Author Archives: Bonnie

Last week of class

I’m happy about not needing to go to class anymore so that I can spend more time working in the hospital. I cannot believe that I am sad at the same time because I won’t be spend as much time with my peers. It’s worse because I am taking leave to do another course in the next 12 months so we will be in different class in the future.

It is interesting that I feel so different from my Week 9 workshop key activity blog post. We gain better understanding of each other during this time, seeing each other at least 3 days a week. I even brought Caitlin with me on one Saturdays for the group meeting. We learnt a lot from each other. As a result we are comfortable to reveal our cray cray true inner self to the two other girls and don’t need to worry about being judged.

D&L, thank you for being the most awesome group mates I can ever possibly have. We rocked pb4 and wish you two all the best for the course.

P.S. Can we still hang out for movies and food? lol

The destiny in the next few weeks is determined by a little piece of paper in ‘the sorting hat’. (Not Slytherin, not Slytherin)

Few minutes later it was revealed that my group mates for PB4 are Drizzle and Linda.

My first thought was ‘Oh. No.’

Don’t get me wrong, they are both lovely girls. It’s just that we have been in the same group before and the three of us are usually the people who are quieter and don’t have much to say.

And the three of us got put into a group.

What if we remain quiet and don’t say much? What if we are stuck with ideas like what happened with one of the exercise we did in workshop? What if we don’t have enough ideas/materials/things to fulfill the 7-8 minute requirement? What if we cannot come up with anything during our brainstorm time?

I hope that I am overthinking and time will tell.

The modern trend of watching tv.

This is so popular that I have heard of it many times. I tried to access it out of curiosity a while ago, but gave up due to being stingy. I don’t want to pay every month to watch TV. I have been streaming free TV shows from my hometown in Cantonese and will be continue doing so.

My peers are horrified when I tell them I don’t watch Netflix.

It results in lacking of common topics, while they talked about the shows on Netflix, I remained as a listening. I didn’t bother telling them about the Hong Kong TV shows I watch because they won’t get it either.

Regardless, I agree that with the rise of Netflix, it turns a new page in TV history. People nowadays are so busy, they don’t necessary sit down in front of the television at a certain time everyday to find out what happened next from the free TV shows.

Netflix’s flexibility is exactly what they need.

This week we received another exercise to help us familiarise with Zoom microphones.

I got paired up with the lovely Rebekah, and I immediately suggested that we talk to my car and recording some horn beeping sound. I think it worked really well as we took advantage that I drove to Uni that day. It also inspired us to develop the story line around that idea. We decided to produce an audio production that the pedestrian is so into using social media that she wasn’t aware of a car coming, nearly hitting her, but afterwards continue to use social media as it is a inseparable part of her daily life.

I found Hannah’s step by step tutorial very useful of knowing how to use Adobe Audition. Like premier pro, I have not heard nor used this application before so it would be quite overwhelming without the demonstration. There is so much more for us to learn on creating different effects and becoming a professional audio producer.

We are very lucky to get feedback from Jon Tjhia, I found what was really useful is that he liked how we started our audio, and suggested us to look into dynamic compression, it will help reducing the lacking of stability of volume of our rough cut.

I liked how Tessa and Joey used the sounds effect of the telephone. It sounded really realistic and engaged me as an audience.

I found Hannah’s feedbacks helpful as well. I had the same feeling of the first music introduction bit of our rough cut audio is a bit long due to the lacking of narration. We were worried about not being able to interview someone from the older Media generation that has only read comic books but not the tv series, but then came up of a plan to make the script up and get someone else to record that for us. All 3 of us feel not as bad and more confident about our pb4 after this workshop.

I wouldn’t say this is the first time that I am involved to produce a audio only production, but this is more detailed and skilled than what I had experienced before.

The idea of a person listening to the radio in the car was inspired by myself doing that. We tried to avoid an essay kind of approached as mentioned by our teacher that a lot of students did that in the past year and that wasn’t what the teachers wanted and found them boring, which I think we have achieved this quite successfully.

The final production sounded so much better when what we have imagined. We are really happy and proud of our work.

We are glad that we are allow to use copyrighted materials in pb4, we talked about how difficult it will be if we are only allow to use copyright free materials like pb2 and pb3.

I found producing an audio project easier and more difficult than producing a video project at the same time because there are less effects to worry about, but are also limited with the effects because you cannot show the audience anything visual at all.

We had trouble deciding how much sound effects to give away, whether we include everything as possible like the unlocking of the car, opening the doors to get inside, ignition, acceleration, switch on radio, or just a subtle hint of switching off the radio when the person arrived home.

Personally I think my challenge was I had no idea what Riverdale was when my group decided on the topic, so during our group meeting I’m usually quiet when Linda and Drizzle are discussing about what happened in the story. To be honest I gain better understanding of this show but still cannot say I understand the story well enough like they do.

With group work, it is difficult to include everyone’s idea into one final product, perhaps it is a good thing to have too much idea that we cannot include everything rather than not coming up with enough ideas.

I think finding mutual free time is a difficult thing for our group too. This is mostly my problem of working and my daughter’s extra curriculum activities on the weekends. Most of the time Linda and Drizzle worked together when I’m absent or show up 2 hours late from the set time.

We found it difficult to come up with a natural way to incorporate all the requirements

What worked and what didn’t?

I think the radio call in worked really well, it is very realistic.

I raised the issue of it sounds like ‘Bonnie’ can predict the radio will be talking about Riverdale because that particular conversation happened before the radio broadcast part starts, but Drizzle and Linda said it will be fine so we did not do anything to try to ‘fix’ this issue.

We were worried about that the audience will think it is a bit odd that both ‘Bonnie’ and ‘Linda’ get through the call in so quickly, but as Hannah said this is fiction so it doesn’t have to be THAT reasonable.

Originally I planned to bring my daughter with me to this week’s lecture. On Tuesday we received an email saying that the lecture has been cancelled due to Brian being sick, that means can sleep in and don’t have to go to RMIT until 2:30pm for my Cinema Studies seminar.

I use social media daily in my life. I use Facebook and Instagram. I still have not master the art of Snapchat yet, thinking I am too old for that. I think the invention of internet and social media have a great impact on the Media industry.

People nowadays are sharing more of their personal stuffs on the web. I do so sometimes too because I cannot be bothered telling my friends individually about what is happening in my life this moment. For example if I post a status on Facebook that I have been quiet lately because I am working on my assignments, then my friends will know the reason why I am so busy and don’t have time to join them for dinner or gatherings.

Animals-another interesting topic this week.

We did not have time to discuss about this in our workshop so I am interested in other people’s opinion towards this.

I have been an animal lover since as young as I could remember. Back in Hong Kong I had pets like gold fishes, turtles, birds, ducklings, hamsters, guinea pigs and chinchillas. I really wanted a dog or a cat (still do), but my parents won’t allow me to(and now it is the landlord). My parents see animals as expensive, filthy and troublesome little creatures.

To compensate the feeling that I don’t have my own dog/cat, I spent a lot of time watching Discovery Channel and The National Geographic channel because they have a lot of animal documentaries, even including the animals that aren’t pets like elephants, lions, tigers, seals, penguins etc. It is so mesmerizing to track them from birth, growing up, some leaving their family, had their own children, then death. The life cycle. I was so fascinated that at one point I wanted to be a vet but then decided I cannot deal with bones and blood.

So glad to get another pb out of the way.

This should leave us one more to go for this semester.

I had a sneek peak of our last pb, and it’s a group project. I am always nervous with it comes to working with other classmates because I feel like they are really good at media and often have a lot of amazing ideas where I just can’t think and contribute anything, sitting there being quiet. It is like I am the worst group mate you can ever get. I do not mind them giving me instructions of what to do. I am a good instructions follower. It is just that if you ask me to come up with something, I am not so creative in that area.

This makes me wonder that if this is how the media industry work when we graduate and start working, am I really suitable for this industry? My future boss will not be to happy if he/she pays me to work and I can literally come up with nothing to present.

Today we watched our table group’s rough cuts of PB3, it was interesting to know who other people are interviewing. I feel like my peers are interviewing really interesting people, and I am so lost about interviewing my daughter Caitlin.

I got very excited knowing that we are going outside again to film another exercise. We face the same challenge as the previous exercise, that is we only have limited time to plan our storyboard. This week was better than last week, as my group mates have a lot of different ideas shooting across and we were actually the first group finished planning and went outside to start filming.

As a media student you thought by week 7, you already know that you *may* have a chance to be on the camera and you should apply makeup. Nah. Not in this case. I felt guilty playing as a hot, attractive girl in the pursuit but she’s actually very mean.

The suspense is killing that we are not allow to view the video until next week. Can’t wait till next week’s workshop. I have a feeling that our’s gonna be hilarious.