Category Archives: Assessments

Assessments, They Film People Don't They

She Drives

Elizabeth became a taxi driver in the 1980s, Marz started driving for Uber in the 2010s. Though separated by a generation, these two women share more than just a job.

Synposis: When Elizabeth starting driving her taxi in 1982, she was told it wasn’t the job for a woman. Over the next three decades she proved her critics wrong, built a fleet of female drivers and changed the industry from the inside. Marz began driving for Uber to make some extra cash. Though she expected it to be a challenge, she quickly discovered that there is more to being a driver than just driving.

Produced, Directed & Edited By: Alice Fairweather, Anna Miers, Bradley Dixon, Izzi Hally & Zitni Putriadi
Cinematography: Anna Miers, Izzi Hally & Zitni Putriadi
Supervising Producer: Rohan Spong

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Assessments, They Film People Don't They

TFPDT interview folio

In January, 2011, Heather arrived in Egypt for a month-long holiday with friends. Half way through her stay, on January 25, thousands of people descended on Tahrir Square and demanded political change, eventually leading to the toppling of Hosni Mubarak and what we now call the Egyptian revolution.

Here are three edits of my interview with Heather. I’ve written more about the interview process in a separate post.

In this edit I kept everything Heather said in chronological order, and took out anything irrelevant or unnecessary to the main thrust of the story. This resulted in a huge number of cuts in my timeline, and I struggled to find enough cutaways and archival material to cover them all.

This is the edit that most closely resembles the conversation as we had it, but it’s also very plain and not at all dynamic. It accurately reflects how she now talks about her experiences in Egypt, with a mixture of humour and modesty that doesn’t do her story any favours but does help her come across as a friendly and likeable person. I decided to leave in the anecdote about setting up an Abbey Road photo shoot in front of riot police because it’s a good story (and has an accompanying photo), but it undercuts any sense of danger or tension in the story. I also decided to take out the story about being approached by the van, partly for time and partly because it didn’t seem to match up with the tone of this edit.

Heather had a habit of idly looking out the window while she was talking, so her eyeline kept moving to the left of screen instead of into the empty space of the frame, so half way through the interview I had to move myself further to the right and ask her to try to look at me when she was speaking. I think this embarrassed her (for “doing it wrong”, even though I assured her it was my fault for not setting up the interview properly), and as a result she speaks really quietly from when she starts to talk about going to Pete’s aunt’s house for dinner. This was a nightmare to edit around, because I felt it was necessary to set up that part of the story (to give a sense of time/place), but it’s so obviously different from all the speech around it that it sticks out like a sore thumb and draws attention to the fact that it’s from a later part of the conversation.

I also left a few jump cuts in the interview, but only at points where she’s moving to a new conversation or topic from what came before. I was hoping that this would feel natural (and signal to the audience a move to a new topic) but I’m not sure it really works as I’d hoped it would.

To cut down the amount of setting up required, I begin this edit with an explanatory title. Just having 15 seconds of titles saved me almost a minute of interview time I could spend elsewhere, so I tried to take advantage of that and go deeper into the incident with the van.

This edit has more (and longer) sequences that are allowed to play through without any cuts, so it feels more like Heather is telling her story and I’m not piecing it together in the edit. It feels more “real” and accurate than the first cut, because there are fewer obvious places where I’ve used B-roll cutaways to hide an edit (which signals to an audience that words have been rearranged). Seeing Heather speak for more extended stretches I think also helps identify with her, because you see her face a lot more in this cut than the first one. There are also more “ums”, “ahs” and laughs in this one, which encourages identification and a more organic feel.

I decided to use music underneath the section where she talks about being approached by the van. I think this subtly changes the tone enough to make it clear that Heather found the incident scary, even though she’s talking about it with humour in the present. Finding the right song was difficult (and in fact I selected this song mainly because it works for the third edit), but for a royalty free song it ticks the right boxes in terms of mood. I struggle with audio mixing, so I’m worried that the music might be too low in the mix, but any louder and it starts to make Heather more difficult to hear (particularly with headphones).

My working title for this was the “in media res” cut. After hearing Heather in the interview talk about being approached by the van, I immediately wondered if it would be possible to start the video there, and then later go back and explain the context of the Egyptian revolution.

This is by far the most dynamic of the three edits, with extensive manipulation of cinematic style (prominent music, more incendiary looking archival footage), but I also think it’s fair to say it’s the most dishonest. The tone in which Heather’s words are translated to the screen is very different to the tone she used when speaking them, and I used style choices to change her story into something more in line with what I was expecting when I asked to interview her about her experiences in Egypt. This edit suits my needs as a filmmaker, but doesn’t reflect Heather’s retelling of her own story. (But then again, I think an argument could be made that this edit more accurately reflects Heather’s actual experience, regardless of how modestly she speaks about it now.)

The fact that you don’t see Heather’s face until almost 30 seconds into the video undermines relatability and identification, but in its place this edit offers a more visceral, subjective experience. I also didn’t colour grade this cut, so the colour temperature of the interview is slightly cooler than the previous two versions.

The introduction works quite well, as does the first transition into Heather speaking about the context of why she was in Cairo, but I don’t think it quite works when transitioning back to the incident with the van to finish off that part of the story. Had Heather spoken more in a present-tense, first-person point of view I think I could have pulled it off, but I don’t think it’s the right fit for the material I had.

This cut uses some B-roll I shot with Heather walking down the street at night (I was hoping for an association with walking down a dark street), but it’s not really relevant enough to look suitable. I should have shot her walking down a deserted back street and asked her to act a bit more like it was a reenactment (perhaps even wait until a van drove past), but she was very uncomfortable even with the amount of filming I was already asking her to do, so I didn’t want to push my luck.

Credits

Photographs supplied by Heather Scott, used with permission.

Photograph of the Egyptian Museum by Bs0u10e01 (CC 3.0 BY) <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/The_Egyptian_Museum.jpg>

The Egyptian Revolution: In February 2011, millions of Egyptians came together to overthrow their leader, Hosni Mubarak [online]. Four Corners (ABC1 Melbourne); Time: 20:33; Broadcast Date: Monday, 19th March 2012; Duration: 44 min., 3 sec. Availability: <https://search-informit-com-au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=TEV20121207316;res=TVNEWS> [cited 23 Mar 18]

Mo Rooneh – “2,3,4” (CC 4.0 BY-SA) http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mo_Rooneh/MaCHiNe/03_234

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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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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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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use Analysis: Evaluation

 

My online media use for the week can be grouped into two broad categorisations: university work, and personal communication/entertainment. Within these categories there are different types of engagement (including most significantly whether I am consuming or creating material), and drilling down even further shows that I often engage with different online media platforms in the same way or for the same ultimate purpose.

My university work included a lot of communication on Facebook and in group messages. The most significant engagement we had with online media was using Soundcloud to publish our demo recording. We were able to use Soundcloud internally within our group to make notes and write annotations on the show itself (using the platform’s timestamped comments), and since it’s public we could also show the demo to others in our class or in the general public if we wish. We submitted the Soundcloud link to our studio leader for assessment too, so it has been tied into every aspect of our work from beginning to end. As we’re all so physically dispersed and can’t often meet up in person, this enabled a level of collaboration that would never have been possible otherwise.

In my personal use of online media, I noted that I often use it for unproductive uses: passive consumption of material on my Facebook news feed, browsing through people’s Instagram photos, etc. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I did notice that the scale of productive/unproductive use is heavily skewed in one direction, at least for the week I was observing my use. Had I not just come back from holiday in Japan, I wouldn’t have had dozens of photographs to publish on my own social media, and may not have actually used online media for creation at all this week.

I think one of the main take-aways from this exercise is that while I haven’t done much creation or media making myself this week, I’ve been fortunate to have seen how others are using online media in a way that supports their work or creative expression, and which I might be able to take advantage of myself. On Day 6 of my data collection the S-Town podcast was released, and I spent about 15 minutes that day poring over the S-Town Facebook page (and have since devoured photos and other material posted to the S-Town subreddit). There are photos of the “characters” in the podcast, pictures and maps of the real-life locations, and discussions around the meaning and interpretation of the podcast. This made S-Town feel almost like an exercise in multi-platform storytelling, where you don’t get the complete picture just from listening to the audio and must search out other materials to round out the experience and fill in the blanks. I can imagine using techniques like these myself if I ever release a serious podcast series, or explore the possibilities of photojournalism, or any number of other ways I can use online media to augment my media practice. Now that I’m more aware of my own online media use, I can start to identify opportunities and take advantage of the affordances of online media.

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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use Analysis: Evidence

I’ve spent the last week documenting my online media use, examining how I use the internet and reflecting on what it brings to my life and work. I enumerated the platforms I used, what I used each of them for, and how many times I accessed them. There were some things I left out: if I listed every time I sent a photo of a cute puppy to my girlfriend, for example, I would quickly run out of room for anything else.

But what my documentation did find is that, at least this week, the vast majority of my online media use has been consumption rather than creation. As someone who dabbles in media making regularly (photography, writing, podcasting, etc.) I usually use the internet for publishing purposes much more often than I did this week. Rarely a week goes by without me posting some photos to Instagram, or writing film reviews on Letterboxd, but this week I browsed Instagram and Letterboxd while barely posting to them at all. Part of the reason for this is that I had a couple of university assessments due this week, so I had less time to spend on my own extracurricular media making. How I use the internet for creation, and why I did less of that this week than I normally do, is something for me to consider and evaluate further.

Early in the week I started off meticulously documenting the platforms I used as I was using them, collating everything into a post at the end of each day, but as the week went on I slacked off a little and just took stock of what I’d used at the end of each day without doing any real-time documentation. It greatly helped that most social media platforms now have a stream or log of your activity, which meant that I could just look through my activity log and get an idea of how much I’d been using each platform, rather than writing anything down myself. I suspect if someone had observed me full-time and noted down what I was doing, rather than relying on the strength of my own recollection, I would have collected much more information than I did. But as it is, I think what I’ve done gives me a good, well-rounded idea of my online media habits.

 

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