Monthly Archives: March 2016

Media 1, Thoughts

Will technology destroy cinema like it destroyed the music industry?

One of my favourite things about being at RMIT so far is the way that topics in my elective subjects (Introduction to Cinema Studies, and Music in Popular Culture) tend to correspond in some way with what we’re doing each week in Media 1, so you get to delve into an idea or topic from multiple perspectives.

This week in Music in Popular Culture we discussed how technology has shaped popular music, in particular how recorded sound basically revolutionised the practice of making music in the early 20th century and how home formats (vinyl, cassette, CD) continue to influence music in a multitude of ways long after their obsolescence.

I’m not a musician so I haven’t had much experience with the recording/performance aspects of music, but even as a music fan it’s remarkable just how much my experience as a listener has been shaped by technology. When I was 15 and got a casual job for the first time, I spent my first month’s pay on a Sony Discman and from then on I was basically never separated from it. Everywhere I went my Discman would come with me, and I even used to carry around a hard-case CD wallet that held 88 CDs. Looking back it was hilariously impractical and there’s no way I would bother lugging that much weight around each day now, but at the time it was basically the only choice for people who couldn’t bare walking anywhere without their headphones in.

Today, everyone carries dozens of times more music on their phones than I ever could carry on CD, and they do it without needing to account for a physical storage medium. Untethering the act of listening to music from its physical formats has been as revolutionary for the music industry as the democratisation of the internet — listeners can now be much more liberal with their buying (or downloading) decisions, amassing vastly larger music collections than ever before possible. And with SoundCloud, Bandcamp and similar artist-focused commercial platforms taking off over the last five years, a major beneficiary of this power shift has been small, independent or unsigned artists — those whose commercial viability is too low for the artist to be offered a contract by a major record label, but who can grow a small, self-sustaining cult following and operate in perpetuity outside the traditional commercial pathway.

(For a brutally frank breakdown of just how difficult it was to make enough money to survive in the traditional recording industry framework, read this 1993 polemic by producer and musician Steve Albini.)

This dynamic shift has led to the rise of microgenres and the increasing concentration of music fans into tribes, like fractals of communities that become more and more distilled the closer you look. With literally the entire history of recorded popular music at people’s fingertips — and without the need to have a radio DJ or television video clip program play their favourite music for them to hear it — people are now seeking out exactly the music that interests them, only the music that interests them, and nothing else. If you want to listen to nothing but cloud rap, bubblegum bass or blackgaze all day every day, you absolutely can.

For makers this can be both a blessing and a curse (and increased availability clearly makes it more difficult for any creator to be heard above the crowd), but as long as an artist makes music that appeals to at least a small subset of the music community, with the help of the internet they can now connect with that group and sustain their work as an artist much easier than ever before.

This shift doesn’t seem to have yet translated to filmmaking, though cinema tends to lag behind music in major paradigm changes generally, but I can imagine a future in which the Hollywood studio system has collapsed under the weight of billion-dollar budgets and in its wake has risen a new independent cinema, built on the back of technological advancement and cheap online distribution. This could be the world that my classmates and I graduate into, and it’s something that I think we need to keep an eye on as we move through our degree and out into the real world of media production. Perhaps we shouldn’t just be hoping to get a job as a cog in the machine that is the media industry, when we could be looking forward to a future as creators and artists answering to no one but our own audience.

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Media 1, Readings

Perspectives on sound

As I’ve found true for many topics we’ve explored in Media 1 so far, perspective and distance in audio/sound mixing are things you don’t really notice until you make a concerted effort to study them. When discussing visual media it’s easy to grasp perspective and distance – because we’re such visual creatures, we already have useful analogies for discussing and approximating the two dimensions involved:

  • Distance is achieved by the “size of the frame”, i.e. whether a close-up, medium shot or wide shot is used, and the relative size of the subject within this frame
  • Perspective has two axes, each of which defines a part of the relationship between the subject and the viewer:
    • Vertical axis determines power, e.g. top-down perspective places power with the viewer, bottom-up perspective places the subject in the position of power
    • Horizontal axis determines the level of “directness” in the relationship

But when it comes to sound, the mechanics of achieving perspective and distance are much more nuanced. For starters, as Theo van Leeuwen says in this week’s reading Speech, music, sound, audio is a “wrap-around medium” with no real concept of frontal or side-on sounds, or, in other words, no equivalent of the visual “frame” to mediate perspective. Though spatial positioning can be approximated in stereo environments with panning, hierarchically we perceive sounds as more or less equal regardless of the direction we perceive them coming from.

Distance, therefore, becomes much more important in determining the importance of sounds, with three levels of distinction:

  • Figure – the main focus of interest (also called the foreground or immediate sound)
  • Ground – the immediate setting or context in which the Figure sits (also called the midground or support sound)
  • Field – the background, sits at the furthest distance from the listener

Whether a sound is in the figure, ground or field dictates the perspective of the listener, and can be manipulated to mediate the audience’s experience in much the same way that visual distance and perspective can be. I’ve noticed this many times in the past, but didn’t have the language to adequately describe it, so I’m looking forward to paying closer attention to this in the future.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Foley

The topic of foley came up in the lectorial this week, and since I’ll take literally any excuse to revisit the Police Academy movies I decided to watch this little collection of Michael Winslow’s scenes:

Worth it.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB3 inspiration

I’ve started doing some research for Project Brief 3, after deciding on my subject: a local Melbourne sign painter named TJ Guzzardi, whose work can be found on hipster restaurants and barber shops all over town. I thought TJ would make a good subject because his work is visual by nature, allowing me to shoot some great B-roll footage of him at work, and from what I’ve seen he appears to be quite knowledgeable about the history and principles of his craft, which would make for a good interview.

My inspiration for this was the short film Up There, which is an amazing portrait of a group of American painters who hand-paint giant advertising murals on the sides of buildings. I saw it on Vimeo when it was uploaded (six years ago, apparently!) and it’s stuck with me ever since. I would obviously have to be careful not to actually replicate anything from this film, but use it more as a guiding light towards what’s possible in the medium.

But after a bit of Google research, I discovered that someone else made essentially the same film about TJ Guzzardi, only three years ago. It even utilises some of the shots that I had visualised trying to create for myself (shooting through glass, at work in his studio, slow pans of his previous works, etc.). This is a pretty frustrating development because I feel like I can no longer pursue this idea, and will have to find a new subject for my interview. But it’s a good little film that I think I can still get something out of, in terms of inspiration and example.

And now I have to pick a new subject – I think I have one potential option, but we’ll see.

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Lectorials, Media 1

Affordances

Affordances: the specific and unique attributes or functions of a medium.

It’s interesting to think about what makes a particular medium suited for some stories but not others. In this week’s lectorial we discussed how sound has a particular set of attributes because sound reception is a psychological process interpreting physical vibrations:

  1. Sound is physical – you feel it (e.g. low sounds can make you uncomfortable)
  2. It provides precise spatial and directional information
  3. It can be a very intimate form of communication – because you feel it can communicate very delicate personal information (e.g. whisper)
  4. Often portable – you can be doing other things while listening to sound

This got me thinking about what the affordances of other media might be.

Podcasts

  1. Use sound’s intimacy to tell human stories – it’s right in your ear
  2. Portable, can be used when driving or doing housework etc. (This could also be a weakness as it allows for a less attentive audience.)
  3. Major weakness is that it can’t use visual accompaniment in any way

Live television

  1. A shared experience between communities, either in the studio audience or in society at large (e.g. event television)
  2. Allows for “wow” moments, unplanned or surprise experiences
  3. At the mercy of the live participants, so resulting quality can be inconsistent

Long-form magazine articles

  1. Can use (and edit) quotes to steer a reader’s point of view to the story
  2. Text can compensate for low quality audio recording, as the legibility of the speaker isn’t an issue
  3. Allows deep focus – reading an article is the only activity that can be done at that time

Comedy/spoken word performance

  1. Like a written story but speaker can use cadence and emphasis to add colour
  2. Live audience feedback is contagious and concentrates reactions

There are obviously many, many more affordances that could be listed for these and other media, and hopefully we get a chance to work with some of these types of content in future workshops.

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Assessments, Media 1

Project 2: Creative self-portrait

Rather than attempt to sum up my entire self, for Project Brief 2 I decided to dial way down to the micro level and create a short sketch based on what I’ve been doing (watching, reading, listening to) over the last couple of weeks. This gave me an opportunity to further experiment with Adobe Premiere Pro and rhythmic editing, and still functions as a self-portrait even if it’s not literally so.

Each “section” of my video uses associative form (something we discussed in my cinema studies class two weeks ago) to evoke a mood or feeling unique to that section. For the most part this worked OK, and gave me an opportunity to record some nicely abstract footage and play around with colour and effects. One thing that I struggled with was finding a visual way to represent the “film” section of my video without actually using material from the films themselves. I never quite resolved how to achieve this, and as a result I’m not happy with how that section ultimately turned out.

This was my third or fourth idea for PB2, after I discarded earlier ideas for being too ambitious or too unoriginal. I’m already looking forward to Project Brief 3 and representing someone else in my videos, which is much more in my comfort zone.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Vocal timbre

This week’s lectorial on the elements of sound, in particular timbre, got me thinking about just what it is about some voices that make them more or less enjoyable to listen to than others.

99% Invisible is a podcast I should love. As a former designer myself I have a sharp appreciation for the tiny, seemingly insignificant details that designers spend hours upon hours slaving to get perfect. The hidden complexity of everyday life is fascinating, and indeed so would the podcast dedicated to finding and explaining that complexity — except for one thing.

I can’t stand Roman Mars’ voice. It’s literally the only thing stopping me from listening to the show. He gets so close to the microphone and has an irritating half-whisper that sounds like he’s doing a voiceover for a late-night phone sex commercial, but apparently a lot of people find it soothing and therapeutic. Judge for yourself:

By contrast, Zoe Chace has worked on Planet Money and This American Life and is often said to possess one of the most annoying voices on radio — but she’s easily one of my absolute favourite presenters. She has an unusual combination of timbre, accent and vocal fry that for some reason I just love — I recognise that her voice probably isn’t the most suited to traditional ideas of news/economics reporters, but perhaps that’s part of why I like it so much.

I still don’t really understand the mechanics of vocal timbre, and why exactly I find some voices irritating and others irresistible, but it’s interesting to note just how much of a difference it can make.

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Assessments, Experiments, Media 1

Timelapse fail

Yesterday I started to film one of the shots for my creative self-portrait — a timelapse of swirling clouds that will be used towards the end of the video. As Melbourne’s hot weather started to give way to a cool change it created an incredibly beautiful cloud pattern over the east of Melbourne, and I was excited to be able to film such a striking visual image for my project.

So I got up high (shooting through glass on a second floor balcony) and set my phone up on a small tripod so I could film the entire 10 minutes without my phone being moved too much by the wind.

But since it was such a bright day (great for the shot, not so great for being able to see my screen), I didn’t notice that a subtle reflection from the glass reflected people walking behind my phone — completely ruining the take.

I didn’t notice this until I finished shooting the entire video, but luckily I had time to film multiple takes of varying lengths (hoping to experiment with the speed and duration of the clip in my final project) so I’ll be able to use a later take which was filmed from above the glass panel.

This video is a cautionary tale — watch those reflections, and always give yourself enough time to re-shoot anything you completely stuff up.

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Cinema Studies

Experimental film

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Though at first it seems like an arbitrary collision of unrelated images, Ballet mechanique juxtaposes and manipulates visuals to convey a certain feeling and provoke an emotional response from the viewer. Though it has no story or narrative in the traditional sense, it still conforms to standard film language by utilising certain elements of film form (particularly similarity/repetition, difference/variation and unity/disunity) while completely ignoring others (function and development). This is an example of the abstract form of experimental film, in which the filmmaker uses theme and variation to build a cohesive work that is interesting or compelling because it provokes our senses in unusual ways.

The Illustrated Auschwitz is a stunning and effective example of the associational form, in which images and sounds are placed together in such a way as to create an association in the viewer’s mind. At first the film’s imagery seems oddly disconnected to the narration, but the viewer is quickly trained to make clear associations between the subject matter of the voiceover and the images being presented on screen – though these meanings are more abstracted than in a traditional narrative film, their presentation in this way helps the viewer to feel the film viscerally rather than understand it intellectually.

We Have Decided Not to Die uses highly constructed, stylistic shots to convey different feelings and emotions in each of its “phases”. Though it also has no narrative in the traditional sense, a viewer could interpret it as an exploration on a theme – so it can be “followed” in the same way as a narrative film. It also uses elements of film form (specifically similarity/repetition) to create associations between each phase, and by their placement and juxtaposition next to one another shapes the viewer’s understanding of the film.

La Jetee is an experimental film concerned with the possibilities and limitations of the cinematic form itself, using a stylistic constraint (the film is built almost entirely from still images) in service of conveying its story. Even though it has a very clear story and plot, its unique mode of presentation sets it apart from the rest of narrative cinema.

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Experiments, Media 1

Hello ollo: photographic experiments

I used Project Brief 2 as an excuse to buy myself an Olloclip, a small attachment with four lenses you clip in front of your phone camera that gives you access to a wide angle lens, fisheye lens, and two macro lenses. I took some experimental photos with each lens to see what was possible.

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The above was taken from my desk with the fisheye lens – I can’t imagine I’ll find much use for this particular lens but good to know it’s there!

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With the 10x macro lens I can see my own fingerprint in detail. (Readers from the future, please don’t steal my identity.)

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This is an orchid that sits in my lounge room – looks like it’s a little dirty with the 10x macro lens.

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Yep – on closer inspection (15x macro lens) it definitely needs a clean.

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One of the shots I’ve chosen for Project Brief 2 will be a close-up of a spinning record player. With the 15x macro lens attached you can actually see the sound waves etched into the vinyl. (And more dust – I really need to clean my house.)

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