Category Archives: Workshops

Media 1, Workshops

Week 5 Exercise: Surviving Uni

In our workshop this week we were assigned a group exercise to familiarise ourselves with the Sony MC50 video camera. My group mates Riah and Isobel came up with the structure and concept for the video, based around the theme of “a survival guide to your first six weeks at University”, which we then filmed in and around Building 80.

We tried to go for a more light-hearted, comedic treatment of the subject rather than a straightforward question-answer format, and so we introduced the thumbs-up motif to serve as punctuation for each of our cut-away shots.

We ended up shooting way more footage than we could conceivably use in the finished edit, so I had to cut a lot of the best answers/shots which was disappointing, but overall I’m pretty happy with the result. The narrative ties together nicely when edited, and thanks to Riah’s great first answer I managed to make it clear that the video is about tips for surviving university without needing opening titles or narration.

The only real technical problems we encountered were that the lapel mic’s extension cord connection was a bit dodgy and left some pops and crackles on the audio track, and the automatic white balancing made the green background look different across shots. I should have used the camera’s inbuilt display to view back footage we’d shot and make sure it looked consistent, but we were so conscious of time that we shot everything in one take before moving on. When I use this camera and microphone set-up in the future I’ll make sure to tape the audio connection in place and input technical settings manually.

Another key learning I took from this exercise is to ensure there is ample clear space before and after each shot, because J-cuts are much easier when you have extra material either side of the cut. It ended up being OK in this instance, but in my Project Brief 3 I’ll make sure I keep the camera rolling as long as possible.

I also wish we had recorded more ambient sound to build atmosphere, but since that wasn’t really part of the exercise we didn’t worry too much about it. Overall, I give this exercise a thumbs up.

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Media 1, Workshops

Week 4 Exercise: Favourite Place on Campus

In this week’s Workshop we used the ZOOM H2N audio recorder to make a short audio piece and familiarise ourselves with the equipment and process for editing sound.

We were extremely constrained by time and barely managed to record any sound at all, but I managed to layer what we got into a (simple) piece in which I discuss my favourite place to sit and chill on campus. There are three layers of audio in this piece.

Editing sound is something I’ve done in the past (see my podcast here) so I didn’t learn too much from the editing part of this exercise, but it was good to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the ZOOM recorder for future reference.

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Media 1, Workshops

The Galaxy: a haiku

In this week’s workshop we filmed some static footage around Melbourne for an editing exercise, pairing the footage with a haiku poem. Above is my attempt, titled The Galaxy.

Compiling this footage into a short film was surprisingly fun. I wanted to try to build some sort of narrative from the naturally narrative-free bits and pieces in the collection, if possible, and I think I managed to do that by piecing together the clips in such a way that implies someone travelling to the State Library. It’s not particularly complex, but to be able to build even a simple narrative out of a random collection of static clips shows the power of editing.

A lovely thing to see:
through the paper window’s hole,
the Galaxy.

I chose this haiku because it’s evocative of the sheer size of the galaxy and how, by simply looking up at the night sky, we can see objects that are an incomprehensibly long distance away. We can actually see further than we could ever hope to travel in our lifetimes (or anyone’s lifetime, really). In my film I tried to draw a parallel between the subject of the haiku and the feeling I get when I’m in a library: that there are so many stories and worlds and characters contained within all the books in a library (paper windows) that I could never even get close to reading them all.

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Media 1, Workshops

Media survey

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I was part of a small group of students that went to the State Library and performed a survey of all the pieces of media we could find.

Most of the media we found were, in some way or another, advertising. There were banners and signs on shopfronts, stickers and posters on walls and the ground, branding on clothing, and a whole lot more. Clearly advertising is a giant producer of all the media content we’re exposed to on a daily basis (and probably rivalled only by our own smartphones).

Inside the library there must be hundreds of thousands of books, DVDs, digital files and the like, as well as information posters, pamphlets, video screens, advertisements and more. I think it’s safe to say that I could have counted literally millions of pieces of media in this exercise if I had the time (and the inclination!).

But, happily, on the outside of the library I was actually surprised by how little I could find. I think being a government-funded cultural institution (with a beautiful patch of grass out the front) it contained less media than the other locations surveyed – Melbourne Central, Emporium, and the Bourke Street Mall – which would be jam-packed with advertising and signage over every inch of usable space. Seeing the beautiful stone facade of the State Library was great – until you notice the giant banners of advertising on it.

It was quite eye-opening to realise just how surrounded we are by media every day. Until you actually take a step back and consciously take notice of it all it can be easy to ignore.

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Media 1, Workshops

Thinking caps on

The “six thinking hats” feedback system, developed in the 1980s by psychologist Edward de Bono as an extension of his ideas on parallel thinking, is a way of giving structured feedback in one of six “personas”. By playing one of the six roles, and being forced to provide feedback of a certain type against one’s natural instincts, the feedback process should, theoretically at least, be much more productive and less adversarial.

Today’s workshop saw us present our creative self-portrait elements to each other in small groups, with other members of the group each assuming one of four hats:

Yellow – optimistic, positive, something that works well
Red – immediate gut reaction, emotion
Black – something that doesn’t work
Green – alternatives, new ideas

I’m not particularly happy with what I put together for my creative self-portrait, so presenting it to a group and having to talk about or justify my pieces of media was daunting. But, thanks in part to the hat system – which ensures you receive positive comments as well as negative ones – it ended up being an enjoyable exercise.

One finding that I’ll take away from the process is that too many of the pieces I chose actually say the same things about me, and I could instead have used those pieces as an opportunity to explore other facets of my personality.

As the yellow hat, responsible for giving positive or optimistic feedback, I was able to let my group-mates know how much their self-portraits impressed me (which is true – they were all great). Doling out good vibes is a fun thing to do.

I really valued this exercise as one of the things I want to achieve in this program is to learn to give and receive better feedback. Structured feedback like the six thinking hats offers an abstracted way to provide honest, constructive feedback while separating the feedback system from the creative process.

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Media 1, Workshops

Nowhere Line

The animated documentary short Nowhere Line came up in discussion in the week one workshop – it’s watchable on Vimeo and well worth the 15 minutes.

Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island from Lukas Schrank on Vimeo.

It reminds me of the Oscar-nominated Israeli film Waltz With Bashir for a couple of reasons. First, the two films share similar animation styles (thick outlines, dark shading, block colours), but more importantly they each combine two genres not normally combined: animation and documentary. Nowhere Line is “narrated” by Manus Island detainees who share their story through interviews, which are then represented on-screen by animation.

The stylised, impressionistic rendering of each scene places the viewer firmly within the scene being described without looking like a recreation or dramatisation in the traditional sense, which can often look inauthentic (even The Thin Blue Line, one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made, suffers from overly staged reenactments).

This kind of genre mash-up and remix is something I hope to explore in my own work throughout my degree.

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