In today’s lecture we dissected the story element of media. The guest speaker was very entertaining and charismatic, and presented some very interesting ideas about narrative and non-narrative, causality, and the elements of story-telling.
Our activity of analysing and graphing the emotional intensity of a film was thought-provoking. Here is the overall graph I drew, our group looked at the film The Matrix.
Overall the feedback I received about my project was positive. The main points were:
– Good subject matter
That Lucas was a great choice because of his interesting choice of career. Also that the closeups around the house included a clever choice of items to film.
– Good Editing
According to my peers the shots were nice and brief and kept the action moving and the audience interested. The shots were not too long as to bore the viewers.
– Nice content choice
That the visuals complimented each other.
face down in a bath of wine after this.
Media 1, Project 3: Declaration and Statement of Authorship
1. I have not impersonated, or allowed myself to be impersonated by any person for the purposes of this assessment.
2. This assessment is my/our original work and no part of it has been copied from any other source except where due acknowledgement is made.
3. No part of this assessment has been written for me/us by any other person except where such collaboration has been authorised by the lecturer/teacher concerned.
4. I have not previously submitted this work for this or any other course/unit.
5. I give permission for my assessment response to be reproduced, communicated compared and archived for the purposes of detecting plagiarism.
6. I give permission for a copy of my assessment to be retained by the university for review and comparison, including review by external examiners.
I understand that:
Plagiarism is the presentation of the work, idea or creation of another person as though it is your own. It is a form of cheating and is a very serious academic offence that may lead to exclusion from the University. Plagiarised material can be drawn from, and presented in, written, graphic and visual form, including electronic data and oral presentations. Plagiarism occurs when the origin of the material used is not appropriately cited.
Plagiarism includes the act of assisting or allowing another person to plagiarise or to copy my work.
I agree and acknowledge that:
1. I have read and understood the Declaration and Statement of Authorship above.
2. I accept that use of my RMIT account to electronically submit this assessment constitutes my agreement to the Declaration and Statement of Authorship
3. If I do not agree to the Declaration and Statement of Authorship in this context, the assessment outcome is not valid for assessment purposes and cannot be included in my aggregate score for
this course.
Digitally Signed,
Bianca Cornale,
22nd April 2015.
The short piece I compiled for Project Brief 3 focuses on my good friend and neighbour Lucas. The audio was recorded in a half hour interview conducted roughly a week prior to filming. My close personal relationship with Lucas made it possible for me to ask questions I knew would evoke interesting responses – about his deep spiritual beliefs, divination abilities and music making process. From this bank of audio I edited the vocal track in GarageBand, increasing the reverb and delay to add gravitas. I was hoping to add royalty free music but this ultimately proved too difficult, as was thus abandoned. I think I was successfully able to team the audio with relevant footage (found and original) and time the breaks in the voiceover to the cuts in the edit.
The found footage I hoped to fit seamlessly into my original content. The only place it’s jarring is when Lucas is speaking about his spiritual upheavals and painful past, and there’s a very grainy shot of someone smashing a guitar which I found on archive.org. I chopped and changed this footage somewhat to create drama and though it’s very different to the other footage used in that it sticks out, I actually like this effect.
I ended on footage I took of Lucas on my phone recently at a party, the only original lo-fi footage in the film. I think it creates a slightly different feel, and I edited it in iMovie to look especially grainy, juxtaposing the clean, sharp Sony MC50 footage.
I added texture to my piece by filming close-ups around Lucas’s Preston home, including pre-existing media, such as the photographs, drawing and posters on the walls. This combined with the footage of his furniture, decor, book collection give an accurate impression into my friend’s life.
Using iMovie I edited some of the footage in my film to have a particular hue, usually a yellow tinge. This was purely for the aesthetic purpose of continuity but I think it also suits the overall tone of the piece.
By and large I’m very happy with my film and have learned a lot about this process and about my good friend Lucas.
Over the weekend I made time to interview my subject. I used a number of different takes and tracks and edited them together in garage band. I’m happy with the final result, having pieced snippets together and edited the overall quality. Following the audio tutorial last week I made sure there was no clipping, the microphone was a decent distance away to capture the sound but not the background noise, and added reverb to create a slightly more pensive and dramatic overall ambience.
This is a screenshot of my process and the editing of the audio tracks.
This week I was interested to relearn recording techniques and devices in our tutorial. My house has two recording studios which I’m always around yet don’t know the technical facets of – so this tutorial was of particular interest to me.
Our activity felt like a scavenger hunt as we went around school trying to find all the sounds. The most entertaining for me was recording inside the ladies bathroom. I got really paranoid someone would think I was being a pervert. And the clip I captured it a really distinct sound of someone urinating which is kind of awkward.
The clip here is of the conversation from a meter away which was also awkward to record. I felt like we should have had a release form for that one. I also felt like the worlds most inept spy.
Editing some of the found footage has been a real challenge. Although I am still yet to interview my subject I’ve been going through some of the videos I’ve downloaded and it’s been quite frustrating. I downloaded two from archives.org, with a combined running time of over an hour, and found maybe 30 seconds of footage I can use. This has taught me to be more selective of what I download in an attempt to waste no more time.