Relating the statement “Innovation and progress is hindered by scientific regulation.” to the 2007 video game Bioshock.

In the opening of Bioshock (2007) the haunting sound of the recorded voice of antagonist Andrew Ryan recites the philosophy that the underwater city of Rapture was based on.

 

He says that Rapture is a city where “…the artist need no fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small.”

The fictional city had no lawful restrictions on science, and as such its denizens made marvoulus scientific advancements such as genetic manipulation, and Rapture is designed to be a utopian society free from bruecrocity.

However the state of Rapture as perceived by the player is not a utopia, it is dilapidated and its citizens are deranged junkies addicted to the biological advances made by science.

The message of game is completely opposite to the message given by the characters inside the game. The philosophy of Rapture is one of pure capitalism, and individuality in order to transend the other societies of the world.

However the message the game sends to real-life audiences is against this libertarian viewpoint, and definitely does no advocate releasing science from any forms of restraint or regulation.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Part of this blog is meant to be writing about random Media stuff, I’ve been fairly slack on that, but I’m trying to do more:

 

On Thursday 14th of May, I went to the cinema and saw the new Mad Max movie, Fury Road, directed by George Miller. I very much liked this movie. It was incredible. This blog post contains my impressions about the movie, there may be spoilers.

There was so much that resonated with me in this film, first and foremost was the action: the movie is almost non-stop action from beginning to end, and it does it without it getting stale or feeling repetitive.

This is because of the variance in action set pieces, each one has a different style, such as cars ramming into eachother using spikes as a weapon, or motorbikes using rocks as jumps to assualt the vechile from above, or even giant poles to swing from car to car.

This brings me to my next thing that I really appreciated was the lack of exposition. The movie does very little to explain its world, instead opting to just show us in motion and rely on the audiance to understand.

For example the religious aspect of “War Boys” in which they deliberately commit suicidal attacks in battle to gain glory and enter the afterlife of Valhalla. This is never actually explained by anyone, instead we are just shown this process in action, and the audience is trusted to put the pieces together and use their imagination/knowledge of real-world events to create the whole picture.

I feel this kind of “show dont tell” filmmaking has be neglected in recent years, with many action blockbusters stopping and meticulously explaining background information instead of letting the audience put 2 and 2 together.

Mad Max: Fury Road had excellent editing, framing and cinematography that made the chaotic action easy to understand, and THIS article explains it better than I can.

It was a great movie, and is the type of film that inspires me to make my own

 

 

SYN Media training and video.

During May I participated in SYN media training at SYN Media located on Cardigan Street near RMIT.

It was over 2 Saturdays and involved learning how to operate equipment such as camera, lights, mics and editing software, as well as learning about how to get into the media industry in Melbourne, especially Channel 31 which SYN has a close relationship with. On the second Saturday we used our learned skills to produce a short video.

On the first day we met up and learned how to use some of the equipment, it was a small group of only 6 students and a teacher. All the students were from University (a few from RMIT, one from Melbourne, Monash and Latrobe), and studying a variety of subjects including Media, Journalism and more.

Some of the learning was redundant for me, since it covered the same basic stuff that we had done in Media 1, such as learning how to use the cameras. However there was other equipment that I was un-familar with, such as Boom Mics, lighting, and having multiple audio channels.

The first Saturday wasn’t very exciting, but everyone was really cool and interesting to talk to about the different Uni-courses.

The next week was much different: We were tasked with writing, filming and editing a short video in a few short hours. Our concept was to make a faux-reporter style video where and Interviewer asks questions to various university students, with each student embodying a different “type” or “cliche” of a university student.

We settled on having 3 interviewees, an overdramatic political activist, a foreign exchange student and a over-the-top hipster parody. Each one was written with various levels of satire and ridiculousness, with the foreign student being almost 100% sincere (since Joel, the actor, was in fact Malaysian), and the other two being parodies or massively exaggerated.

Each person had multiple roles in production, I was both an actor and holding the Boom mic (in all shots except where I was acting), while others swapped around using the cameras, using the sound board etc…

After working our a rough script and assigning jobs we set out to film in various locations around Melbourne. We filmed inside SYN headquarters for the intro, at the Library for the political activist, in a graffiti filled alley for the Hipster and at the Vistitors centre for the Exchange student.

We encountered various hassles in filming, especially outside the library. Since apparently people couldn’t tell if screaming “SAVE THE ANTS” was sincere or not. Also an old man walked straight through the middle of our shot, paused, took out his mobile phone and took a picture of one the camera operators from behind and walked off. It was creepy and probably illegal, but we were all too bewildered to do anything.

The other shoots went smoother, and we were back at SYN in plenty of time.

Now we were tasked with editing the video together, we were given a breif tutorial in how to use Adobe Premiere and then left to our own devices. It was decided that having everyone stay would be pointless and crowded, so only those who wanted to edit stayed.

Me and Jasmine were the only ones to stay, and we began the mammoth task of editing the video together.

We quickly learned we had made a cardinal mistake of filmmaking: we had forgotten to use a clapboard or label our takes in anyway. This meant we had multiple cameras and multiple mics without any way to tell which take matched up with which, especially since for some takes one camera wasn’t used, so simply counting from the top didn’t work either. Not to mention there was no uniformity between lengths, sometimes one camera kept rolling, while another cut and reset.

It was slow and extremely frustrating, but eventually we matched video with audio, and got different shots from the same take to put together. After this it was much less frustrating, but still time consuming to edit all the clips in order and crop everything to proper length. We also added a title, credits and names for the interviewees.

The rest of the group had all left at 4pm, the final video was uploaded to our Facebook group at 9:30pm. Everyone was extremely happy with the finished product, and were surprised that Jasmine and I had stayed so long.

I am quite proud of this work, it was great meeting new people and seeing pathways into the media industry. As well as having lots of fun making a video and learning how to use new editing software and filming equipment.

Here is our video: “Uni Lyfe”

 

 

Project Brief 4 minutes – Filming Day

Minutes for filming day

  • We met and setup the equipment in the basement area of Building 9
  • We setup 3 cameras, a light and 2 microphones
  • We also connected a laptop to the TV screen to display footage.
  • Then we began filming.

The filming process went very well, apart from a couple interruptions and the camera turning off at one point. The audio was clear and Kristain held up a laptop with out lines on it, to minimize screwing up lines.

 

We got all the footage required, and used all 3 cameras to get multiple angles for the shoot.

 

We finsished and uploaded the content to Ali’s computer.

 

By next week we will complete:

  • Ali – begin editing, and make a rough cut
  • Sandy – find royalty free music/sound effects to use in video
  • Kristian – find royalty free music/sound effects to use in video.

Remixes and Copyright shenanigans

Todays Lectorial was on remixes, and I found it highly interesting and engaging. It dealt with the concept of “remixing” media, especially music and the ramifications of this in a copyright sense.

The activity where we had to try and list all the samples inside a music pieces was very interesting (not to mention challenging). As was the video that showecased an interview with a copyright laywer.

It shows how the media landscape is always rapidly changing, and how the legal framework can never quite keep up.

Project Brief 4 Minutes – meeting 5

MEETING FIVE: TEAM FORTE

14/05/2015

 

  • Figured out our new room, to be filmed on Thursday 20th at 12.30 in the lounge and workspace underground near the studios.

 

  • Kristian has finished his script, have read over it and approved the final copy.

 

  • Ali is to find footage for Grand Theft Auto and Sandy is to find footage for Resident Evil. This footage is to be used for the final media outcome.

 

  • Have hired lighting, camera and 2 tripods for our filming date.

 

  • Ali to bring in his own camera from home, which is a more professional camera.

 

By next meeting:

 

  • Ali: to have footage all found, and credited for GTA.

 

  • Sandy: to have footage all found, and credited for Resident Evil.

 

Kristian: to produce the logo for Game Scope.

Project Brief 4 – The Script

Over the last week we have been developing a script for our Media Artefact.

The Majority of our script has been written by Kristain (his Blog post about it can be found here)

After Kristians rough draft me and Ali suggested some changes, mostly terminology since Kristian is not heavily involved in gaming, so the revisited script contains more accurate terms.

For example we changed “Game-Makers” to “Developers”.

Brief 4 Meeting 11/5/15

Project brief 4 minutes for Monday 12/5/15

 

 

  • We met and disussed various issues including where to film and when to record. We settled on recording Thursday morning in a room we booked
  • We also read over Kristians work-in-progress script, and made a few edits.

 

Then we decided to record a basic prototype of our media artefact.

Movie on 11-05-2015 at 12.53 pm from Sandy Jones on Vimeo.

Obviously the script isn’t finalised and its a pretty unprofessional, but its a basic template of what we are going to do.

Institutions

Todays lectorial covered institutions, which was a very interesting topic.

One activity that was particularly engaging was getting into groups and writing about different media institutions (Facebook, Google, News Corp and Local Media).

The opinion of each varied greatly, with News Corp being generally disliked, Facebook being seen as a necessary evil, Google being mostly praised but with some questioning of their ethics and Local Media being praised.

 

Brief four minutes 7th May

Minutes for Thursday 7th May tutorial.

 

Project Brief 4

 

  • Everyones annotated bibliography is completed and uploaded into a single doc (not yet put into alphabetical order, but that will be done soon)
  • Further discussed what we found in our sources.
  • Talked about ideas for artefact
  1. Concept of a Mockumentary abandoned
  2. Rachal gave us the idea to make a TV style report similar to the ABC program “Good Game”
  3. We unanimously dicide this is a good idea.
  4. Brainstrom ideas, settle on showing/comparing how different mediums are used in two different games. As well as talking about how games are different to other mediums.

 

We decide to use the Games “Grand Theft Auto” and “Resident Evil” because they are very different in their atmostshere, scope and use of other mediums such as sound.

 

Before meeting again on Monday we have the following jobs:

 

Ali: Find quotes and add them to the quote Doc

Kristian: write a rough draft of the script

Sandy: look for possible ways to get Resident Evil (possibly buy the ps1 classic to play on ps vita)


During our meeting on Monday at 12:00pm we aim to review the proto-type script and record a read-through to see how it flows and length etc…