Category Archives: Lectorials

Lectorials, Media 1

Studios

Today we were introduced to the Studio system that will define the rest of our participation in the B.Comm (Media) program. Based on what I know of last semester’s Studios this will be an incredible experience, working in medium and large groups on projects throughout the semester. Topics seem to range from highly theoretical / technical subjects to finely focused practical explorations of a single medium.

My main worry is that I’ll probably want to do all of the Studios. When I enrolled in my classes for semester one I had a short list of about 10 electives to choose from and I really agonised over choosing only one to actually enrol in. I even considered turning up to lectures for two or three subjects in the first couple of weeks so I could decide for sure which one I wanted to do.

Obviously this won’t be possible with the Studios, but hopefully over the next five semesters I’ll be able to complete a nice selection of Studios that both appeal to my interests and help to develop my theoretical and practical knowledge.

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Lectorials, Media 1

Medium theory and technological determinism

In today’s Lectorial the concept of medium theory was introduced, as well as the role technology has to play in wider social and cultural development.

Medium theory is the study of particular types of media, and the way they differ (physically, psychologically and culturally) from other types of media. To me it seems related to the idea of media affordances, but on a much broader and more philosophical level. There are three main metaphors that are used to answer the question “what is media?”:

  1. Media as conduit, otherwise known as textual analysis (i.e. media contains codes and messages that can be decoded and analysed)
  2. Media as language (i.e. particular forms of media have a unique language and grammar)
  3. Media as environment (i.e. the analysis of media without regard for content [textual analysis] or grammar [affordances])

Technological determinism is the idea that shifts in society and culture are caused by technological advancements. This theory contrasts with an instrumental approach, which says that a society develops and uses the technology it needs as it needs them.

I can see how technological determinism might be an attractive theory in consideration of the industrial revolution, when advancements in manufacturing, transport and communication revolutionised many aspects of society and brought with them large-scale changes to the way society is organised in a relatively short time (i.e. modernity). But is it still applicable today, where the pace of development has greatly accelerated and is more or less continuous?

I remember before the iPhone came out – the mobile web was still in its infancy (text-only WAP browsers), and apps were basically not a thing. There was a strange year-long period there where you could actually SMS questions to a service and some person in an office somewhere would research the answer for you and send it back. Weird times. Did the introduction of the iPhone, arguably the most significant technological advancement so far this century, cause the rapid improvement of the mobile web, a shift to the app economy, and related developments? Or is it that there was an invisible, unarticulated demand for these things, and the iPhone just happened to be the first device that managed to satisfy that demand? It’s probably an impossible question to answer, which is what makes gauging the validity of technological determinism difficult.

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Lectorials, Media 1

Institutional values

In today’s Lectorial we discussed institutions, and particularly the way that institutions can represent extremely different things to different people. To demonstrate this, we completed a little exercise where we came up with some attributes for a particular institution, for example:

Facebook:

  • What is their relationship to their audience? What is their mode of address? Facebook is a platform that in some ways attempts to be “invisible” (i.e. Facebook is your friendships, not just the platform on which you maintain your friendships). Facebook also uses inclusive, informal language to encourage casual everyday use.
  • What are their core values? Sharing, openness, building social ties and networks.
  • What is their status? Facebook is a trusted Silicon Valley success story, enabling revolutionary forms and levels of communication around the world. But in some circles Facebook is seen as a monolithic overseer selling its user’s personal data to unscrupulous advertisers.
  • How are they more than a business? To many people Facebook is a news source (for some, their only news source), a social gathering place, an indispensable communication tool, etc.. Facebook performs many functions outside their core money-making activity.
  • What forms of regulation constrain their activities? Laws and codes of conduct restricting the use of identifying information (cookies, Do Not Track, etc.) could affect their ability to use targeted advertising. Privacy legislation is the primary way that Facebook would come up against regulatory activity.
  • In what sense are they conduits for flows of power? In localised social groups (e.g. high schools, groups of friends, workplaces, etc.) Facebook either enables or denies certain people power. It is also big enough that it can affect real-world political issues, such a same-sex marriage debates in the United States.
  • What other institutions are they related to, engaged with or aligned with? Facebook owns Instagram, another major social networking website/app. It also maintains relationships with major advertisers, governments and regulators all over the world.

I also completed the exercise for NPR, which is an institution I’m personally interested in and contrasts in many ways to an organisation like Facebook.

NPR:

  • What is their relationship to their audience? What is their mode of address? NPR is primarily a broadcaster – traditional radio stations, plus creating content for syndication and online streaming. As a public broadcaster it retains a certain level of trust as it is less beholden to commercial imperatives than other major networks, and in general it is seen as an authority in the world of news and information exchange.
  • What are their core values? Community, inclusion, education.
  • What is their status? As the major public broadcaster in the American radio sector, NPR is very highly respected. However, it also garners criticism of left-wing bias, and as a (partially) publicly funded organisation it receives periodic accusations of being a waste of taxpayers’ money.
  • How are they more than a business? NPR contributes to the ongoing cultural conversation in the United States, and also exports its ideals and values internationally. NPR is also a training ground for presenters who go onto perform on higher profile platforms.
  • What forms of regulation constrain their activities? Broadcasting laws and regulations constrain.
  • In what sense are they conduits for flows of power? As a mass media broadcaster, NPR’s inclusion or exclusion of particular people/groups/communities from its airwaves gives them great power to influence discourse.
  • What other institutions are they related to, engaged with or aligned with? Partner radio stations, content providers, sponsors, other public radio organisations like PRX and Panoply.
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Lectorials, Media 1

Copyright

I found today’s presentation on copyright to be extremely interesting and valuable – the rules of copyright seem so vague and constantly changing that it was great to hear from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. The most surprising thing I learned from the presentation was that there’s actually a lot more infringement going on than I would have guessed, but most instances of infringement go unchallenged in court. It’s something that we, as media makers, need to be constantly vigilant about.

The example of GIFs in Facebook and on Tumblr got brought up, which is especially interesting because people would use such GIFs on social networking platforms billions of times a day, every single day, and yet Facebook isn’t constantly being served with takedown notices about peoples’ Parks and Recreation GIFs. But since every single rights holder would need to individually challenge Facebook’s legal right to publish those GIFs, at the same time, for any real action to be taken, it will probably never end up in court. I’m glad I’ll be able to post the Tom Haverford “baller time” GIF with impunity into the future.

I don’t usually do this, but since I think the copyright lecture will be relevant to me and my work well into the future, I’m going to basically just copy my notes from today’s class into this blog post, for future reference:

  • Copyright is automatic
  • No requirement to add (c) symbol
  • No registration requirement
  • Ideas are NOT protected by copyright
  • Facts are NOT protected by copyright

Copyright protects material form or expression of an idea (degree of skill and labour required to create), not the idea itself.

Ideas can, however, be confidential. To mark your ownership of an idea, express it in some physical form and then mark your work with a statement: “The information in this document is confidential and must not be used to without first obtaining written consent.”

Potential exceptions to copyright being automatically owned by the work’s creator:

  • Employer ownership
  • Contract or license (can be non-exclusive)
  • Assignment of rights

Moral rights apply to all copyright works, but can be waived:

  1. Right of attribution
  2. Right of false attribution
  3. Right of integrity (deals with honour and reputation – e.g. if someone remixes your work in a way that harms your reputation)

In Australia, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, but different countries have different terms. Factors influencing duration:

  • published/unpublished or made public (even unpublished works are copyright)
  • published anonymously / pseudonymously
  • film made before 1st May 1969

Copyright cannot be renewed in Australia, because there has never been the requirement to register a work for copyright.

Exceptions (when a license is not needed):

  • Fair dealing
    • student research and study (only applies while studying)
    • research or study
    • criticism or review
    • reporting the news
    • parody and satire
    • (public use is not OK)
  • Education
  • Libraries / archives
  • Cultural institutions and museums

For infringement to be considered the following could have been breached:

  • Rights of ownership
  • Substantial part of work (quality not necessarily quantity)
  • Moral rights
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Lectorials, Media 1

In Seth Keen’s Lectorial presentation this week he mentioned that narrative films are generally governed by temporal relations, but in non-narrative film the governing force is often spatial. That is, rather than following a cause-and-effect procession, the various elements of an experimental film can work together to create a “space” in the audience’s mind.

A couple of years ago I read a reddit AMA with some of the crew that work on David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. Attenborough’s films aren’t strictly non-narrative, because they have such prominent narration and they’re generally constructed as a narrative film with characters, settings, etc., but the material they shoot could easily be compiled into an observational documentary in the style of Frederick Wiseman if they so choose.

Anyway, I’m a huge Attenborough fan so I read the entire AMA with glee, but one thing in particular stuck out to me: I discovered that in Attenborough’s films (and most nature documentaries) the sound is recorded entirely separately from the video. So when you see amazing video of a bird imitating human noises, chances are it’s actually a bit of a cheat and they’ve just layered audio of one bird over footage of a different bird.

I’d never really given this a conscious thought before but it makes sense in hindsight, because unless you have an incredibly sensitive directional microphone attached to each camera there’s no way you can record the sound of, say, a lion from 300m away and have it sound as crystal clear as it does in the finished product. I guess you could consider it a kind of foley, in a way… where the foley artist is an animal.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the result is a spatial relationship between all the pieces of material (audio and video), which is put together into a whole by the audience in their minds. This is another example of closure, which was discussed early in the semester.

One of the main things I’m learning in Media 1 so far is that so much of the work in making a text coherent is actually done by the audience. Very strange.

Cheating spatial relations

Aside
Lectorials, Media 1

Elements of story and narrative

In today’s Lectorial we learned the basic building blocks that every story (be it cinema, theatre, literature, etc.) must be built upon.

Narrative, broadly, can be thought of as an intrinsic value of all humanity, a way that we make sense of our surroundings and communicate across cultures through universal experience. When talking specifically about media, narrative has a short list of key elements:

Each of these elements serves a particular purpose in building a narrative. First, a story needs to have an inciting incident and a controlling idea – a point, something that the author is trying to say. Every element of the story must work to prove or demonstrate this controlling idea in some way. Typically this is achieved by challenging it, because there are very ideas that are self-evidently “true” when it comes to creative media, and those that may exist vary across audiences/cultures.

Then characters must populate the narrative – two character types are of particular importance to building narrative: the protagonist/s and antagonist/s. The protagonist is usually the character who drives the action, the one from whose perspective the film is told, or the character who changes the most over the progression of the story. The antagonist, or antagonists, need not be the protagonist’s literal enemy, but their wishes generally lie in opposition to the protagonist.

Once the story is set up and the characters have been introduced, the progression of the story is achieved by use of conflict. Robert McKee (1997) 1 offers three levels of conflict that occur in a story, depicted as concentric circles around the protagonist in order of proximity:

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These elements always operate within the genre of the work, which include wider assumptions and conventions that the audience holds from being previously exposed to works in that genre. For example, the conflict may take two very different forms depending on whether the work is a psychological horror film or a romantic opera.

Though these definitions and guidelines seem quite rigid and inflexible, they seem broad enough that they would encompass the vast majority of many and varied texts in existence (though they are not without their detractors).

  1. McKee, Robert, (1997), ‘The substance of story’ in Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154 ↩
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Lectorials, Media 1

Fundamentals of interview technique

Louise Turley’s practical introduction to the basics of interview technique was incredibly valuable to me. I’ve done some informal interviews before (mostly with bands and musicians) but never really learned about the techniques themselves and why they are employed.

The most important aspects of interviewing can be summed up in “The 5 Ws”: who, what, where, when and why.

  • Who
    • Does your subject have something to say?
    • Are they credible?
    • Can they deliver on camera?
    • Are they good “talent”?
    • Who is my audience?
  • What
    • What are your questions?
    • Research your subject – read about them, speak to others about them, observe them
    • Write your questions – simple, as short as possible, open ended, check for bias, avoid leading questions
    • Practice the interview ahead of time and try to anticipate if your questions will elicit the types of responses you’re hoping for
  • Where
    • Location – home, work, other? Why? Do you need permission?
    • Light – is there enough? Will it change?
    • Sound – background noise, interruptions?
    • Backgrounds – what does it say? Will it change? Avoid artworks you’ll need clearance for
  • When
    • When conducting your interview, brief your subject
    • Clothing – no black, no white, no small stripes, no checks
    • Maintain eye contact
    • Listen – use nods and facial expressions, not verbal noises
    • Be flexible and adaptable depending on your subject’s answers
    • Be respectful and show empathy
    • Stay focused
    • Be quiet – it’s not about you
  • Why
    • Always have a result in mind

I’m glad I learned of these techniques before conducting my interview for Project Brief 3, because I was able to better prepare for the interview and as a result I think I got much more usable footage than I otherwise may have.

Interviewing technique is also part of Alex Blumberg’s 21-lesson Creative Live course Power Your Podcast With Storytelling, which I’ve been meaning to watch. Maybe now’s the perfect time.

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Lectorials, Media 1

Textual analysis in practice

Building on this week’s reading, in our Lectorial we put these concepts into practice by analysing a Brooks Brothers advertisement from GQ magazine. We identified as many individual components as possible and noted their denotative and connotative meanings.

Denotative meaning (first order): a universal, literal interpretation/description of what is depicted

Connotative meaning (second order): a more associative meaning based on personal context and wider social/cultural conventions

Supima-Image1

A reading of the advertisement might identify the following denotative components, along with their more associative connotative meanings:

Denotative Connotative
Bearded, mid-30s man Affluence
Hipster/fashionable style
Flowing, blue shirt with rolled up sleeves, patterned shorts, bare feet Comfort
Holidays/recreation
Boy being thrown into the air, smiling Happy, fun-loving father/son relationship
Adventure
Pool Summer, heat, holidays/recreation
Angle draws focus to the main figures
Resort lounge area with blue/white colour scheme Colour coordination, fashion awareness, aesthetic sensibility
Palm trees Exotic or tropical location
Holidays/recreation

When you look at this scene, very little of our understanding of the situation comes from denotation – there is nothing inherent in the image that definitively states the relationship between the man and boy, why they are in that location, etc. (In fact, they are likely both models with no previous relationship, and are only in that location for the photo shoot.) But through connotation the entire scene is built up in our own minds, as well as all the associations that come with that scene – and, the advertisers probably hope, an aspiration to achieve the same in our own lives by purchasing the product being advertised.

In the advertisement, to the right of the above image sits a panel with four levels of hierarchical copy including a cursive Brooks Brothers logo, a slogan (“the difference you can feel”, with emphasis on the “you”), and product branding. A connotative reading of this panel would identify the cursive logo as a signifier of luxury, trustworthiness and tradition, and the slogan as a signifier of quality, accessibility and affordability.

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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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Lectorials, Media 1, Readings

Michael’s extreme closure

Part of the reading this week, the comic Blood in the Gutter by Scott McCloud, explains that people are very good at filling in the blanks when given partial or incomplete information. For example, if in one image we see a woman riding a bicycle, and then in the next image the bicycle is upturned and the woman is lying on the ground, we can infer that between the two images the woman fell off the bicycle, even if we don’t actually see this part of the scene occurring. This is called closure.

Closure is a really intriguing phenomenon, and when reading McCloud’s piece I was reminded of an incredible example I discovered at the Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago.

The film is called Michael, it’s a relatively obscure Austrian film from 2011 that follows an insurance salesman as he quietly and unassumingly goes about his mundane daily existence. It’s all very boring, but for the fact that he has a 10-year-old boy, Wolfgang, locked in his basement. The relationship between Michael and Wolfgang, on screen at least, is basically parental: they have breakfast together in the morning, Michael goes to work (having locked Wolfgang away), they play musical instruments together at night, watch television, etc.

The film never actually portrays Michael abusing Wolfgang in any way, but that is clearly the subtext of what’s going on. Amazingly, this aspect of the story happens entirely in the mind of the audience. The viewer has to realise and understand what’s happening off screen, and how awful it is, using closure. And because of this, in many ways Michael is a far more disturbing film than if it had shown the abuse on screen.

This is an extreme example, obviously, but it’s interesting how editing can force a viewer to imagine things in their own mind against their will.

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