This week is week 11.

Time to freak out.

I’ve got so many assessments to do and so little time to do them.

Over the weekend, I worked on my documentary short film, it is a list of things that is in the RUSU Queer Lounge. I’ve haven’t enhance my videos in any shape or form and I don’t plan to now, even though a few weeks ago I said I will edit the colour balance of some of my shots since the lighting in some of the videos are pretty horrendous. I have yet to reshoot my videos, I haven’t got to reshooting some shots yet. Now, I’m just thinking over whether I should reshoot or not. Because when I come to think of it, the shots seem quite fine. The footage is raw. Just like how when a queer person who is new to the Queer Department come and pay a visit to the Queer Lounge, the emotions they would feel would be raw too, wouldn’t it? Considering it is a new surrounding, a new place of belonging, a safe place that is free from judgment, I mean look, how many places are there in Melbourne that’s like that?

I quite like the rawness in my videos – the unedited aspects of the lounge – it conveys this sense of realness. Many queer students when they first discover the lounge, they couldn’t believe there such thing as a Queer Lounge, a haven of all sorts at RMIT. It took them awhile to wrap it over their heads. This rawness of the videos with all the shadows and the blurriness of colours is what someone new to the lounge may see.

This just reminds me of the student’s line in Latour’s On the Difficulty of Being an ANT: An Interlude in the Form of a Dialog, a reading that Adrian handed out back in week 4:

‘I am always limited to my situated viewpoint, to my perspective, to my own subjectivity.’ (Latour pp. 145).

This rawness to my short film is only my viewpoint, would my audience see it that way? Or would they just notice how awful my shots were and how the ‘things’ that I shot were not lit properly, would it matter? How would they interpret it?

I’ve finished writing up my script. I believe it’s quite well done, it’s poetic or at least I think so?

I will be borrowing a zoom recorder and recording the script for my film before the studio on Friday hopefully, if not, I will record it after the studio in the late afternoon. I’ll be recording the script in my office, in the consultation room at RUSU.

I’ve already recorded the script on my phone, however the quality of the audio is appalling and it’ll be embarrassing if I use it in my film. I’ve timed my script twice. One time I recorded the script with a total running time of 6:43 minutes and another time was 6:58 minutes. I did speak rather slow and I did mess out my pronunciation of a few words. I will seriously need to consider practising reading my script this week before I record it on Friday. I believe the final recording of the script will be less than seven minutes long. My film is currently sitting on 8:39:14 minutes.

I will be using some segments the audio recording from the coming out workshop in week 9 as my audio track for my short film

In my presentation of my project #3 back in week 7, it was noted that I could possibly use an audio track in my film, that audio track would be of people in the lounge talking, but I was to distort the audio track so people’s voices are unable to be recognisable. I’ve considered this and over the weekend, I thought of layering my audio tracks. That is, I layer one segment of the audio track with another segment. I experimented with this idea and I liked it. Since my film is quite long, I’ve layered the audio tracks with segments of noise – that is, many  people talking all at once – with a segment where only one person is talking at a time. In some parts of the film, I’ve juxtaposed the audio tracks to have two segments of noise at once, so it’s just noise that my audience will hear but at times, they will be able to comprehend what is being said.

Since this experiment was a success, I will be using this method.

The queer collective members that can be heard clearly in the recording have given me their full consent for me to use their voice in this short film. I’ve asked them to sign release forms after the recording. I’ve already asked them again for their consent and thus approval for me to use this audio recording for my project and were please to do so. Those individuals who can be heard in the recording are out, they are out to their peers, family and to society, and they’ve assured me that I’ve got their consent in publicising their voice as audible and undistorted for my project. Frankly, they don’t care. And they told me so. Actually, they want their stories told.

I hope to finish my film this weekend or by Friday night this week. I want to get this film out of the way of my studies so I can focus on my essays, not only for this studio but for my other classes as well.