I found this Project Brief 4 audio piece to be one of the most interesting of the semester, and I feel like there were a few contributing factors, such as the nature of the project itself and the aspect of collaboration, essentially becoming the first collaborative media project I’d done for this course.

An issue that arose throughout the semester whenever we were tasked upon completing an exercise, during the workshops, the groups we formed were struggling to see eye to eye on a particular idea which led to exercises being slightly rushed, or at least prematurely thought out, and I felt that while it was initially slightly problematic that we, for this exercise, were struggling to work out how exactly to focus on attention, thinking of stuff like Adult Swim, memes (as we kind of agreed everyone was kind of being encouraged to consider), before deciding on binge watching, which I felt was a successful aspect, binge watching has been in the public consciousness for long enough that there are quite a few studies on it which made it quite easy for us to gather an understanding of what we wanted to achieve, not only from the literature but also our own experiences of binge watching, related to attention.

Translating this knowledge and research of binge watching to an audio piece however was another step to make. Brian implanted an interesting concept in our minds, which was this search for a bigfoot (in nature) binge watcher, the illustrious, “biggest binge-watcher”, which was a concept we tried to deliver, which I feel was executed relatively well. However it may have taken too much of time, leaving not enough time to include a discussion of binge watching, at least I feel as if that may have occurred.

It was rather serendipitous when in one of the later lectures there was a lecture that very thoroughly dealt with the topic of Netflix and binge watching, which was able to further contextualize, at least for me how genuine a concept or issue had arisen in terms of binge watching, with so much of the class partaking in the activity so casually being aware of the fact they binge watch, as if it was so thoroughly streamlined in today’s society, which I guess it now is. Though this may have been slightly distorted in the sense  that this was a class full of media students, though I honestly don’t think so.

In terms of things I felt I learnt from the exercise, which was quite a lot, the most intriguing thing was in the scene where we were trying to envisage this soundscape of a scary/haunted house, and Ben and I whispered quietly as Maddy was to question what the noises were, creating almost a 3d sound with the whispers, and that kind of almost 3D sound was something I’d heard before, but I hadn’t really thought of audio pieces being more than likely to really be the only platform in which more 3D sounds could be pursued, because for such a thing to take place in a video the audio device would, if we were not to try to dub the sound, kind of have to be in the midst of the shot, which is I feel a rarely thought of advantage of audio, almost allowing an audio piece to be more vivid than video in this aspect. That said it definitely wouldn’t be impossible to create a 3d soundscape in a film, it would just be far more difficult I believe.

I felt that in a collaborative sense, the three of us did quite well, and worked quite well as a team, each understanding or at the very least quickly adapting to the roles we realized we needed to undertake in order to make the completion of the Project a reality, which in that sense worked out quite well. One aspect which I realized could have been an issue had it not been for the internet was distance, as we all lived on different train lines, Maddy and Ben at the end of two, Frankston and Cranbourne respectively, and I lived in Elwood, which meant that if we didn’t communicate online and commit to pre-organised dates to meet in the city and record, it would have been unlikely for much to have eventuated from it all. But it did, and I feel like it sounds alright.