more extensive degree than we care to think, infused with a process of inscription…”

Pre-modern society, the social world was experimented through just face to face interactions or direct experience, as with modern society, it’s mostly indirectly, photo movie etc. It creates an “Imagined communities”

http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/