Month: May 2017

Overall, I don’t satisfied enough on myself. Although I learned a lot and had a lot of fun in media 1, I find some weaknesses that I need to improve. I think I am lack of analyze skill  and find hard to read academical reading. And the depth of my reflection is not enough. In addition, I am lack of creativity, I usually out of ideas during the project, and sometimes I feel hard to understand or misunderstand the requirement of the project. Nevertheless, I have learned a lot professional techniques such as using Premiere and Audition, and also done some group work during workshop, which develop the collaborative skill.

I have seen a film named Night’s Tightrope this week. It is a Japanese suspense drama film, which contains the implication about Karma. As the common Japanese filming style, you usually cannot understand what the film wants to talk about at first, even after watching two third of the whole film. Japanese directors usually try to leave suspense to audience and keep the unity of the plot, so you can easily find the clues throughout the film. The most editing technique in Japanese film is flashback — they never follow the chronological order. The effect of flashback could be highlight  the causality of the story, or confuse audience at first than give the answer at the end.

In Night’s Tightrope, the space and time are disorder, the plot happens in one scene, suddenly jump to another scene. As a result, I cannot understand what happens until the ending scene. The film is describing the life of two high-school-girls. They lived in darkness, Atsuko was suffered school bullying; the other girl,Yuki, has a psychopathic grandma, and was hurt by grandma when she was a child. Yuki wrote a book describing Atsuko, but was plagiarized by her teacher. She posted the scandal of the teacher as revenge, lead him died eventually. Then the following stories are all about the Karma: the retribution of characters cheating, hurting others, deadness, are all reflected on the guilty persons, or their family. I cannot find the relationship of each characters at first. In the end of the film, all the relationships are showed up by the  clues such as photos and flashback of the recall. There are also some graphic match in the film, connect to the recall and the reality, which makes the plot clear.

Our group presented our rough cut to the other group and the tutor in the workshop. The rough cut lasts for about 7 minutes including the introduction, the vox-pop of the least favorite sound, soundscape of recording the annoying sound, and the doctor interview about misophonia. We didn’t finish the conclusion and seeking for the improvement. After listening our rough cut, the tutor told us a couple of problems of the audio and tell us what can be improved. Firstly, he told us we need to add some background music. Our audio didn’t have background music at all, which seems to be boring. What’s more, the transitions of each part did not sound fluently, so we need to add some effects such as fade in and out, or adjust the volume. Maybe adding additional music can solve this problem. And the volume of the part interviewing the doctor sounds strange because the volume of translation is too loud, and the original sound of the doctor was hard to hear, thus we need to adjust the volume again. The length is another problem. The length of the soundscape and the vox-pop last for too long, we need to cut a little bit of them. And we originally decide to add a scene of a dinner and set up an arguing situation above the soundscape, but the tutor said that would be too much, so we won’t add the scene in the audio. Finally, we didn’t think about our resolution: how can we conclude the audio? The tutor told us we need to connect to the introduction and give out the current condition of misophonia. And we also need to conclude with what people should do to solve it. I think we still need a lot of work to do, our group members should concentrate more on the unfinished part.

Our rough cut audio:

Our group record the sound in the cafe, including the sound of making coffee, and the sound of tablewares. By doing this exercise with Audition, I learned how to create multiple soundtrack. I also learn to cut the piece of sound from one timeline and move it into other timeline, or adjust it such as reset the volume by dragging yellow line. I have used the fade in and fade out at the beginning and end. I tried to copy one spot sound and paste it many times to fit into the rhythm of background music I found. However, I didn’t use special effect. I don’t know how to add it. What’s more, I do not understand how to use the other functions in the tool box and I found hard to add spot sound into the timeline. I didn’t add narrative dialogue inside, because after I record the dialogue and import it into soundtrack, I think it cannot fit in the whole audio, so I deleted it finally. The practice helps me to learn the skills of operation of Audition, this is very useful to adjust our project audio.

According to the reading this week, we can know that public’s awareness are treated as the commercial product. Merchants usually use the even the students in school become their business object. Since merchants’ aim of publishing an advertisement is to make profit, they tend to confuse right and wrong and disrespect for the truth nowadays. Media become a path for the businessman to purchase their products or even infuse their values to the publics. The value of those advertisements usually being disordered. Recently media becomes to the “commercial economy”. Furthermore, merchants also publish the entertaining media, which they think it is suitable for the most audience’s taste. So the media platform becomes nonsensical. This reading is to claim the right of choice to watch the advertisement.

I saw a movie called Prophecy this weekend. It is a Japanese suspense and crime movie which is an adaption of a series manga. It is about a group of “antisocial” who use newspaper to cover their head and faces, always announce the person they will kill before they kill that guy, by posting video online. They only kill the persons who contrary to morality. And the police are trying to arrest them. A lot of public are actually support them because they sanction the bad guys. However, they use an inappropriate way which is murder and also raise social unrest. The movie use a fresh back to tell the causality of their action: these “antisocial” are from the bottom of the society, they met in a construction site. Once a child who worked there was ill, but the labour contractor ignored and forced him to keep working. At last the child died. The main character was angry and he killed the labour contractor by mistake. Then he decided to continue the “sanction”, and organize these group of the companions. The movie exposes the unfair of the society, no one cares the people from the bottom of the society, lead to the pathetic result. The authority even cannot identify the justice, so the people who are treated unfairly would do things against the society, this is regrettable.

In the film, they post the announcement according to the social network, which shows the huge impact of mass media. All of the “netizens” can post their comments directly below the video. Also, the police can track them through the internet. Only a piece of video can cause social unrest, this shocks me.

Our group discussed about the division of work. We’ve meet outside the class for sharing the individual finding and through throughout this week, and we coordinate the component of the audio in this workshop. Our topic is Misophonia. First, we will start the audio with a story of the annoying sound, makes audience involved into the described situation. And then we make a brief introduction what it is . We will have the vox-pop asking about what is the sound people commonly hated. Furthermore, we decide to interview a professional doctor and record the interview. I know a Chinese doctor that is doing the traditional Chinese medicine treatment and she is also a professor in the Endeavor Collage of Natural Therapy in Melbourne. Lastly we need to return to the topic, since Misophonia is a phonology symptoms, I think we need to figure out how to relate back to the meida.

We used to join a tourist group or purchase in travel agency, but now more and more people choose to do the schedule by themselves. I usually plan the trip by watching other travelers’ travel notes and the travel guides online. People now usually post their trip dairy on their blogs as well as post some tips so that other visitors who decide to travel that place can collect some useful informations. It is far more convenient than before! Instead of buying a plan from travel agency, we can learn more history and culture about the destination and the visiting time is more flexible than travel with a group. Internet brings convenience to traveller. We can book the accommodation and the flight by ourselves as well. These cannot be imagined in the past.

We’ve discuss about the perspective and social distance in the workshop. In the reading, writer divides sound perspective into two types, static and dynamic. Static perspective places the soundscape into three levels: figure, ground and field. Figure is like the highlighted sounds of an artwork, such as the character’s voice and the important sound effect. Ground is less prominent, which creates listener’s social context. Field is the furthest thus called background sound, provides spatial “volume”. Although the field is the furthest sound, it doesn’t mean that it is not important. It can create the atmosphere of the soundscape. For example, the field sound could make audience feel anxious if the situation is emergent; or the it could create a relax feeling when the scene is soft and peaceful. Imagine that if you hear an audio about a mom telling the goodnight story to a baby, if it has only the figure sound which the mother’s voice, without a light background music, there would be less relaxed the listener experienced.