We as a group met up on Tuesday to muster up some sort of a rough cut for the Thursday class, and what we ended up piecing together felt pretty good. There was a general blueprint of what we wanted to achieve, in that there would be this search for the Netflix Bigfoot/Bingefoot, as well as some sort of discussion revolving around binge watching and it’s nature.

We’d booked the room for perhaps slightly too much time, I’d heard as much but wasn’t able to come in on Monday to change it, but I think it was resolved in that we ended a little earlier and we were able to tell someone they could check back at around 2 to use the space, so that was fine.

All this audio/podcast related study stuff actually got me thinking for the first time in a while (approximately 7 months actually) that I needed to listen to some podcasts again, and I ended up trying to listen to some Aaron Chen related material, which ended up being in the form of an Aunty Donna podcast (fell asleep), and also some more This American Life and The Flop House. The status I posted below ended up being pretty great for my friends to tell be some things I could be listening to, and The Flop House I felt was perfectly relevant for lots of aspects, and also was quite entertaining. My friend Jack told me about some interesting history ones, but then about how he managed to get nightmares from them, specifically this Genghis Khan one (mind blanked just then, had to search “mongolian evil guy”), so I might stave off that one for now ha. Slow steps I reckon!

The video that I assisted in for Poncho ended up getting uploaded, and it seemed to come out alright, though initially I thought Matt and Zac may have come in again to rerecord portions of it due to the camera’s slightly different color-grading, but I don’t think that suspicion was correct and I was just being a little to skeptical.

However the video did show that there was still a lot to learn, I was operating the live camera and trying to anticipate who says the lines was slightly more difficult than I thought it would be, or perhaps I got the yips or something like that. Probably not though, just a sign of the work in progress that comes with this all, and there was a lot to learn from it all, like making sure I learned how to keep a straight face, or to maintain a greater degree of poise, even when it was my mates that were being funny, cos I guess a lot of this will involve just that, my mates being funny, if I make some comedic material, and it’ll probably be pretty important not to react so instantly to slightly funny lines or something like that.

Ben, Maddy and I got our Rough Cut looked into Jon from The Wheeler Centre, and we got to listen to Erin, Annie and (forget..)’s rough draft too, it was pretty funny trying to get the multiple headphone splitter device thing sorted but it was all worth it in the end.

I thought their Rough Cut, or what they had so far was quite good for what it was, Erin I knew had previous experience in something, I think it was SYN, and it was a cool little edit, almost sounded like something you’d have to spruce up on Ableton.

Anyway, it then got to us, and while I’d listened to the Rough Cut already I hadn’t listened to it with the knowledge of potential scrutiny from my peers and also an independent mediator who was to tell us what he thought of what we’d produced so far.

I knew that the whispers and haunted house excerpt was pretty good, and I found my own lines roasting a fictional town/suburb called Parkland was also pretty solid, but something I didn’t realise until listening to the rough cut in that instance was realising just how long drawn my diatribe about Netflix and how binge watching mediums kind of evolved in fact was, immediately feeling an urge to re-record and reformat that little bit, and Jon seemed to agree, but also appreciated or seemed to appreciate the bits that I set out. The static is something that to me feels like an audio version or fade transitions, which seems slightly ironic, but also I guess they can be necessary at times.

I found Kyla’s lectorial thoroughly entertaining on both a learning and normal scale, with the tips that we gained for the Project Brief we’d be undertaking, as well as some of the crazy and unreal podcasts that we listened too, giving us a pretty good idea of what we would want to aim to achieve from our sound recordings. Hearing such a full on non-fiction soundscape describing an incredible situation in the class was pretty incredible, and I felt as if it really was able to amplify the situation to, it gave me a lot of think about in terms of how I felt I should do this Project Brief of my own, though it would of course be lacking in as enthralling a non-fictional soundscape as that. At least I think so.

I think the fact that one of the tips being that there needs to be more than one texture is pretty solid considering I feel like my interview was lacking due to the fact there was just the talking head sound, (Brian did warn me about this). The reading goes a long way into contextualising how the textures can be laid out, like immediate, support and background, which placed me into an interesting journey in my head and online of what suitable podcast music existed, because for me podcast music falls into the trap of either being something I don’t think I’d ever be able to find/shazam, as well as music I normally listen to be way too unsuitable in that sense as well.

For the Week 11 Lecture, Roman Lobato, a media and comms professional was a guest speaker, and came in to speak about many aspects related to the television world, but the thing that I noticed the most was that an aspect of it happened to tie in extremely well with our project brief, which was the part that focused on Netflix. We were at a point positioned to consider what our last watched television program was, and I think the vibe in the air was Master of None? Which of course was a Netflix show.

There is a lot to be said about the ease at which VOD services like Stan and Netflix can be consumed, at the discretion of only a few clicks, we can choose to watch such a large media library, if we want to, at any time. Which at a lot of times during a Broadcast Television’s schedule throughout the day is eons better than anything you could be watching, no more midday movie, so to speak.

The statistic that was pointed out in the lecture by Roman that the average Australian consumes 2.7 hours of television per day with a massive chunk of it, 2.2. hours of it being broadcast television baffled me, but then I realised the excessively high levels of reality television consumption I hear my friends consume, on top of say wanting to remain informed with the news. Couple this with the fact that people don’t really binge too much television in multiple goes throughout a week, like you could go through 6 episodes of Master of None in one week and 7 the next, and that would pretty accurately satisfy this statistic, giving you plenty of time to decide to watch some Next Top Bachelorette or Biggest Kitchen or My Block Rules throughout the week.

In the workshop this week we were given our first exposure into some sound recording equipment, in a Zoom Mic, and it was really interesting how much it seemed to enhance the sound around you, almost like a hearing aid or something, but I guess microphones serve that purpose, to amplify the noise around it.

We watched about half of the classes films as well, and they were pretty enjoyable, made me feel a little annoyed that I realised a matter of minutes too late that I might benefit from renting a lens to compound that which I already had, or a camera. Though I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out, my friends enjoyed it I think, and Cal thought it was nice. Though it still baffles me as to why he’s decided that F1 is “his sport”.

The collaborative contract was something we slowly pieced together, we took a little longer to do it than first thought, though we didn’t really end up recording much of an intro sound exercise, though we were able to get a pretty decent feel of the Zoom and learn how to avoid say allowing it to lead to clipping.

Ended up doing another shoot kind of thing, for Poncho, which was rather amusing because It was a show my friends featured in, and the reasons it was met with issues that were amusing, that make me think I wont be going back there, because I forgot one thing, that my friends were funny, and operating a camera live on the tripod that requires zero hand movement when it needs to be static, is an issue that i should have probably known how to deal with, but i guess my friends were a little too funny

They do this show At The Music, and its a pretty good show in the sense that it is really similar to Tim Heidecker’s on cinema. Also used a Zoom H4 for the first time, and it was a fun experience, because we’ve been learning about the H2 but the same kind of reasons that I had never used a external sound recording element really before, due to reasons of almost pure laziness based on like the complications I felt existed, but like failing forgetting to press the record button twice. First to arm, Second to record, simply clapping at the beginning of the take seemed to me like an ingenious way to ensure a sync of audio and video if the audio was separate, but I then realised it made just so much sense

The podcast we listened to in class was extremely interesting, the subject of lobotomy was something I had thought about or at least been aware of through the Jack Nicholson film, and the novel that it was adapted from, but that was more extreme I guess as it was to essentially kill or make brain-dead Nicholson’s character, so I felt pretty captivated by the subject, who was also the host, trying to piece together in this audio how the lobotomy had effected him, like assuming it led to that monotonous voice or something.

Maddy didn’t make it to class, but Ben and I fleshed out more of an understanding of what we are thinking of doing. After spending a while deliberating and thinking, viral videos, memes and the like, we ended up thinking that focusing around the concept of binge watching could be good, perhaps incorporating something Brian mentioned, which was to incorporate this such of the biggest binge watching, idolising this Bigfoot kind of style binge watcher, and this feels like something that will both allow for a degree of creativity. I guess then, also making it sound like a cool podcast-sounding succinct in style which will be fun.

We’ll see how Maddy feels about the idea.

The first two performances (out of six) that I filmed at Triple R last weekend got uploaded to YouTube and I gotta hand it to the editor or the video producer, they did a pretty good job with the footage I filmed, as the same constrictions i felt existed in the production or filming part kind of was dealt with quite well, particularly the framing of the shot in the Shabbab queen shot, as there was that portion that was out of the frame.

For the Hi-Tec emotions performance I feel like I might have spent too much time focusing on one shot, struggling to deliberate where to go and how to do it, and then when I finally decided to change shots felt as if it was necessary to divert back to the original shot. But this is all part of the learning process I guess, or at least as they say, and all in all I thought it was extremely fun.

Though I’m not sure it would have fit, it was a shame that the part of the Shabbab’s performance that delves deeper into the immigration issues and the issues that the lead singer and people of his ethnicity have had to deal with, a pretty long, and I felt meaningful monologue was excluded from the uploaded video, even though I recorded it, though I guess it still would have been broadcasted on the radio and be looked back on, but I feel youtube is just that much more accessible in a way.

I feel like for the most part, my technical skills increased as I was required to be more well versed in something that I was learning, like for the Project Brief 2 as I was meant to acclimatise to Adobe Premiere a little more, I learnt more about it, though as Project Brief 3 was rather similar in style, not too much more was learnt, however for Project Brief 4, for something that I was required basically Learn how to do from scratch, the sheer tenacity of how many new things I was learning, for instance, how to use a Zoom H2, Adobe Audition, and the fact that there was more collaboration

Further, my practical skills kind of similarly I feel improved the most for this last Project Brief as there was more to be understood

In terms of my professionalism I think the fact I immediately went back to uni after coming back from Japan, meant that my level of professionalism was slightly low until I was being made more accountable to work in a team with other members in the class

Finally, in terms of conceptual ideas, I feel like my thoughts and concepts for the first two project briefs were thoughts that I toyed with, and again the nature of collaboration has lead to some more creativity in the thoughts, or trying to think of things that other members in the group would think is a good idea