“Hello to the audience!”

Hehe.

Yesterday’s lectorial was all about – you guessed it – audiences! It was part of a series of tutes Brian has been doing on the five topics for the next assessment: audiences, institutions, texts . . . and  . . . some others . . . look, I forget, but my group is doing audiences so this was the lectorial for us.

Brian started by talking about some media theory, and once again I was glad I’d done year twelve media and so had some general idea of what he was talking about. He talked about the ‘effects tradition’ as opposed to ‘reception theories’: traditionally, media has been somewhat feared and media theorists have talked in terms of the way media influences its audiences. However, these days, we tend to look at media more in terms of audience interpretations of a text.

Stuart Hall’s encoding-decoding model, for example (#thankyouyeartwelvemedia) suggests that producers of media texts ‘encode’ texts with meaning through use of codes and conventions, and that audiences then ‘decode’ these codes and conventions to understand the text.

But the thing that was really interesting about Brian’s lectorial was his discussion of the modern audience. Our group has decided to focus on the interactivity of the modern audience, so I was pretty keen to hear what Brian had to say. He talked about the different way in which modern audiences engage with texts, compared to traditional broadcast media audiences.

For example, he talked about the phenomenon of multi-screening, and showed us a video from Deloitte about media consumption in 2014. It was really interesting to see the way in which we consume multiple forms of media at a time these days. Have a look at the video – I don’t know about you, but there were a lot of time when I was thinking, “Yeah, that sounds like me!”

Emma had the same thoughts. We spent a bit of time discussing our own media habits, and it seemed that we both spent a lot of time multi-screening. We also agreed with Deloitte’s data that TV is no longer the preferred form of media entertainment. More and more, audiences are turning to mobile devices and the internet to relax and unwind at the end of the day.

Hmm. I do spend a lot of my time on my phone, but I also spend a lot of time watching TV and I think Masterchef’s about to start! (Oh, like you’ve never watched reality TV 😉 )

So I promised a post about Thursday’s tute, and here it is.

This is the way Jac, Dusty and I think (have a look out for our self-portraits dotted around the page 🙂 ). It’s our brainstorm about what we’re going to do for our group assessment on the subject of media audiences. We want to focus on the interactivity of modern audiences in the online realm, like on YouTube or Twitter.

That’s all I’m going to say for now; I’m away from home this weekend so on borrowed wifi, and there’s a few more posts coming this week on some academic articles related to the project, so look forward to those.

Sorry for the delay guys – I’ve been away this weekend so I’ve missed my Friday post; later today I’ll do a post on Thursday’s tute but today I want to show you something I made. I realised the other day that for a media student, I hardly ever actually post any media, so have a bit of a squiz at this poster I made for my hockey club:

Hockey Victoria, hockey’s officiating body in this state, has organised a ‘women and girls round’ to celebrate women in sport. Our club, as you can tell, is taking part, and we wanted to promote the things we were doing. As a an amateur but interested photoshopper, I volunteered my services. I don’t know how good it would seem to a professional graphic designer, but I’m pretty happy with it and I think it does the job.

Quite simply, in media one this week we looked at stories. What makes a story? Why do we tell them? Is everything a story, or can a media text be entirely story free? These were the questions brought up by tutor and as-it-turns-out-hilarious lecturer Daniel Binns.

At school, you get taught that stories are most simply made up of a beginning, middle and end, and looking at it pretty basically, that’s true of most media (or at least Western media). But Daniel took things a step further by exploring the idea of causality (what we in year twelve media called ‘the story element cause and effect’). Causality is pretty much as simple as it sounds: it’s the idea that one event causes another, and that in turn causes another and so on and so forth. In media, this concept – while on the surface painfully obvious – is really important to think about in depth because it constitutes the way in which we develop traditional narratives.

Daniel broke the idea of ‘causality’ in narrative media down into three parts: plot, resolution and character development. These are three key elements of narrative media that demonstrate the importance of causality.

The first of these, plot, should be fairly obvious. Causality is how we progress plots – in our primary school scheme, causality fills in the middle between the beginning and end. The Wizard of Oz would be pretty boring if we started with Dorothy arriving in Oz and then moved straight onto her getting home; in the middle we have the plot, which is made up of a chain of linked events. Dorothy accidently kills The Wicked Witch of the East, which leads to her being pursued by The Wicked Witch of the West, which leads to her being sent down the yellow brick road, etc, etc, until finally she finds the Wizard and can return home.

Which brings us to the second point: resolution. As Daniel put it, the resolution of a plot relies on causality not just because it is the last in the chain of linked events, but because it is the resolution of everything that has happened in the film. At the end of The Wizard of Oz, not only does Dorothy return home, but her companions get their wishes, the Wizard finds redemption, Toto is saved, and then absolutely everything is resolved in the neat (and rather frustrating, if you ask me) conclusion that ‘it was all just a dream’. The point is, this plot resolution was caused not just by the event directly preceding it, but all the major plot points of the film. Thus, causality is not just important in telling a story that moves from event to event (the plot), but in telling a story that follows the satisfyingly familiar Western story structure of opening, development and resolution (the year twelve media way of saying beginning, middle and end).

Finally, character development. Daniel brought up a classic storytelling phrase when explaining this point: ‘show don’t tell’. We all get told in creative writing classes to use techniques to create our characters rather than openly describing them, for example, “he squinted, his eyes adjusting to the dawn light filtering through his unusually non-bespectacled eyes” is preferable to “he couldn’t see without his glasses”. (Give me a break, I made it up on the spot.) In narrative media (for argument’s sake let’s restrict it to film and TV), this means using techniques – such as story – to highlight the characters’ attributes. For example, in The Wizard of Oz . . . oh wait . . .

Not a great example of show don’t tell. Let’s look at X-Men (the first one). When Rogue being lost and alone leads to Logan (Wolverine) taking her in, we don’t need a narrator to tell us that beneath his steely exterior (hardy-har-har), wolverine has a heart of gold.

So stories are pretty important. In fact, I’m getting distracted by one right now, so I’d better head off!

Today I had a very exciting experience; I took part in my first RMITV shoot. RMITV (as the name might suggest) is RMIT’s student television department. As a paid member (for the grand sum of $10 a year), I receive regular emails advising me of student projects that require cast and crew. A few weeks ago, I got a crew call for The Assenders, a sitcom about – well, I’m not too sure quite what it’s about yet, but it’s a locally-grown student sitcom so I’m sure it’ll be worthwhile. Considering Sundays are a good day for me, I emailed back, admitting that while I had next to no experience I was keen and eager to please.

Luckily, I heard back quickly that there was a place for me as a production assistant. Sure, in the film industry this is a fancy word for ‘go-fer’, but it still meant I would be on a real live set. And I wasn’t disappointed. To a professional, I’m sure our fifteen-strong crew of teens and young adults must have seemed almost laughable, but to me, to hear words like “rolling . . . mark . . . action!” was a very exciting experience.

I spent most of the day on the boom microphone, making sure that all the actors could be heard without maxing out the boom levels on the camera. It’s not a particularly glamorous job (especially when I fell off my stepladder into several shelves of painting supplies), but it was a job nonetheless and one I was proud to do.

It was great to be able to watch the key creative team (writers, producers and directors) go about their work. From what I could tell, they all had quite a bit of experience with RMITV and media in general; they’d worked on live shows such as Live on Bowen and other narrative shows such as Fergus in Hell:

It was great to see them at work, taking the jokes in their heads and turning them into a fully fledged TV show. Filming at Grimes and Sons paint shop in Eltham, we focussed on one scene in episode one, in which Mike (played by Mike Gorrie), a failed auteur, decides to take part in a decidedly dodgy local stand-up gig, ‘laughapalooza’. I can’t reveal too much else, because I don’t want to do a disservice to the creators and everyone else on set (including me), so all I’ll say is watch out for The Assenders!

Oh, and make sure you check out the RMITV website to have a look at some of the other awesome, student-made content that’s there to be watched. Please remember that loads of media professionals get their start with student TV, and without it many others would never get the chance to pursue their passions and have their fantastic ideas made into real content. So please support us, just by having a watch!

We had a mini-screening on Thursday; everyone’s brief threes. They were really good, and I was particularly impressed with the variety of subjects chosen, from Dusty‘s taxidermist to Patrick‘s Auschwitz survivor.

We then broke into small groups to get a bit of feedback on what worked well and what didn’t. People seemed to like the effect of the polaroid pictures in mine, making it original and fun, and they liked my presence as a narrator, giving the story an affectionate, story-book tone. There were a few issues with the audio dipping in and out but on the whole I think people were able to follow what was going on.

The other members of my group produced amazing and unique portraits that I was glad to be able to watch. Bianca was lucky enough to have a tarot card reader for a neighbour, and used a fantastic amount of b-roll to cover his unusual and fascinating possessions.

Ariff, like me, chose a friend, but used beautiful music and clever found footage to pain a portrait of a traveller. Our only issue was the unusual aspect ratio, but obviously that was a tech issue and not his fault.

Sandy was worried that by choosing her mother hers might be a bit boring, but we all agreed that her personal perspective was touching and she’d covered enough of her mother’s life to create an engaging film.

https://vimeo.com/125567917

Unfortunately, Rob has been a bit busy lately and so hasn’t finished his yet, but keep an eye on his blog for when it’s all finished (hopefully about 27/4).

And that’s about it. I know this seems like a short post, but I can’t think of much to say about the films that you can’t see for yourselves by watching them. If you want to check out any others from my class (and I recommend that you do because they’re all really good), head to the blog of our tutor, Rachel, and click on the links at the side to head to the others’ blogs. Enjoy!

Yesterday’s lecture was all about semiotic theory: the idea that in all communication there are certain ‘signs’ that create meaning because of a shared social understanding of that sign. It makes sense when you think about it; an easy example to use is that of language. The word ‘dog’ doesn’t inherently mean anything; to a native Spanish speaker it means nothing. However, in English speaking countries, we immediately associate it with a small, four-legged animal because that’s what our shared understanding of it is.

In media, this theory is particularly important because we gain a great deal of understanding that isn’t explicitly explored. For example, if you saw a picture of Voldemort having never seen Harry Potter before, you could probably still guess that he was the bad guy because our society has a shared understanding that black clothing and inhuman features signifies evil.

In media analysis, we call this interpretive process ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’ (thank you year twelve media!). ‘Denotation’ is what actually, physically appears in a media product. In the above example, it would be a picture of a strange-looking man with black robes. The ‘connotation’ is the meaning we gain from this due to our shared social understandings (eg. he’s the bad guy).

We can further look at this process of denotation and connotation in terms of ‘codes’ and ‘conventions’ (again, thank you year twelve media!). A ‘code’ is a technical aspect of a media production; for example, sticking with the Harry Potter, it could be the darkness and lack of bright lighting in the final movie. The ‘convention’ is the meaning associated with this code, so in the case of Harry Potter it would be that these are ‘dark’ times for the wizarding world and that Harry is in danger.

And that, in a nutshell, is what media analysis is all about: understanding the meaning associated with technical aspects of a media product, and thus being able to understand both the creator’s choices and the effect the product has on its audience.

I promised yesterday to make up for Friday’s missing post with an extra post today about Thursday’s tute, so here it is. On Thursday, we were looking at the technical side of sound recording.

Anything you can hear on a recorded piece of media can be categorised as one of the following: music, speech, sound (eg. footsteps, birdsong) and noise (unintended music, speech or sound). As Rachel (my tutor, in case I hadn’t mentioned it) pointed out to us, you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your ears, so sound is a really integral part of a media piece in terms of engaging the viewer/listener and setting a tone.

Thus, it’s obviously pretty important to ensure that you create good sound, and while a well-loved media saying is “we’ll fix it in post”, you make it easier for yourself when you record high-quality sound in the first place. Rachel was keen to emphasise that just from listening to a recorded sound, you (and yes I mean you, not necessarily a media professional but an ordinary person too) can determine where a sound was recorded in relation to the microphone, how far away from the microphone the source was and what type of microphone was used.

So in true media student style we headed out, armed with a few nifty microphones from tech services, and recorded our own sounds. We had a big list of items to cover, from traffic to talking to taps, and then had to return to class to evaluate the quality of what we had recorded. Ali and I managed to get most of the things on our list, and I’d love to post them here but my internet’s gone a bit haywire so unless I want to sit here for five hours . . . (I don’t).

These are some of the questions we had to reflect on when we got back to class:

What problems did you encounter? Probably the biggest problem was recording the outside sounds, as there was an RUSU function on at Bowen Street that overpowered most of our sounds, creating a poor ‘signal-to-noise ratio’. Birdsong was particularly difficult to hear over the pounding festival-style music.

What were your most successful recordings? I think the train recording was particularly good, as you can clearly hear both the train announcer and the train itself, which I think gives it a really good sense of place and a story-like aspect.

What did you discover about mic techniques/setting levels? We were using an omni-directional microphone, meaning that we did not have to use the mic in a certain direction or anything like that, so it was actually fairly easy to use.

Our lectorial this week was all about how to use the library and collaboration part two, so not much to blog about that I haven’t already covered. So instead, I thought I’d talk again about one of my other subjects, textual crossings, which once again has a startling relevance to media one.

This week in textual crossings, we started looking at adaptations of real stories, and watched Todd Hayne’s 1987 biopic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. It was particularly relevant to media one because we’re in the midst of assignment three, which is once again about doing a media portrait, but this time about someone else. It’s not exactly a biopic; it’s an exploration of their personality rather than their life story, but I would say Superstar actually fit this brief nicely. Instead of telling Karen Carpenter’s life story, it focussed on a few years and her battle with anorexia, dissecting the motivation of it and in turn different aspects of her personality.

Now that I’m planning my own media portrait, it was interesting to see the innovative ways in which Haynes tried to represent Carpenter’s personality. The most obvious is that nearly the entire film consists of barbie dolls being moved around in front of the scene to represent the Carpenter family. It’s a interesting depiction not only of the Carpenters’ reputation as being the wholesome, “American Dream”-like family next door, but also of Karen’s obsession with her body image.

Having said all that, it’s important for me to say that I really hated Superstar. I thought it was really crass in the way it made a melodramatic, almost horrific spectacle of what should have been Karen’s private battles, and I thought that it unfairly reduced her entire personality down into one illness. But within the context of assignment three I was almost glad I had disliked it because it gave me an understanding of my own personal tastes when it comes to media portraits and exactly what I don’t want to do with my own work.

Of course, I’m only one person. Haynes’ film is considered by many to be a gritty, artistic film that gives the viewer a real understanding not just of Karen’s personality but of anorexia as a disease. Because Haynes never got permission to use the many Carpenters songs that appear throughout the movie, it was never able to be released in cinemas. It was shown at several festivals and awards nights after its initial release, with a mostly positive response, and then it was distributed through back-door, black market channels. Currently, you can see it on YouTube, so I’ve linked to it below so you can have a look at a bona fide media self-portrait. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think; I know I’m looking forward to the discussion in the textual crossing tute tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rACJWPd3VnI

One of the key things you study in year twelve media is forms of regulation. One example of media regulation that I’d like to tell a personal story about today is the advertising standards bureau or ASB. An independent industry regulatory body, the bureau takes complaints about ads on TV and judges them against certain criteria, and has the power to remove ads from air. I’m writing about it today because my dad has made a complaint.

There are plenty of criteria against which ads are judged, such as the inclusion of discrimination, endorsement of unsafe behaviour or depiction of illegal behaviour. It’s based on the last criterion that Dad has made a complaint. You might be familiar with a certain Nimble ad in which two parents are in strife when they realise they can’t pay for the DJ at their child’s birthday party. Luckily, Nimble comes to the rescue with an on-the-spot loan.

Dad complained on the basis that in hiring the DJ without knowing for sure that they could pay him, the parents were engaging in a contract that they couldn’t fulfil, which is against the law.

It may seem a bit pedantic, but I think it is fair. I mean, we shouldn’t be encouraging people to buy things they can’t afford on the basis that they can lend money to pay for it. But if you think that’s pedantic, you should see some of the ads that have been cancelled by the ASB. Have a look at these, and see if you can guess why they’ve been banned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rUahMBILuk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8jOPc5DXIw

Give up? Ad A was banned for misleadingly suggesting that preservatives could make you glow in the dark. Ads B and C were both banned for depicting unsafe behaviour; the first for depicting unsafe road behaviour and the second because using electronics in water can cause electrocution.

Seems pretty crazy, right? I mean, surely people have some common sense and can work these out for themselves? These aren’t even the worst. If you want to see how crazy people can get, check out this Mumbrella article by Tim Burrowes about some of the worst complaints made to the ASB over the years. It should give you a bit of a laugh.