Tag: Reflection

Semester 1 Reflection: Time Just Flies By

Alaine Thompson on

This semester has been an experience of constant growth, as with each class, reading and task I feel as though not just my skills are evolving, but my way of thinking about and approaching certain issues, as well as my knowledge base, have all developed. I feel that I’ve learned a lot more about media in a very broad sense, through many practitioners and an exploration of the self to allow me to explore and develop my own understanding of what creativity and film-making is, especially in terms of my own creative process. I have learnt a great deal about the basics of high quality video production and sound production, as well as the importance of sound and editing to create meaning. I have also learnt a great deal about editing video and audio both literally and laterally, as editing is vital in the creation of meaning.

Throughout this semester and the many various tasks, readings and lectures we’ve had I’ve found that the best way I learn is through just simply doing, that is participating, doing things I normally wouldn’t and noticing things around me that pertain to my practice/interests as a media practitioner. I also find that I learn well from looking at other people’s work and analysing what makes it click, and what makes it fit into that certain category/genre, so I can set myself a sort of list of conventions to possibly include in my work.

Even though I knew my way around an editing program pretty well from year 12, I still found that I couldn’t quite create the meaning I wanted through editing. I found it difficult to create these mental links in my storytelling, even if I was only creating an experimental piece expressing an emotion. I feel as though through each of the works I have created this semester I have grown better at this though, and with the help of Robbie and my fellow workshop members, I was able to straighten out my thoughts and create some great pieces that I am proud of. I also feel like one of the most challenging parts of this course for me has been keeping up to date with the readings and the blog posts throughout the semester due to my medical condition, but I found that towards the end of the semester I was able to keep up with the workload and take more on as I began to adapt to university life and leave the old habits and ways of thinking from high school behind me.

Through the production of many different kinds of products in many different kinds of forms; progressing from the self portrait with separate mediums, to the self portrait with combined mediums (as a video), to the portrait of another person with found footage, to a multimedia website utilising as many forms as possible to explore and convey one single idea; through this logical progression throughout the semester I feel I have been able to develop and explore my own creative process, learning about my own creative style as well as learning about how best to express and create through a visual medium, as well as many other kinds of mediums, as I have mainly written previously.

Here is a learning graph I made to represent how much I feel I’ve learnt, not just from the course itself, but from the findings ideas within the course have led me to, as well as the philosophical ponderings upon such ideas:

Learning Graph (1)

A Portrait of my Dad

Alaine Thompson on

For our most recent project (and the most recent iteration of the portrait saga), I chose to create a two minute portrait of my father. For this project, as there has been with with each one previously, there has been a unique ‘catch’, found footage must be utilised throughout the project.

As with each project there has also been a reflection required, so here’s mine;

Looking back on the piece I feel that the found footage I chose to match with the audio really linked together to create an entirely new meaning, a more childlike hope and sense of wonderment, as I felt that was the essence of my father that I was trying to capture. I also feel that the photographic components worked really well in the piece and aided in creating this mood drastically. This was the first time I created a timelapse video and utilised stop-motion to create movement on a large scale, and I think that both processes worked really well.

The most problematic aspects of the project for me were the audio and the interview process. I found it very difficult to edit the interview I did with my father as he is a very fast talker, and generally didn’t leave me any space to cut the audio cleanly, which made some clips sound rougher and more clipped than others. I also discovered very quickly into the interview process that some of the questions I had written down were too open ended, as answers would stretch on for around ten minutes each. This gave me around an hour and a half of footage to edit for the interview, which was very difficult to break down to just two minutes of material.

I found that the use of found footage allowed me to take the essence of the piece to the level and the attitude of my subject, allowing me to hopefully instil the audience with as much hope and enthusiasm for the future as my father has.

While I did borrow and use the Zoom H2N recorder to record the ambient noises around my dad’s work area, I later discovered, after returning the device, that the recordings were not very useable without alteration, and also realised that just my father’s words by themselves were powerful enough, so I decided to let his words and the imagery speak for themselves, as opposed to over-saturating the piece.

Through this piece I really wanted to experiment with the linking of the visual and the auditory, creating meaning through these created links, as well as cuts between footage. I really wanted to utilise match cuts to link the two parts of the ‘story’, so I matched an image of a rocket flying with the 3D printer, printing a rocket, which was a new idea for me but I think worked really well. I feel I really achieved my goal of creating a new meaning through editing, and brought through the essence of my dad’s persona.

Self Portrait: Video Edition. (Naivety)

Alaine Thompson on

Here is the second assignment of the year, a video self portrait combining all the mediums from the previous self portrait:

Through this piece I really wanted to show an emotional journey, the kind I feel my life has been and still is. From the beginning of this project I knew I wanted to create an emotional crescendo through the music, which starts out calm and peaceful but quickly becomes hectic, crazy and cluttered, as my mind often is.

I also wanted to show myself through images of my favourite places, and as I have grown up literally surrounded by parks, I have used trees as a motif to convey different areas of my personality throughout the piece. At the beginning I use trees moving in the breeze and fades to show my calm and positive side. This then develops into the idea that I myself have been labelled a tree because of my height. The vascular tree images, which I created using Adobe Illustrator, also give the idea that the tree is alive, through the use of montage theory which makes the tree pulsate.

To me, trees also symbolise growth and development, as each bump in its trunk was created by some event, it grows in a certain direction, it has many branches and thick roots. Trees to me also symbolise life itself and the journey of growth and change throughout life.

I found it very difficult to get the right meanings and ideas across in the middle of the piece, where things become more hectic, as I was originally going for a quantity rather than quality approach to the editing. But once I really thought about it I found an idea that worked. I still think there is a little too much going on, but I like the meaning that comes across throughout the piece through the editing.

The main idea I wanted to get across through this piece is that I changed so much in Year 12 that over the summer holidays, I felt I had finally gotten to know myself, only to discover once I reached university that I had continued to change and now I feel as though I know nothing again. I really wanted to capture that confusion and feeling of both freedom and being trapped at the same time.

Self Portrait: Naive and I know it

Alaine Thompson on

For Media 1, for our first assignment, we had to create a self portrait of ourselves. So, this is what I thought of myself when I started Uni;

 

Bird Cage

 

Through this image I wanted to convey the way I felt throughout high school, and in a way, still feel now as I learn to adjust and settle into the style of university life.

This is not Alaine

 

This is an homage to Rene Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images”. I wanted to show that this self portrait is only a representation of myself and not actually me.

My View

 

Through this filter I aimed to show my unique and whimsical view of the world.

Tree

A while ago I had surgery on my back and in order to de-stigmatize it for myself and give it a new kind of beauty, I decided to get my dad to paint a tree around it, to show growth and strength.

This is a recording of my favourite place to just relax.

This is a recording of me singing “Singin’ in the Rain”, as I feel this song best shows my positive attitude towards life in general.

‘I’m naive. But I embrace my naivety. “So it goes” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Slaughterhouse 5’

I chose these words to somehow sum up myself, because I found this so hard to do and wound up writing in circles, until I finally decided to go with something simple. But how do you sum up one person in 50 words, let alone 10, 000 words? not even a film could achieve such a feat.

Through this video I wanted people to feel the way I feel when I walk my dogs, which for me is having gorgeous furballs constantly smile at you, and feeling the sunshine as I walk through along this path. Hence, why it’s called sunshine in a lense, an inherently Australian thing to capture.

This, for me, was yet another way to de-stigmatize something and show the world how I see things, both literally and metaphorically. I have a condition known as visual snow, which, as you’ll see from the video is like having the static of a TV screen over your vision all the time. I wanted to show that although I may see the world in a literally different way to most people in the world, I really do see the world differently to everyone else. Not because of my condition, but because of me.