The Story Way Back When

 

 

In this difficult and trying world, I must be the harbinger of my own success and future. I spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure out many things, mainly just what I wanted to see myself doing within the next 2 – 6 years, then the next 10 – 20 etc. It’s a situation I’ve always dreaded throughout my life, not knowing what aspect of the world I could somehow slot myself comfortably into, unsure if such a thing existed at all, and the idea that I’d have to submit to doing and becoming something I hated simply because I had to put food on the table. I’ve always believed that if money was all I wanted out of life I could easily attain it, but it would be it at the cost of leading a meaningless, unproductive and regretful life. The end of my degree looms near and I can already tell that I’m just not going to really suit a normal office job but my options then become stranger, and a lot more difficult.

Growing up in Malaysia’s education system is something I can only describe as being forced through a hellish version of Ken Robinsons factory process, where they attempt to indoctrinate you with nationalist and religiously biased history classes, and force you to memorize giant textbooks of information to regurgitate later, that you’re most likely never going to need ever again outside of school. One of the biggest problems I faced was not being very fluent in the national language Bahasa Melayu resulted in terrible results in all those subjects. Lucky for me science and math was in english and in fact where my deepest interests lays. In fact I had a deep fascination with physics in particular which I still pursue every moment I can today. However in the fourth year of high school students get divided into the ‘art’s and ‘sciences’ and if your grades aren’t all good you automatically get placed in the arts stream, I had to request to be put into the science stream, and I was just told “No, you can’t, you don’t have the results” because only three of my papers – english, math, science – bore good results. This basically ruined my hopes of gaining new and exciting knowledge ever again and I lost all my will entirely in school, and simply resigned myself to the back of classrooms. My only criteria for high school was to pass the final exam (can’t get a job without it), and that I did, only just.

After high school I spent another half a year thinking about what it was I wanted to do, and I had a long standing passion with music, having picked up the piano at a very young age, I wanted to forge a path in that direction, but music isn’t really seen as a productive occupation and was discouraged by all those around me save for a few. In the end taking music course wasn’t really an option so I thought maybe I’ll make games because I spent most of my time playing them, and in the end I settled for a digital animation course at The One Academy. Never having worked hard in school I was totally unprepared the hailstorm of assignments they had in store for me and I hardly lasted a year and failed almost all my subjects every semester and eventually I pulled out of the course and studying for a brief moment until found my feet again in a Mass Communications course at Taylors University, which frankly was the course I heard people were taking when they didn’t know what else to do with their lives.

I often tell people that my time spent and subject studied at Taylors was like an extended version of high school exclusively for those who didn’t make the science stream, where I didn’t learn a single thing. Most (not all) people in my classes just didn’t care to learn things and wanted to have a good time partying and hanging out or causing trouble, I wasn’t any different although my version of trouble was constantly questioning the doctrine pushed onto us by the lecturers. Our assignments weren’t really even that tough. I was able to submit maybe half of my work and still get by which seemed to be the general attitude that was held by many around me, which suited me just fine. After the education system turned it’s back on me, I couldn’t care less about it.

The Story Not So Long Ago

 

I decided to further my studies into a degree not because I wanted to prolong my time free from an office job, but what I didn’t expect was just how much I was suddenly turned on by what I learnt at RMIT in Melbourne. It’s like the little kid that died inside when he was told he could never study physics just sprang back to life and was fascinated with what he was seeing. What I got wrong was thinking I had learnt nothing, when I had actually realised early on whilst doing my advertising course that I was basically learning how to manipulate people into doing things they don’t even realise, and my initial and immediate reaction to this was repulsion, and I have ever since hated advertising and PR on a moral basis. This was the foundation that sparked my curiosity again at RMIT where I realised that what I had learnt wasn’t inherently an evil thing. What I did learn was that there are people out there who know how to use this knowledge in extremely exploitative ways, and that there those who use the same knowledge to positive ends as well. This really encapsulated me as a mixture of paranoia and desire to learn more about just what little control I had over my decisions as well as to what extent other people are embedded into this life, and lead me to learn how just much how we’ve all become prisoners of a panopticon in our heads.

“any form of coercion requires justification, and most of them are completely unjustified” – Chomsky on totalitarianism

When I started off at RMIT, my contextual studies aspect of the course was in film, but in the following semesters I changed it up to politics and economics as this newfound fascination of the civilized world had gripped my attention gravely. Having next to absolutely no knowledge on any of what was going on, the course materials and concepts were incredibly difficult for me to grasp not because they were particularly difficult concepts, but because there were just simply too many of them. As a result I was completely overwhelmed, but managed to stay barely afloat in this new sea of ideologies and knowledge and what I’ve picked up from it has only inspired me to continue the search for knowledge and answers to problems. What caught my interest the most out of all I went through was thought control in democratic societies but the thing that got me really invested was a 4 part video series by Adam Curtis titled The Century of the Self in which he brings to attention things like the birth of PR as a rebranding of the word ‘propaganda’ by Edward Bernays because it had negative connotations with the Nazi’s. He also talks a lot about the massive amount of psychological information that is used in PR and advertising campaigns to get people to behave irrationally, particularly the psychoanalytical knowledge uncovered by Sigmund Freud (who happened to be Edward Bernays’ uncle). Today the landscape is a little different, and data-mining has been one of the best ways to predict people’s behaviors, and then adjust specific and effective messages to cater individual desires but the objective and end results are the same. A lot of what I picked up after this was from both the documentary and book by Noam Chomsky called Manufacturing Consent and excerpts I had gone through from his other publications. The things he brings to attention which seriously question the role of democracy in the world which promised freedom and solidarity, were a big wake up call or rather a slap in the face for many, including myself, that much of the media we consume is to instill very particular desired behaviors and attributes in us.

“I think people have the capacities to see through the deceit in which they are ensnared, but you gotta make the effort” – Chomsky

The kinds of media I hope to create then will probably make getting work I enjoy a little more difficult in a standard media company as they most likely won’t want someone to craft messages that tell people not to be so quick to buy a product. I don’t really see the purpose in confining myself to a single media platform as trying to tackle problems like these requires all aspects and levels of media, they are a means to an end. I plan  on uncovering more methods that can produce these kinds of results and to explore the extent to which these methods can be applied. This endeavour will require knowledge of an enormous avenue of technologies and techniques from media, politics and business to science and religion. As these are all massive avenues of research that people have dedicated their entire lives to I will need to make great effort towards educating myself and figuring out ways to collaborate with people who are already experts in their fields so I can create the most effective and efficient work and methods and this is why I have chosen to work in a scholarly direction. My plan is to spend the next few years fully focused on studying and exploring the wealth of knowledge there is already available. I was able to speak with individuals within the industry and gain invaluable insight into the working world, and to better guide my own path. I still wasn’t 100%  convinced about what I was going to do, but after hearing from them I feel more confident in working towards it.

I realised pretty quickly that the people I wanted to speak with the most were the people who had been teaching me in the last three years of my education as they are the ones who have had a direct influence on my desire to learn more. I also sent out queries to several other professionals who already create media for similar ends that I aim to make.

The Story Now

 

During my last semester in a DJ course, we were privileged to get Graham St John to come and give a lecture on what he does.

“Passion for research led me into a scholarly career, which is not the same as an “academic career”. The latter involves inflated egos, power games, administration and so forth. But don’t get me wrong, there are a great many good people in academia. If you have an interest in research then that is the best start. If you are simply interested stature then that is not a good start.” – Graham

He goes around to all the biggest lifestyle festivals in the world such as Burning Man and writes about the culture surrounding and embedded in them. When I spoke with him, he was quick to point out a difference between scholarly and academic work, the latter being imbued with unnecessary politics and inflated egos and that it’s something I should only consider as long as I’m in it for the research and not the smug sense of narcissism that comes with it. When I asked what he found most difficult, he brought up how important it is to to choose a research area that has wide applications and appeal ~

“That said, often the research interest is not that which you choose, but which chooses you” – Graham

He stressed on how it was important to have my ideas criticised through peers, conferences, reviews etc. which is something I hadn’t really thought about before but quickly made a lot of sense and was also a sentiment shared by most of the academics I had spoken with. I had also spoken with Adrian Miles who lectures at RMIT as he really fascinated me from the first day of class where he talked about decentralization and autonomous systems. What I managed to get from his lectures, was the idea of self driven and self directed work, and learning how to learn, or how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out things. Adrian also enforced the idea that I needed to put my work out there for criticism and recognition. But as I was pretty clueless about what to expect, I did notice that most of my tutors were on their PHD’s as well, which made me wonder if teaching was a necessary component, and it turns out to be entirely optional and not something everyone is capable of. I had also taken liking to Ken Robinson who takes creative approaches to education and talks about lateral thinking in opposition to factory style teaching methods which really fascinated me. I’m still reading into it, but watching his RSA lecture really got me thinking about what I could really be capable of as a human being and to really take being a student to the next level as well as figuring out what it takes to be a good teacher to cultivate the same kinds of creative learning.

“You can be a very good teacher without being the smartest researcher, probably not the other way round.” – Adrian

I was also able to talk with Ed Montano who taught me last semester as well for DJ Dance Cultures, in which we looked into the development, current and potential state of dance music and cultures as well learnt some basics on how to DJ ourselves. My chat with him was possibly one of the most useful where he talked to me in detail the kinds of things I could expect.

“This is my little joke, I think most music academics are failed musicians..” – Ed

I couldn’t help but agree (even though he may have been joking) that this is a sentiment a lot of people in the arts and creative industries feel when they resort to teaching for income instead of their craft and definitely not a trap I want to fall into. Like most of the people I interviewed, getting into academia wasn’t exactly a deliberate decision but one they sort of found themselves in and Ed talked about how even after a PHD you’re still expected to continue researching and writing articles or books, which I personally thought was a great place to be. He went on to talk about creative practice research as opposed to traditional publications, and this was something that really caught my attention as the kinds of work I want to make will depend heavily on if they can have real world applications and results.

“When you do a PHD people think it’s hard. It’s not hard intellectually, it’s hard motivationally, because you usually get a year and half two years into it and you wonder ‘why the fuck am I doing this?’” – Ed

He and Adrian pointed out that my main focus for now should be on applying for an honours and writing a convincing personal statement that proves my interest in researching a particular topic, and should that not pull through to then work towards a Masters Degree.

I was also lucky to get to talk with Tom Heinemann whom is a documentary film maker (who may deny it) makes politically imbued documentaries such as Carbon Crooks which discusses the horrors of the carbon pollution problem.

“Well, I do not see my films as politically motivated. I will leave this up to the viewers to decide that.” – Tom

I was intrigued as to what motivated him to create types of media whose goal is to educate people en masse rather than to deprive or hide knowledge from them. He told me about how he had spent the last twenty years travelling the world and how it was “damn unfair”. He expressed his anti free market views and concerns about income inequality, and how as a result of the work he does, it has become increasingly difficult to get things such as permits to film and release footage without getting into lawsuits. He did mention that it was a monetarily fruitless endeavour

“This “business” is close to zero profits and the only thing that justifies me keep doing what I do, is that I truly believe that I can do a difference.” – Tom

but that wasn’t going to deter him, nor should it anyone who really believes in this cause. He ended by pointing out that he had no affiliations to any particular ideology or school of thought.

“I’m not a political activist or part/member of any ngo or political party or movement. An unbiased, critical journalist cannot be that. End of story” – Tom

The Story That Is Yet To Be

 

Whilst I’d love to argue that his anti free-market position is certainly a political and biased one in opposition of capitalism, I can see where he’s coming from, which I think is more important. Labels don’t really help solve issues, if anything they just fuel the fire and add more unnecessary layers and confusion to already convoluted problems, ultimately taking away from the actual problems at hand that need solutions. Being unbiased is critical and I aim to make it a point to practice it in as much work as I can to avoid being regarded as an unreliable source of information. I think particularly after these last few weeks, I’ve been able to really solidify my aims and draw out a path I need to take to get where I want to be. It’s not going to be particularly easy, but nothing worth doing ever is. I hope that I can look back on things like this one day and really think to myself that I wasn’t so hopeless after all and that I was fully capable of making truly worthwhile contributions. Always having been a passionate lover of all things scientific, I hope I will be able to create experiments that produce desirable results and perhaps in finding answers, bring rise to new questions worth asking. My journey is far from over, if anything I’m still taking my baby steps, but these are probably the most important steps I will take as they shape what my future will most likely look like. I am both excited and terrified and will have to cultivate my body and mind as best I can to avoid crumbling under the pressures what may come. The future is a dark place and we can only do so much to shape what comes, and I’d rather be prepared and not need to be than be unprepared and caught off guard.

 

Interviews:

Adrian Miles: Interview took place online via Google Docs on Friday Oct the 2nd 2015

Ed Montano – Interview took place on at RMIT building 9 level 4 Friday Oct the 2nd 2015

Graham St John – Interview took place online via Google Docs on Friday Oct the 8th 2015

Tom Heinemann – Interview took place online via Google Docs on Friday Oct the 1st 2015

 

References

Curtis, A. (2015). Century of Self : Happiness Machines. Available at: https://vimeo.com/95699538 [Accessed 6 Oct. 2015].

Noam, C. (2015). Manufacturing Consent. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBhuoUzNQ8c [Accessed 6 Oct. 2015].

TED, (2015). Changing Education Paradigms. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U [Accessed 7 Oct. 2015].

 

Growing up where I was from, piracy was possibly the only way to get content at all. The media world around me was totally censored or simply banned outright (Daredevil was banned because it had the world devil in it for fucks sake). The only people who sold movies and music that were worth the time and not uncensored were people selling pirated content. When I re-watch a lot of old movies it’s like I’m watching entirely new films – which is great to some degree, it’s a whole new experience! But in all honesty I wouldn’t have known about the world of music, games and movies if it wasn’t for piracy, and now that I can afford them I spend money whenever I see something worth spending on.

I don’t think big companies neglect this truth either, otherwise they’d be working even harder to take down individuals for minor offences in piracy. Besides, the world of copyright is muddy as fuck. If I’m a music producer and my tracks get used in clubs and bars around the world for profit, I should be getting a cut for all of it – as a DJ would I really want to go through the trouble to credit 30 different artists just for a one hour set, which I change every time I perform many times a week? Well in that sense it’s probably the venues responsibility to sign up with a body like APRA and pay their dues there, but I don’t know if most do.

There is no real black and white when it comes to it outside the pirate flag itself.

Leaving it to the music (or whichever related) industry is akin to letting the mob handle its bidnuz, and they will bully the fuck out of everyone they can to milk every single penny they can.

Saying no to ‘piracy’ is like saying no to drugs. It’s not gonna happen and with good reason. People have been ‘stealing’ and re-appropriating art since forever. It’s a learning process, it’s how we develop more complex ideas and make new things. Most of the media if not all of it that you know and love today is a copy or a ripoff or a remake of something someone else already has already done. Trying to stop that and stamp your name on it is like trying to kill the creative process and say no to any growth unless it has your name on it. If this ran rampant it would inhibit any real progress and just seems totally counter-intuitive and unproductive.

The whole notion of ownership is a human construct anyway, but we want recognition and incentive to continue making works of art. If there’s nothing in it why bother? I think the illusion that to be a successful creator you need to reach triple A status is a big problem with this – that you’ll only ever be considered an artist if you make a lot of money.. the most money. Otherwise your life is a failed endeavor. But art is the creative playground in which all other aspects of our lives are born, it is innovations’ playground. Creativity deserves much more credit on the basis that without it nothing would really exist today and we’d still be living in the jungles smashing shit with our fists. The whole field of design can be argued as a place for futurists to plan out what our life will be like, isn’t that important as fuck?

I find myself in a particularly peculiar position as I myself am a media maker, but I have also pirated many things in my life, and I’m not alone in this as I’m sure a majority of creators around me do so to. It’s not because we want to steal from the people whose work we adore, rather it’s often times down to a few things like being financially incapable or simply not having access to text in a legitimate way. Knowing the way the internet is and how when you put something online, or if it does end up online somehow, it really doesn’t belong to any one person anymore or group anymore, it becomes part of a greater collective – and to be honest I think that is fair and right. The internet has always been the greatest tool of unknown collective collaboration we have ever seen (I mean you collaborate with people you’ll never know, and people you’ll never know will make things out of your work that you’ll never see) and as long as it stays free it will continue to serve people.

The problem is the warped attempt to capitalize on everything possible at every turn. The term pirate for people who ‘steal’ files was supposed to be derogatory, but if anything when a company goes after an individual for downloading some tunes or films they are the ones that come off as evil and it’s probably because of this

which is why nobody really feels like anything is being stolen when they pirate. Big companies still make million of dollars and thrive and continue to do so and when they crack down on poor unsuspecting kids they make themselves out to be even bigger greedier heartless machines.

The line has to be drawn somewhere,

and this is a discussion that needs to find a resolution.

 

There’s something terribly wrong with us today. I don’t know if you can feel it too, or if you’ve just stopped caring. Everytime I look to see, it’s just pain, misery, lies, fear, terror, oppression and the occasional innovation – just to tease you into rationalizing a reason to keep on keeping on because you know, clearly there is hope. There’s always hope. Is hope really enough though – the more I talk about things that are difficult to face or answer, people around me just concede to their predicaments.

Nine to five Monday to Friday is just this thing everybody accepts now – using up all the time when a human being is at it’s most productive in tiny space on a focused task serving some conglomo’s leader they’ll most probably never even know. Just so they can continue to live a life chasing weekends which you’ll probably spend dreading the start of the next week anyway.. and where at least from my own experience of those around me is only good for getting as fucked out of your head as possible just to forget you even have work at all.

Whats wrong with you? Why don’t you think this wrong? Why do you keep trying to find words to justify this way of life? The answer is and has always been there. You’ve given up… just like a pig or any animal in a farm has given up trying to be free. You’ve given up to the point that you’ve forgotten and stopped caring what being free actually means. As long as you get fed all the way to the slaughter you’ll let it slide. Because trying to think is too hard, and painful and difficult. It’s easier to just be fed and shuffled around until you die. If a species of animal can’t become compliant in captivity for the purpose of cultivation, we wouldn’t cultivate it. And people are very compliant when coerced or distracted with goodies. And you basically become docile pigs in a farm waiting for the next meal to be shoveled down your throats so you can shit it back to the people who own you.

The strange thing about studying media.. is that the more I learn about it, the more I want it to be abolished from daily life =/

I’m not sure if this is a sign that I’ve completely failed at understanding the subject matter, or that I understood it too well.

Dead giveaway title heh.

I used to think about time the same way I understood how a clock worked, because that’s how I was raised to look at time: divided into 12 segments, each of those into another 60 mini subsections, so on and so forth. This was a very practical way to utilise and work with time as all my daily activities seemed to depend largely on what the clock dictated: 7am school, 5pm play in the park, 10pm bed. Of course I would argue when I wasn’t actually feeling tired but there seemed to be no reasoning with the clock. It was doctrine, one I never understood and hated very much, because of how systematic and unwavering it was and mostly how it seemed I couldn’t reason with it.

I come from the tropics and we have one season, hot wetness; and you could always rely on the sun going down and coming up at roughly the same time all year round, which really reflected this understanding of time that the world seems to share. However, that’s hardly how I would describe my experience of time. I doubt anyone ever truly experiences time in such a uniformed and unvaried way. They say time flies when you’re having fun but it slows down when you’re bored, and I think that has a lot to do with how time actually works. The way I see it, on some level, time flies when we don’t pay attention to it and thats when it actually behaves erratically or is relative to what we’re doing or rather our perception of what we’re doing and whether it’s something that does(nt) require strict attention. However when you start paying attention, time begins to move slowly. In a way, if you wanted to slow down time, all you’d have to do is stare at a clock all day and suddenly you’ll realise you’re living some seriously long days.

The standard way of looking at time.. it can’t be measured and standardized because each of us experiences it differently, whereas a clock is more of a measurement of Earths’ position relative to the sun, can be measured and is something we all share simultaneously. But why call it time? Isn’t it a measurement of place? Shouldn’t we be asking “where are we?” instead of “what time is it?”? We tend to look at this individual perception of time as something arbitrary or a silly notion but consider if we were taken and put on another planet where the rotation and orbit of the planet takes ten times as long as our own, would we have to adjust time to suit that yearly cycle? Does that make the average lifespan of the average person only 5-7 years? I’m just 24 cycles around the sun from the earth old. I mean there are countless examples of how our clock based understanding of time is not really good enough as there have been many experiments [for instance] where people deprive themselves of light and they lose all track of time, hours turn into days and it’s entirely disorienting. Time, I think, has a more fundamental connection to quantum mechanics. I’m not a physicist and obviously don’t have the credibility to talk about any of it but I am a science enthusiast, and the way I see it time reminded very much of the double slit experiment; when we don’t observe it, it’s just a wave of possibilities and the moment we pay attention it becomes more rigid. The way we experience time is relative to how much attention we give it.

When you quickly glance at a clock you’ll notice that the first second hand actually takes a while longer than the preceeding one. This is actually constantly happening and watching a clock is simply an easy way to observe this effect. The reason this happens is that in that quick glance our eyes still see everything that happens in-between and it takes a moment for our brains to quickly analyse the information. The more information we process in a shorter period of time, affects our perception of time. The quicker we can process all this information may well have a direct correlation to how much control we can have over time, if you can for arguments sake process information at or near the brains processing equivalent of the speed of light, you could potentially exist in your own little time bubble where everything around you becomes extremely slow. Clearly the human brain can’t actually process things instantaneously, but perhaps there are ways to speed it up exponentially. I believe that “the zone” is a very real example of how humans are able to harness this idea of having some diction over time, by processing so much information in such a small windows of time that they perform tasks to their full potential almost seamlessly.

I reckon it’d be pretty sweet if we could have that kind of control over time wilfully. Or maybe I just spend too much time thinking and need to get out more.

This thought has been bugging me more than I like, might be worth looking into some ideas to test this huhu

I noticed the word justice appear a fair amount in the last couple of weeks in my life. The new JLA movie came out, we did a documentary/comic about it for The Art of Persuasion, and it’s deeply embedded in social democracy which I have to read about in my Global Political Economy class. Justice is a pretty strange thing.. it gives the impression of purity and goodwill, but justice isn’t the same around the world. Justice varies from society to society and from one situation to the other and what you might find as an injustice here is commonplace in another. Can there really be a sort of universal code? Why hasn’t one been written that can exist in the contemporary world that can be accepted by all? But perhaps thats is a line of thought for another day.

My process through the Art of Persuasion this semester has been rough. I understand the value of a collective mind in creation, I know it’s where the stuff of creation happens and I do want to be able to engage in creating amazing things with amazing individuals but I just keep hitting a wall when I try to engage with other people. I dreaded the group process from the start because practically every semester here I’ve had difficulty with interacting with other human beings.

The little voice in my head right before I try talking to someone new
.

I got into a group with a pretty cool comic loving dude named Aravindha and we were joined later by Dominic who was my groupmate for this classes first assessment. This was our prompt: –

“What do we want?”
Working in small groups you are to produce a short documentary film that offers a social critique or raises a political demand.
This film is to comply with any three of the following formal constraints:

• no interviews
• no voice-over
• only found-footage or other appropriated material
• is non-photorealistic

Aravindha already had a cool idea to make a video that panned over a comic strip which would tell the story through dialog boxes like in a comic book (that we would have to then create)- so basically no interviews, no voice-overs (this was decided later), we only used found/appropriated material and it was most definitely non-photorealistic. So we kinda went the extra mile with this one.

The story centers around The Justice League and in particular Wonder Woman and Cyborg who feel that they are an oppressed minority. They hope to find more diverse/non-stereotypical heroes but in their search discover something far more sinister – their entire existence is a facade and they are mere puppets who have no control over their decisions. They discover the existence of the very editors who make and dictate their lives and decide to take the fight to them head on. Our comic itself doesn’t actually depict anything fighting but rather brings up a small bio of the editors at the end and a snippet of the kinds of motivations behind their writing, and ideally that will be what is enough to convince the viewer that there is certainly some injustice in the comic book world thats worth discussing.

I don’t know if this project was tough or just tedious, there were a lot of walls we were confronted with, but it looks like we’ve managed to pull through with a somewhat watchable 10 minutes of radicalized opposition to white male dominance, where we make some prominent comic book writers out as evil fascists. I mean in the last comic panel scene you can’t help but feel a swastika wouldn’t be out of place. Although the stance taken against them is so very harsh, I love a lot of the stuff they make, even things like the shooting of Batgirl in the Killing Joke <–| shhhh | particularly because I didn’t look at it in a sexist way, I just saw the Joker fitting his role. When the hero always wins and people get bored, what else do you expect to happen?

Any shitt you want to hear

I think we could have definitely worked much better as a team, but I blame myself mostly just for not really being a proactive teammate on account of being a self indulged depressed douche. We basically took turns in not showing for classes and being late on our own deadlines for each other and that resulted in everything being crunched in the last two weeks, which was in some aspects ample time, but we didn’t really take into consideration how difficult animating the text into the video would be. Needless to say it was tiresome, but we managed to make some decent comic pages, edit them into a movie clip, add animations and finish off with a decent soundtrack (I wonder if anyone will notice Wilhlem). I think this was a fun project towards the end, I didn’t really share the vision at the start but once things started coming together I started to like the way it was going, but I know deep down inside I probably could have done a lot more t make it better. I noticed this time around, even though I wasn’t there for a lot of the classes, that we didn’t really talk theory which was kinda sad because it would have been really interesting to look into things that people have discovered in their attempts at persuading the masses through creative means a little more, but you know.. maybe if I went to class and was proactive and confident and awesome that might have been exactly what went down.

The video itself came up to about 11 minutes, which was a little longer than we would have liked, and we could have probably done something to cut bits out but at this point we were just going for the finish line (we liked our comic pages a little too much to break them apart again). I suppose the main thing I’d try to track back to is my first post in this semester about this subject, where I point out that a documentary is sort of like a rhetorical argument of sorts that I can use to convince people to a desired outcome using what I’ve learnt from people like Adam Curtis and Noam Chomsky who kind of step outside of society and talk about how everyone is basically insane and needs to be controlled against their will, and never knowing they are either of the two.

As I spent my last year at RMIT doing radio, it was a little choppy getting back to the Premiere screen, but editing this, I still find I enjoy the process of creating meaning from two seemingly unconnected things. I may just try to build up some of my own personal projects to see what I can come up with hopefully with the aid of a decent camera.

 

Here’s a tracklist in our vid in case anybody was wondering:

Ajeet

Akov – Retribution | First page

Massive Attack ft Mos Def – I against I | Apache Chief and friends (vid is NSFW)

Meta – Phoenix Down |Final comic page and editor bios

Hot Blooded – Foreigner | Starfire scene – because obviously.

Jimi Hendrix – Foxy Lady | Captain America intro scene

 

 

Aravindha

Superman Man of Steel OST – (Hans Zimmer – I will find him) | Second page, Wonder Woman and Cyborg discuss

Transformers – Autobots score – Wonder Woman complains about Starfire

Superman Man of Steel OST – (Hans Zimmer & Junkie XL – Arcade ) | Call to action, second last page

Superman Man of Steel OST – (Hans Zimmer – Flight)| Wonder Woman reflects

Justice League Unlimited Opening Title

Dominic

Incredible Bongo Band – Apache | Apache introduction scene (also because.. obviously)