- In what ways do you hope your work engaged its audience and communicated a key concern of the studio?
Audience engagement was a key consideration throughout this project given the short film format and the opportunity to work with ACMI. From a conceptual standpoint, I wanted to create an entertaining ‘hook’ and narrative to balance the amount of factual content I needed to include. This led me to film the reaction of children to questions about the formats as a fun way to engage the audience and grew into being part of the chronological narrative. Due to the short film style, I needed to engage the audience quickly and offer fast-paced dynamic content. This required a mix of visuals and sound, including historical footage, interviews, narration, music, motion graphics and titles in a relevant way. For example, the music was chosen not only for background sound but to reflect the narrative, such as Jazz Noir for film format segment, the 1980s inspired music for video and contemporary electronic music for digital formats. With ACMI exhibitions targeted at the general public, I considered the audience and wanted to create a film with enough factual and technical information, but without being overly complicated. The combination of audiovisual techniques helps to balance the methods of communication. Including the children’s interviews could also help appeal to a younger audience and remain accessible. Overall, I hoped the audience is able to reflect on changes to film, video and digital formats, see the importance of technology and question what will be next.
2. Imagine you are going to keep working on that media piece. What would be the core things you would want to improve and extend and why?
The most obvious aspect I feel I could develop further would be the length and detail of the topic. With such a broad subject matter spanning over one hundred years of history, I had a lot of research and had to communicate the technical elements of each format as well as key examples. With a short film, I had to ensure the examples I chose were highly relevant to a technical development of each format, either film, video or digital. With a longer run time, I could include more examples following a historical narrative. Or, I could focus my examples on a particular genre, such as Australian film and television rather than relying on the footage to convey the technical aspects. Due to limitations of the Covid-19 pandemic, filming and recording were completed remotely. If I were to develop the project further, I would like to improve the children’s interviews by completing them live to obtain more natural reactions. I would also film them in a chroma studio to improve the motion graphics quality. Another technical aspect I would improve would be recording the voiceover in a studio, although I found some creative ways to ensure good quality, it would be more professional with access to a studio.
3. From your studio, reflect on an aspect of two other students’ media work on the website in terms of specific insights they produced about a key idea addressed by the studio?
Andrea Garcia’s The Art of the Title Sequence (Links to an external site.) provided a timeline-based history of the art of the title sequence in an informative and engaging way. Even by covering a vast history and background information, the film’s pace, design, colours and animation kept it entertaining. Showing examples from films was essential but combining that footage with animated text and graphics added another layer and explained the topic in a visually relevant way. Garcia cleverly created motion graphic text that directly referenced film title sequences, which was both visually engaging and original.
Ruby Amoore explored a unique topic in her film Putting Australian Cinema to the Bechdel. (Links to an external site.) The introduction provided a brief and clear explanation of the Bechdel Test and a fun hook for the audience, with a relatable “flicking” through the Stan streaming service. With an obscure topic, it was clever to analyse it through the genre of Australian cinema. This made it easier to understand and added some recognisable and entertaining examples. The use of title graphics provided the audience with information, using a simple red or green text to indicate if a film passed or failed the test. Finishing the film with a quiz was an engaging way to wrap up the topic and add a participative aspect along with factual content.
4. The other studio website you engaged with, describe a key idea that you think the finished studio work communicated with reference to a specific example.
In the studio Social Media for Social change, many important topics are covered such as climate change, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, workers’ rights, unemployment and the treatment of refugees. Future Aus Music explores the representation of Australian music within the radio and music industry, but also digs deeper to analyse the representation of minority groups such as females, POC and queer artists within the industry itself. The film is highly engaging and dynamic, utilising the TikTok format to present informative, bite-sized clips. The highly visual nature of the platform is exploited thoroughly with a variety of content, for example, interviews, text, graphics, videos and gifs. Not only is this engaging, but also relevant to a youthful target audience interested in new Australian music. Something that stood out for such a fun and entertaining film, was the large amount of factual evidence provided, through text, graphics and data which gave the content legitimacy. The audience would feel they could trust the information provided, making their calls to action seem worthwhile. For example, a range of radio stations was provided to the audience along with statistics of the percentage of Australian music content, encouraging them to support by listening to those with high play percentages. In terms of diversity, they played clips of artists from minority groups and included interviews with them asking for their personal experience of diversity within the Australian music industry. This shows a well-researched and highly credible social media platform that really can encourage change.
