Author Archives: Bradley Dixon

Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

The Work / Call Me By Your Name

I love Melbourne in winter, when the air is so cold it stings your eyes and the Melbourne International Film Festival takes over the city centre.

The best thing I can do for my creative practice is to write as often as possible, so in that spirit I’ve decided to start jotting down capsule reviews for some of the things I see at MIFF this year. I’m not going to place limits on myself, so I may write about films I loved, films I hated, films I anticipated, films that surprised me… whatever piques my interest and presents something I think worth talking about. And I may not keep it up past this first entry, so we’ll see how I go.

THE WORK ★★★★½

Twice a year, New Folsom Prison allows members of the public to enter its walls to participate in a four-day group therapy session with inmates facilitated by former prisoners and counsellors. Prisoners begin the four-day intensive with a pact to leave prison rules and gang politics at the door, and the outsider participants find themselves thrust into the world’s most intense psychotherapy session, where white, black, Asian and Native American gang members down their arms and lay bare their most intimate insecurities and anxieties to one another, hoping to find some kind of remedy for the failures, betrayals and mistakes that landed them in prison.

The Work promises a “rare look inside the cinder-block walls” of a prison, but once the outsiders start divulging their own stories it slowly becomes clear that what the film actually offers is a deep dive into the darkest recesses of the human mind — and a slow realisation that the blackest of those recesses might not belong to any of the prisoners.

A genuinely bracing work of up-close filmmaking, The Work will hit you square in the chest and send a shiver down your spine — and make you think about how precariously balanced the line between functioning member of society and lifelong criminal really is.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME ★★★★½

“Is it better to speak or die?”

This question lies at the heart and soul of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a sumptuous and beautiful romance story set in the summer of 1983. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is enjoying another quiet summer in northern Italy as any 17-year-old son of rich Americans would do: lounging by the pool, eating apricots, reading, playing piano and cavorting with the local girls. Oliver (Armie Hammer), a statuesque doctoral student hired by Elio’s father to assist him in his research, arrives to their estate and suddenly awakens in Elio a budding lust that he struggles to understand, much less act upon.

As the sunny days meander by, the two men dance around one another, slowly and tentatively giving in to the desire that dare not speak its name. Theirs is an attraction that at first confuses Elio and, given the era, poses questions of acceptance and decorum. Is it better to speak or die? Speak and risk everything, or don’t speak and condemn yourself to a life without anything worth risking.

Their lust is expressed not through sex (at least, not on screen) but through fleeting moments of tenderness spent in secret on the banks of a crystal clear river, or hidden in the forgotten rooms of the sprawling estate. Call Me By Your Name is overflowing with sensuality, and Guadagnino’s wandering frame contrasts the quiet stillness of the landscape with the raging desire lurking just beneath the surface of his two leads.

The director’s choice to shoot on a single, unchanged lens — placing the camera between the characters in intimate moments, never giving too much context  — resists allowing the two men to truly give themselves to one another, and delicately balances the viewer at the explosive centre of their sexual tension. Call Me By Your Name is, if nothing else, surely one of the sexiest films to come out of Italy since the days of Fellini.

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Assessments, Everyone's a Critic

In profile: Wesley Morris

“When [the critic] sits down to compose his criticism, his artist ceases to be a friend, and becomes mere raw material for his work of art.”
H.L. Mencken, Footnote on Criticism

For Wesley Morris, a film is never just a film. Whether high, low or middle-brow, each is a message in the great cultural conversation humankind has been having with itself since the first oral storytellers began swapping tales thousands of years ago. Once completed and released into cinemas a film does not suddenly become a static artefact, settled in its interpretation; for Morris it remains something to be actively probed, understood, recontextualised and used as a prompt for further discussion and artistic exploration.

Morris, 42, first became a film critic when he began writing reviews for the The Yale Daily News as an undergraduate student. After graduating with a literature degree, his career took him to San Francisco and then to Boston, where he worked the weekly film beat for 11 years and, in 2012, was recognised with a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism — only the fifth film critic to be so honoured.

After a stint as a staff writer for the ill-fated online sports and pop culture publication Grantland, Morris joined The New York Times as a “critic-at-large”. Panoramic in his cultural expertise, his criticism ties together not just cinema but music, literature, television, news media, sports, technology and politics, with his by-line appearing across a range of subject matter and in a variety of formats, from The New York Times Magazine to the podcast Still Processing, which he co-hosts with reporter Jenna Wortham. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to art: when dissecting a film, it is perhaps not helpful to restrict one’s points of reference only to cinema, and it is by drawing connections between different forms of media that Morris’s most incisive ideas take hold.

His language is precise and uncomplicated, and though he interrogates his subjects with extensive use of reference and comparison, his writing is always accessible. Reading a Wesley Morris film review is in some ways like meeting up with a particularly worldly and articulate friend for a cocktail following a screening — and wondering where on earth they learned to connect references as diverse as His Girl Friday, Alien and the New Testament in their reading of the latest superhero blockbuster.

At its foundation, Morris’s criticism sits atop the idea that in all art, politics are inherent and inescapable. As a writer on film he makes no distinction between the explicitly and the unintentionally political; even a film that at first blush seems innocuous and ignorable, like Ted 2 — which for most viewers was a minor entry in the already minor career of Seth MacFarlane — for Morris conceals a cruel and antiquated attack on black sexuality.

It is on race and sexuality that Morris speaks with the most authority, which is to say he’s had plenty to write about over the past decade. Recalling his experiences growing up the son of an impoverished single mother in Philadelphia, and writing now as a gay black man in a time when certain subcultures have weaponised white, hetereonormative privilege, Morris writes with the clarity of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the directness of Dan Savage to achieve a seemingly impossible task: placing his reader inside the lived experience of someone with whom they might otherwise share nothing, and dissecting culture to reveal meanings that reader might never be able to understand on their own.

Whether writing on a film as serious as 12 Years a Slave or as ludicrous as Let’s Be Cops, Morris uses pop culture as a prism through which to explore the fractured state of identity in America, and the ways in which differences between people are presented and explored — or ignored — on our screens. He understands that every decision made in the making of a film — its subject matter, setting, the diversity of its cast, the costumes of its female characters, the subjects of its jokes — raises questions of responsibility. To make a film in the 21st century with a shaky grasp of identity, or to ignore it altogether, is, to Morris, a crime.

“That’s what writing about race and popular culture is for me: it’s crime reporting,” he told Longform’s Aaron Lammer in 2014.

“It’s not me looking for an agenda when I go to the movies … but I feel a moral responsibility to report a crime being committed. That’s what I’m forced to do over and over again.”

In an era punctuated by the regular and repeated killing of people of colour by government institutions, and with an escalating culture war being fought in the media every day, the role of cultural crime reporter is an increasingly vital one. And it’s a role that no one is more qualified for than Wesley Morris.

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Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

City of Gold, critical comparison

On Monday we watched City of Gold (2015), a documentary about the work of L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold — though it is as much about the City of the title as it is about the Gold.

As a documentary it is relatively unremarkable — shots of talking heads and laptop keyboards are the order of the day — but for a food-related documentary there is surprisingly little food porn. Instead, the filmmakers use Gold’s words to describe most of the food mentioned in the film, which serves as both an interesting filmmaking technique and a beautiful exhibition of Gold’s writing.

I wasn’t familiar with Gold’s work before watching the film, but now that I am I really appreciate his experiential writing style. He doesn’t just describe the food he eats, he paints a full picture of the context and culture in which the food is experienced, because going to a restaurant excites many more senses than just taste. Particularly in a large and multicultural city like Los Angeles, going to a restaurant is a little like visiting another country and experiencing its culture — or, at least, how that culture mixes and interacts with America — and Gold attempts to usher his readers through that experience on the page.

At one stage of the film Gold refers to himself as not so much a food critic as a “chronicler of Los Angeles”, which I think is an apt description and something that any food critic should aspire to be for their city.

I was particularly surprised to learn that Gold visits a restaurant four or five times before reviewing it — and, he says, up to 17 times if he’s unfamiliar with the cuisine being served. This fact really blew my mind, because I would assume most film/theatre critics only watch something once before they write their review. I wonder what effect it would have on film criticism if it was common practice for critics to watch a film five times before reviewing it?

In Wednesday’s class we read five different reviews of Edward Scissorhands (1990), which ran the gamut from simple plot summary to sophisticated critical analysis. It was fascinating to read critics with such different styles discuss a single film, because seeing them all side by side helped us identify differences in tone, style and language. Of the five we read, I most preferred to read the critics like Paul Harris and Adrian Martin, who had depth and critical rigour in their analysis but didn’t get too far into academic or pointlessly florid language.

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Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

W2 exercise: referentiality and Baby Driver

Last week we pitched a 300-word critical review, to be written over the weekend and then workshopped in class. This is mine.

No film exists in a vacuum. All but the most experimental filmmakers weave a fabric of archetypes, narrative patterns and cultural touchstones into something that is — hopefully — new. The internet has opened up entire worlds of art for young practitioners to draw from in their own work, from vintage rock albums and arcane literature to obscure films that previous generations of artists could have enjoyed only rarely at repertory cinemas. As a result, we live in a time where there is no single dominant vector of influence, and never before has mass culture been so vast and varied in its sources of inspiration.

Baby Driver director Edgar Wright has made a career of invoking pop cultural history in his work, from Spaced’s litany of direct visual references to cinema history, to Scott Pilgrim vs The World aping the aesthetic of video games, to the “Three Flavours” trilogy’s collage of zombie/cop/sci-fi tropes. It’s as if Wright is attempting to personify Quentin Tarantino’s famous quip that “when people ask me if I went to film school I tell them no, I went to films.”

With Baby Driver, Wright has distilled referentiality into an art form of its own, where any deeper symbolic meaning is cast aside in favour of allusions, references, cameos and easter eggs. For audiences, the experience is a two-hour long game of spot-the-reference as much as it is anything else, and in this way the film is tailor-made for a generation of viewers raised with the history of human culture mere clicks away.

Wright is careful to ensure that the film is a high-octane thrill ride no matter how familiar the viewer is with the history of cinema, but there is a strange pleasure to be found in recognising the main character, Baby (Ansel Elgort), as a sort of millennial echo of Ryan O’Neal’s character from The Driver (whose director, Walter Hill, has a voice cameo in Baby Driver), or noting that the construction of scenes in which Doc (Kevin Spacey) briefs his criminal underlings on the plans for their next job, are reminiscent of another heist-gone-wrong film: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

By under-serving deeper meaning and symbolism, Baby Driver opens itself up to the accusations that it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. But when the sound and fury is this enjoyable, does it matter?

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Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

Reviews vs criticism, constructive feedback

What’s the difference between review and criticism? To me it’s one of those “I’ll know it when I see it” things, where I recognise that there is a clear difference between a review and a piece of criticism, but the boundaries between the two can often be quite blurry and hard to identify.

Reviews:

  • Are generally less in-depth
  • Function as a consumer guide
  • Should describe the text
  • Have a responsibility not to spoil the text (assuming the reader is not familiar with the work being reviewed)
  • Are more prescriptive in terms of content/structure

Criticism:

  • Can be more in-depth
  • Is less prescriptive in terms of content/structure (i.e. criticism could be a personal essay, thematic response to the text, draw from a wider context, etc.)
  • Does not necessarily need to describe the text
  • Can assume the reader is familiar with the text

To illustrate this difference, this week we read two different critical responses to Tricky’s album Maxinquaye: one a short 300-word review in Rolling Stone, and one a much larger retrospective exploration of its themes and cultural impact by Mark Fisher. Reading two different critical evaluations of the same work was incredibly interesting, and I think everyone in the class got much more out of Fisher’s writing than the Rolling Stone review, which jibes with my own personal experience with longform criticism. With the space to really dive into a work and respond to its themes and preoccupations without needing to necessarily describe and evaluate it, readers can gain a much deeper and more considered understanding of a work of art. It also allows criticism to function as an art form itself.

On Wednesday we paired up in class to discuss a 300-word review of our own, and to give/receive feedback on our writing. Strangely, this is one of the only times in my life that I was actually really happy with a piece of my writing after the first draft. I wrote about Baby Driver and referentiality in Edgar Wright’s work, and my points seemed to flow out of my head in a very natural way as I was writing it, which has never happened to me before. I think it might be because I had very well-defined constraints, so by necessity I had to focus on just the one most important point I wanted to explore, and didn’t get bogged down in wondering how to begin and which points to make.

When it came time to receive feedback from a classmate I was worried that this might backfire on me, like perhaps although my writing came easily and made sense to me in the moment I was writing it, someone coming to it with fresh eyes would have no idea what I was rambling about.

I was paired with Katrina, who wrote a really great piece on the Mad Men series finale and how it ties together the threads that the show had been exploring over its eight seasons (namely, Don Draper’s discovery of his true self and the impact this has on those closest to him). Her thesis was very clearly expressed and the piece was well constructed, so the majority of my feedback was about relatively minor things like providing more context and keeping an eye on things like tenses, word choice and the passive voice. Kat’s feedback on my piece was really valuable — she pointed out a few areas where I’d left points implied rather than actually expressed, and had some good ideas for areas to expand, so I definitely think the article will be improved once I make those changes.

Receiving constructive criticism and feedback can be pretty daunting, but the way the critique session was framed in a positive way meant that it actually felt very collegiate and respectful. I’m really happy with how positively I responded to well-defined constraints, so that might be a trick I continue to try to impose on myself in the future. I’ve also had good experiences working with editors in the past, so I’m looking forward to having more of these critiquing sessions in the future. And of course most importantly, I’m going to try my best to keep writing as often as I possibly can.

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Assessments, Room With a View

RWAV: Feature

The feature was one aspect of Room With a View that I was particularly excited to work on, as it’s closely related to the sort of narrative documentary podcast content that I love listening to. Our subject matter (cultural attitudes towards body hair) was decided relatively quickly, and I felt that as a topic it gave us a lot of pathways to explore and follow, which we could narrow down as we further developed the idea. We discussed a couple of potential styles/tones we could employ, from the more academic current-affairs style news reporting to something more atmospheric and esoteric, and the direction we would eventually go with would depend on the supporting material we could find.

Roles were divided up into pre-production and interviewing (Chloe and Rebecca) and vox-pops, editing and post-production (Hannah, Georgia and myself), with everyone in the group responsible for researching the topic and finding potential sources of archival material and found audio that we could use. We did some preliminary research to inform the interviews, but I tried to be careful not to spend too much time on scripting or recording material that we might not end up even using. This ended up being a good decision, but more on that later.

Chloe and Rebecca recorded our main interviews — one with a beauty therapist, and four with young people who have had personal experience with discrimination or societal pressure about their body hair. They were all pretty interesting and each could have easily been used in its own piece of radio, but we quickly identified that three of the interviews in particular (Lys, Tom and Julia) traversed some common ground and would lend themselves well to being edited together. One of the style options we discussed in our first meetings about the feature was potentially not having any narration at all and instead letting the interviews speak for themselves, which we identified as a viable option if we used Lys, Tom and Julia’s interviews. So we made the decision to cut the beauty therapist and the fourth interviewee entirely, and work only with the three we liked most.

One of the things I’m most happy about with this project is that we followed our material where it lead us. We could have easily come up with a pre-conceived notion of what our piece would sound like, and then tried to find material that supported that notion, but it could have sounded contrived or been difficult to shape the material to fit what we already had in our heads. Instead, we first listened to our interviews and then extracted the most interesting parts and used those to inform the overall tone and style, which I think has ended up with a much stronger final result. As a bonus, this meant that we didn’t spend too much time writing scripts or narration that ended up not being used. (Rebecca decided to go off and put together some narration on her own anyway, which will help her practice writing for radio.)

The finished piece has a very personal, intimate feeling to it, which is very much driven by the voices of our three main interviews. We didn’t use any archival or found audio clips (other than the vox-pops we recorded, which open the piece), but we made the conscious decision not to include such clips because they would have felt incongruous with the content of our interviews. Hopefully the vox-pops, inter-cutting of the interviews and the music we used all combine to give the piece an interesting texture that will keep listeners engaged.

Finding the perfect music to accompany our piece was challenging, as the subject matter is serious and deeply personal, but we didn’t want to use music that was too dark or sombre, or that was too emotionally prescriptive. We downloaded about 15 different free music tracks by Kevin MacLeod, and seriously considered using three or four of them, before we came across the piece that we ultimately ended up using. I think this speaks to the importance of continuing to search until you find the exact thing you’re looking for. (And we’ll have to remember to credit Kevin MacLeod on-air and on the RRR program page when we play the piece on air, to comply with Kevin’s licensing requirements.)

Of all the projects I’ve worked on during my media degree, this feature might be one of my absolute favourites. The editing process was particularly rewarding, as Georgia and I sat in an edit suite for hours cutting the entire piece together, which was a surprisingly positive and collaborative experience. I think it helped that I really respect Georgia’s talent for audio storytelling, so I was able to sit back and learn a lot from her. Previously, I’ve found editing by myself on my laptop to be a long and frustrating process, but having someone else there to bounce ideas off (and to keep me productive) was really valuable.

I’m excited to play the finished piece on RRR during our second show.

Learnings:

  • Let your material dictate the tone and style of your work, not the other way around
  • Vox pops are a cheap and easy way to get good content
  • Editing with a partner offers benefits and leads to better results
  • If you haven’t found the perfect piece of music, keep looking (or make it yourself)
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Assessments, Room With a View

RWAV: First Show

This week Group 4 went to air on RRR for the first time. Our guests were:

[Click here to read my annotations for the show on Soundcloud]

Planning for this episode was relatively smooth, thanks to the preparation and practice we did for our demo. We had settled on a run sheet formula that suited us all well — Rebecca and Chloe, as the hosts, would have one version of the run sheet with notes and scripts to help their presentation, and I would have a separate panel operator version with technical information like audio source and volume levels.

We had some difficulty finding guests that were interesting subjects, were approved by RRR and available on the day we went to air. I’m happy that we were able to talk to Savannah Anand-Sobti as I’m a big fan of the zine she founded, and she does a lot of work to create open and supportive spaces for creative women to do excellent work. The timing worked out perfectly too, because an issue of the LoL zine had just been released a couple of days before we went to air. Anthony Embleton was someone Rebecca had interviewed for her individual interview assessment, though he was happy to come in to the studio and do an in-person interview about his work with the Monash Club of Juggling and Fire Twirling. We were hoping to have three live in-studio interviews, but since we couldn’t find a third interviewee we decided to use a pre-recorded interview with Soreti Kadir that our producer Hannah had conducted for her individual interview assessment. Soreti is a community leader who speaks on gentrification and its effects on local and immigrant populations in the western suburbs of Melbourne, which made for an incredibly interesting interview.

The tracks we chose to play on our show were pulled together in relatively short time. I tried to find music that was local to Melbourne (or, at worst, Australia) and was recently released, and so did most of the rest of our group, which resulted in six out of the seven tracks we played satisfying the Australian content quota. The one track that wasn’t Australian (The Gap Band) is a great song that fits RRR’s format well, so overall I think our music selections were strong.

As panel operator I was responsible for sourcing the music and collecting all of our material in a way that would make it easy to play out on air. In our demo I thought it would be easiest to burn everything (including pre-recorded interviews) onto a CD, which I then duplicated so I would have two identical copies of the same CD. I would then alternate between players and while one track was playing I would cue the next track on the other player, and wouldn’t have to do any switching audio sources on the fly. This worked well in the demo, but we had an issue where a couple of our tracks only had audio in the right channel, so this time I made sure I burned our CDs with enough time to listen to every track in the studio and confirm that the audio was perfect, which happily it was.

Unfortunately, literally 10 minutes before we were due to go on air Soreti requested that we edit out one of the answers she gave in her interview, sending Hannah on a mad rush to figure out what to do with our audio sources. Ideally we would have burned the entire CD again (music tracks and all) to include the updated interview, but since we were so short on time we decided instead to burn the updated interview to its own CD and switch to it on the fly when necessary. This added a lot of unnecessary stress to an already nervous time before we went live on air, and I think in future we should make sure we inform interviewees that if there’s something they don’t want going to air then they should just not say it — just as Terry Gross tells her interviewees.

Actually going into the studio to take over was a lot more frenetic and rushed than I expected. The hosts of the previous show played our theme and we all rushed into the studio, took our places, turned the mics on and jumped straight into it. Audio levels started out a bit high because I was attempting to quickly put our CDs into the players and cue them up, and thus wasn’t paying attention to audio levels from the beginning. There was also a strange tinny quality to Rebecca’s voice on MIC2, which I couldn’t diagnose no matter what I did — I confirmed that the microphone was on, the fader was up, and the levels showed that it was receiving her voice fine, but for some reason it didn’t sound right. I think I’ll chalk this up to an equipment fault or a dodgy cable, which I hope we don’t get marked down for because I noticed it right away and began to troubleshoot it, but nothing I did fixed the problem.

Once we were into the swing of the show things improved. Bec and Chloe had a nice rhythm and worked off each other well, and we used non-verbal cues and notes to communicate with each other while the microphones were on. We still need to clean up our technique, particularly our microphone technique, but that’s something that should come with time. During our first interview, with Savannah, I had significant issues controlling the levels for her microphone because she has clearly never been in a radio studio before and was very wary of the microphone in front of her. As she spoke to Bec and Chloe she continually moved around (and away from) the microphone, so I had to constantly adjust the levels to try to keep her volume consistent. I think in future, the producers should brief interviewees to speak directly into the microphone before they come into the studio, because the end result is not great to listen to.

The most significant error in our show (from a panel operation point of view) was the moment when I was attempting to transition from the pre-recorded Soreti interview to a track, with a RRR station ID in between. Because we’d changed the Soreti interview at the last minute and put it on a separate CD, my run sheet was out of sync (what should have been CD1 was actually in CD2, and vice-versa), and as a result I pressed the wrong button on the panel — playing Soreti’s interview from the beginning again. Luckily, I noticed straight away and quickly faded it down and switched to the correct CD, but anyone listening would have clearly noticed the mistake. This was quite a frustrating error because I did so much preparation to make sure I had the audio sources all in sync and ready to go, but due to circumstances beyond my control (an interviewee wanting to change an answer they willingly gave in an interview) there was mistake that went to air which was ultimately my fault. If I had my time again I would simply refuse to edit the interview, because it’s ridiculous for an interviewee to make such a demand 10 minutes before air time, but this wasn’t an option in this case.

On the positive side, my preparation ended up saving us at the end of the show. Our in-studio interviews went much quicker than expected (and, in fact, the interview with Anthony went way longer than we actually had interesting content for, and our hosts began repeating themselves trying to fill time), so we were left about four minutes ahead of schedule by the time our third interview ended. I passed a note to our producers saying that I had burned an extra track to our CD, just as a back-up in case something went wrong and we needed to fill time, and we decided to play two tracks after the final interview rather than just one. This is a great example of why it’s always better to over-prepare, because if I hadn’t burned that extra track to the CD then I honestly don’t know what we would have done to fill six minutes in our wrap-up at the end of the show. It certainly wouldn’t have been very engaging radio. It felt good to know that my (over-)preparation did actually end up being useful.

Overall, I’m mostly happy with the experience of our first show. We worked well as a team and put together some interesting content that I hope RRR listeners would enjoy. From a personal perspective, I think I’ve now got panel operation down and I’m really keen to get some experience with producing or presenting for our next show.

Learnings:

  • Live radio is scary, but not difficult!
  • In-studio interviews are much easier to handle than pre-records
  • Always be aware of microphone technique when on air
  • Burn extra songs in case you need to fill time
  • No matter how well prepared you are, always expect mistakes and errors and be ready to deal with them
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Assessments, Room With a View

RWAV: Individual Interview

I had plenty of ideas for my RWAV individual interview, but had a lot of trouble finding someone who was available and willing to come in and have a chat with me. I have a feeling that I might have set my sights too high, and attempted to get people who were too prominent/busy to waste their time with a student interviewer, but in the end I was happy that RMIT music industry lecturer Catherine Strong agreed to talk to me about music heritage in Melbourne and the soon-to-be-built Contemporary Music Hall of Fame.

Catherine was a wonderfully generous guest. My subject matter was quite broad, but she gave me 25 minutes of conversation that I was able to narrow down through editing into something focused and succinct. I was also happy that my subject matter would suit RRR if I decided to use it for a future on-air show.

I made sure to make use of Terry Gross’s rules for interviewing, and told Catherine that since our conversation was not being broadcast live she was welcome to stop herself and begin an answer again if needed. She ended up taking advantage of this a few times when she misspoke or couldn’t remember the specific example she was reaching for. As a result I had a great selection of well rehearsed (but still natural sounding) snippets of audio that I was able to string together and cut down into the 10 minute final form.

One thing I made note of for next time is that recording in the RMIT edit suites adds a lot of unwanted hum to the audio, because the suites aren’t perfectly soundproofed. I had to run a noise reduction on the final audio, which ended up being OK but ideally I would record crisp audio to begin with and avoid the need to fix it up at all.

Learnings:

  • Be liberal when contacting potential interviewees, as very few will actually be available and willing to speak to you
  • Take advantage of being at RMIT, which is full of experts who could be interviewed
  • If possible, record interviews either at RRR or in the RMIT on-air studio, as a Zoom recorder in the edit suites results in sub-par audio
  • Use Terry Gross’s ground rules to make your interviewee more comfortable
  • Do as much research as possible before the interview, but try not to use written questions and instead have an informed conversation with your interviewee
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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use: Essay

By auditing my own online media use for a week, I was able to shed light on my habits and make a significant discovery that could allow my creative practice to take advantage of the internet. For this essay, rather than evaluating my online media use as a whole I have chosen instead to explore that discovery, and extrapolate it forward to some logical extensions relevant to media makers like myself.

Perhaps the most powerful affordance of digital media is that it’s network-ready by default. Since the internet is a digital medium, it’s trivially easy to upload artefacts of sound, video or text to the internet, where they can be hosted and distributed around the world with universal accessibility (Siapera 2012, pp. 3-4). By using hypertext to create links and relationships between such media artefacts, practitioners can open up the powerful new dimension of multi-platform storytelling, where the constraints of old media no longer apply (Alexander & Levine 2008, pp. 41-42). Using such techniques, authors can create experiences that are self-directed by the audience and may not necessarily be consumed in the form or order envisioned by the author (Alexander & Levine 2008, p. 47), but which to the audience feels significantly richer, more autonomous and more immersive as a result.

A current example of media makers using such techniques is the S-Town podcast, which released its entire series of seven episodes during the week I was auditing my online media use. Immediately after the series went live the S-Town Facebook page was updated with photos taken by the producers from locations significant to the story, links to further discussion, and other material that allowed listeners to get a fuller picture of the podcast and its characters. This material was not essential to the story, but for audience members who desired a deeper understanding of its central themes the multi-platform component offered a number of ways for them to remain engaged in the story. In my personal experience, while listening to the podcast I was able to hop over to the S-Town Facebook page, to Wikipedia, reddit and other web-based locations to fill in gaps in my knowledge (particularly around clocks, which form a central symbol in S-Town as the main character is an antiquarian horologist). This altered my experience of the podcast in a major way, particularly when compared to other narrative-documentary podcasts that don’t have such strong web presences. As social media becomes further enmeshed into society, this kind of user-directed engagement with media will only continue to increase (Hinton & Hjorth 2013, pp. 2-3).

S-Town was produced by the team that made Serial, a podcast series that made even heavier use of its web presence and social media platforms to tell the story of Adnan Syed, a teenager convicted of a 1999 murder. When each episode of the podcast was published, the Serial website was updated with supporting material like maps, letters, timelines, and real-life evidence from the case, giving listeners a rich tapestry of material to combine into the complete murder-mystery story. Serial was such a runaway success that it has been called the “most popular podcast in the history of the form” (Carr 2014), with its success attributed to the story’s extensive depth and the quality of its reporting.

I have made tentative use of multi-platform storytelling techniques to support my own media practice in the past, though I am yet to embark on any major storytelling projects of my own. In 2016 I made a three-minute short film about my brother, who has kept a collection of dozens of novelty rubber erasers for 30 years. The film contains a number of close-up shots of individual erasers from his collection, and separate to the short film I uploaded extra photographs of his collection to Flickr and embedded the gallery in my blog, allowing my audience to get a closer look at the subject of my film. This is admittedly a very cursory, surface-level experimentation with multi-platform publishing, but it illustrates how using networked media (and free platforms like Vimeo and Flickr) opens up a powerful ecosystem for media makers like me even on a small scale.

Multi-platform storytelling offers exciting possibilities in a number of other disciplines, too. For example, a tourism and travel brand could combine online media like Google Maps, streaming video, photography and podcasting to create an interconnected series of city guides and walking tours that are self-directed, nonlinear and allow travelers to experience a city in a way that best suits their own interests. A team of journalists could take advantage of some of the advances associated with Web 2.0, such as multiple authors and “microcontent” (Alexander & Levine 2008, p. 42), to collaborate on a story that takes an event or incident and unfolds outwards, forming a single whole with multiple entry/exit points and the ability to update the story indefinitely. Museums could use new media to bring new dimensions to their physical collections. Fiction storytellers could experiment with subjectivity and experience in their narrative projects. Educators could use networked media to allow students to learn at their own direction and at their own pace.

There are, of course, significant risks that must be considered when using online media in creative practice. By weaving a work into the fabric of the internet — such as by using existing publishing platforms, or by allowing the audience to drop in and out of the story and complete their own research — the author necessarily loses some control over the experience of consuming the work. In extreme cases, the question of who can lay proper claim to being the “author” of the work could even be called into question. There is also a risk associated with the fact that stability and longevity depend on internet access and hosting being available and affordable in perpetuity. Many early examples of multi-platform storytelling, cited in academic studies and media guides, are now no longer readily accessible on the web. One important example, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated news series The Crossing, was lost when the newspaper that published it went out of business, and the series (which consisted of 33 articles plus supporting photography and video, all presented in a bespoke online interface) was only saved because the author happened to have the series backed up on a DVD (Lafrance 2015).

But assuming the risks can be adequately mitigated, the potential new avenues of expression and creativity enabled by network-connected, multi-platform storytelling far outweigh the potential risks and disadvantages. As a media practitioner I’m excited by the sheer number of opportunities presented to me by new media, even as those opportunities also seem overwhelming.

 

References

Alexander, B. & Levine, A. (2008), ‘Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre’ in Educause Review, 43(6), pp. 40-56.

Carr, D. (2015), ‘‘Serial,’ Podcasting’s First Breakout Hit, Sets Stage for More’, The New York Times [online], <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/media/serial-podcastings-first-breakout-hit-sets-stage-for-more.html>, [accessed 9 April 2017]

Hinton, S. & Hjorth, L. (2013), Understanding Social Media, London: SAGE Publications.

Lafrance, A. (2015), ‘Raiders of the Lost Web’, The Atlantic [online], <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/> [accessed 9 April 2017]

Siapera, E. (2012), Understanding New Media, London: SAGE Publications.

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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use Analysis: Reflection

I need to do a lot of additional research to inform my essay. So far I’ve written a lot about my own experience and made observations about how I might possibly be able to use online media to support my media practice, but I haven’t backed it up with any concrete research or academic material. I think I’ve identified an area that I’m interested in (using online/social media to support creative practice), but I now need to go and find supporting material to push my thinking further.

My documentation is relatively comprehensive (at least for the purpose at hand), and should give me enough material to work with, but even in the areas where my documentation is lacking I have personal history and experience to draw on and fill in any gaps. In my essay I’m not going to discuss the use of online media for personal (passive) reasons, such as mindlessly browsing a Facebook news feed, so those parts of my documentation will be mostly useless to me now. But I’m glad I collected it anyway, if only for me to realise how much unproductive time I spend on social media.

One major thing I still need to do is come up with a mission statement, a purpose for my essay. It could be a question that I set out to answer, or it could be a statement that I set out to prove or disprove… I haven’t really come up with anything yet, but I’m working on it.

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