Feedback on our Roughcuts

Today in class we got to reveal our 1-min rough cut of our audio piece. We had people working in professional audio related fields to come and listen to our work and give us advices. I just finished the edit of the intro to our radio show the night before so i was very nervous and sleep deprived. I felt like our rough cut was way too rough SO not ready to be judged on but it was such a huge help. Some of the advices we received were to

• Mix up different voices into the public interview sector
• Try to control the use of radio sound effects
• Adding more depth to the sound by adding spot sounds
• Keep up the hype by creating various tones

They said it was a really fun and interesting piece (from what i remember although i could be wrong they could have said it was horrible) They liked the way the structure of ours followed a real radio talk show very closely. Although it was just the intro that they heard they gave us plenty ideas what we could incorporate in the next few minutes. It was comforting to know that we were on the right track and that the editing was not too overwhelmingly noisy.

We also got to listened to the other groups who were doing a similar topic as us ‘social media’ and theirs was very narrative based. It followed a linear structure of narrative. If ours was kind of a mash of different sounds jumping in here and there theirs was very orderly. They really focused on the quality of the sound effect and each words that was being spoken which was really nice. The most memorable thing from their rough cut was their keyboard spot sound. It was the typing of a computer keyboard and it just instantly made me concentrate and seemed like i could almost see them.

It’s amazing how many different ways people can go about with same topics or themes. We all think differently and execute in our own creative manner.

*Unfortunately i had trouble exporting that 1-min rough cut that i showed to those guys and kept working on it until i realised that it was no longer 1-min long and a rough cut so we are thinking of just uploading the raw footage of our interviewing voices for our rough cut.

Our group consisted of three girls. Girl Power! We initially thought about social media and celebrity culture when first received the topic ‘attention’. We brainstormed and settled on an idea really quick. We worked on the collaborative contract on the spot and already planned out next group meeting. It went oh so smoothly! well at the beginning at least..

Our topic was on how attention on social media impacts our lives. We were going to focus on two main case studies Kim Kardashian who is considered to be a ‘traditional celebrity’ and Danielle Bregoli the cash me outside how bad day girl, a ‘micro celebrity’. During the process of research and writing out my annotated bibliography which i really struggled with (because i was so not familiar with evaluating a secondary text), I was intrigued by the idea of micro celebrities who are essentially created by the attention on social media they receive. I thought it was perfect for this assignment as it portrays how big of an impact social media has on this generation that there are ordinary people who are becoming extraordinarily popular into micro celebrities by just being themselves like Danielle Brigoli on Dr. Phils. Although some times those things are staged and most of the Instagram models we know solely dedicate their time and money into that one perfect picture to gain that ‘instafame’, we overlook those and are just fascinated by what we see at that moment and we like it (literally) which relates to hyper attention in a way.

Micro celebrities are made by us, social media users because we give them attention and that is what they make money off of and puts them on the list of ‘popular’ but they don’t necessarily have paparazzis following them around or live in huge mansions. They live their ordinary lives except they have a specific range of audience and fans on Youtube or Instagram who follow ,watch and admire them for who they are whether it is their looks, or their eccentric character trades. I thought it would be fun to create a micro celebrity of our own and put her voice and character into our audio piece. So we decided to incorporate an interview with our fake micro celebrity ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ into our very one radio talkshow called the ‘GiGi and Chlo’s Talko Show’.

We had the idea of making a radio talk show from the very get go but the contents that we wanted to fill it with were formed on the way. Obviously we thought we needed a snappy name and intro for the radio show which we did by just putting together our nick names (Although nobody ever calls me Chlo..) Gigi and Chlo to make it sound more stylish and interesting. Ofcourse since we are an Australian radioshow and we talk in it, ‘talk show’ which Nat came up with, seemed very appropriate and friendly. We decided to open up with a public interview where we asked the public some general social media related questions and testing them on their knowledge of celebrity news. Then we recorded a discussion piece with social media guru Nat about the relation of the millennial these days and their excessive use of social media effecting everyday lives causing privacy issues and furthermore.

That day as a group we recorded the intro, the discussion and the outro of the talkshow and this was before we decided to bring in our fake micro celebrity ‘Elizabeth Taylor’. We promised to meet the next week and work on the rest but a problem occurred the whole discussion piece with our social media guru was unusable as every single word spoken in it glitched. So we had to re record but due to the absence of our group member we had to go another way which is when we thought of bringing Elizabeth aka Ellie to life. It  was quite easy to come up with a micro celebrity who became famous over a night; Youtube was the perfect platform for find those who craved or just happened to be instantly popular. We researched Youtube for interviews of them we looked mostly on the Ellenshow and gathered the most typical questions and responses and implemented them. Although it was hard to work only with two members (we had to play multiple roles) i think the outcome turned out to be better.

In terms of editing the most challenging part was to keep up the hype of the talkshow because we weren’t professional journalists or radio hosts, our enthusiasm weren’t exactly going through the roof. We tried..We really tried. Anyways in order to achieve that vibrant tone of an everyday afternoon radio show we packed it in with radio sweepers and spot sounds. We tried to balance out the amount of sound effects to create a rhythm and just left them out in places we thought were unnecessary. I think we definitely could have improved more on our script and incorporated more of our academic research into it but i guess we missed that because we were trying to set up a very casual tone. I also found group work quite difficult when one of your group members just disappear out of sight, out of touch but have learnt to become more flexible in terms of coming up with alternatives and overcoming the situation by just refreshing my mind and editing faster.

Television, streaming, and audience fragmentation /Ramon Lobato

TV in Australia by the numbers

TV is no longer broadcast medium exclusively

Hours of broadcast TV viewing pre day 2.7

Hours of online video viewing per day 0.5

Devices per household 6.4

Households subscribing Netflix (%) 25%

TV in Australia

Go back 40years (4) networks only contact for watching TV 1997 broadcast 5 paytV (20) broadcast (3) pay tv (150)

The online Tv ecology

Catchup – TVnetworks of Australia to extend their advertising and offering to try to hook people back into the idea of linear tv. Residual media system(view,

Subscription video on demand SVOD Netflix, Stan, Hayu, fetch tv, IPTV, fetch tv

Transactional Video on demand TVOD rent or buy individual content Itunes

Advertiser Video on demand AVOD Youtube

Informal: popcorn time, Utorrent

Strong connection between history of tv, the nation and the state Is there still a thing called mass audience

Personalisation

Case study – Netflix

-World’s largest SVOD service

-125,000,000 hours of viewing per day

-Operates in 190+ countries

-100million subscribers globally

-US$41bil market cap; US$6.7bil revenue in 2015

-Headquarters in Los Gatos, California

Broadcast tv:

Over the airwaves, schedule provides opportunities to target consumers capacity constraints 84hours of prime time, flow, Advertising model ad revenues shares the kind of programs they make, mass markets, reliant on hits, sports, news, events, distraction more and more about news sports reality

Netflix:

Over the top/ internet-distributed, curated library, On-demand, no capacity constraints, subscription model, Niche markets/personilisation, less reliant on hits, adult drama, comedy, movies, immersion binge viewing large amounts of quality drama

structural and industrial factors

Goes into specific genres such as sci-fi specialising in niche genres opening up possibilities of intercultural more global consumption

Global Netflix Tracking the global roll-out of an internet TV platform

PB3: Interview with Erica Lee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RETaq8WhnYQ

Title: Erica Lee

Erica Lee, Born in Korea raised in New Zealand, now working as a lawyer here in Melbourne. Just became her number one fangirl after interviewing her. Once you watch this you will be too. But sorry you’ll have to be number 2.

https://youtu.be/bz8hjMJXAJs

Timeline

The first step of choosing a subject for the interview was quite difficult as my family’s all back in Darwin and i wasn’t sure if interviewing my friends was going to be interesting enough but i knew that it would be much more successful with someone i am close with and know well than a stranger.

When i finally thought of Erica i thought she’d be perfect for this interview as i knew  that she came to Australia as an immigrant and now she works as a lawyer. I have always had so much respect for her drive and professionalism. I was so happy that she agreed to it then she had some very exciting news a week later when she found out that she was pregnant which was spectacular but meant that she had to be very careful not to overwork herself with anything.

Catering to her availability held back the filming a little bit but because everything was planned quite  thoroughly it went down really well. Before starting the interview, I briefly explained what kind of questions there were going to be and how the tone of the interview was going to be very casual and that i wanted her to repeat my questions in her answers. It was filmed at my apartment living room area with the white wall as the back ground, we chatted a little with some tea to ease up any tension which i think worked    beautifully. She was very confident in speaking to the camera and all of her answers were genuine which was exactly all i hoped for. The only problem during the interview would have been that she talked much more than the amount of footage i needed, which at the time of the interview wasn’t a problem at all.  It was actually so fun to listen to, but when it came to editing her long answers made it extremely difficult to cut down into one solid sentence.

Another issue would have been that i had no clue what kind of camera angle worked the best in regards to the lighting,the sound and the kind of aesthetics i visioned. Hence i filmed many random shots from various angles and experimented with what i thought would turn out to be the most visually attractive. However in post production when i came to check the footages i was quite disappointed as 85%of my cut away shots were shaky and out of focus. The hand held shots for the office scenes should have been on a tripod. Biggest mistake i made for this project but i had just enough footages taken to  pick out usable parts. I have learnt that i crucially need to improve my filming techniques.

Overall, Nether less the hardship in trimming down the answers, by organising the interview into 4parts  i managed to give the interview order and flow, and with the indecent footages i tried my best picking the most usable ones and pacing them accordingly to the music which turned out to be quite rhythmic and vibrant.

About fandom. We had learnt all about fandom in our tutorial. The pros and the cons, I guess i only looked at the pros for fandom. I just thought the more fans there are it would be better for whoever or whatever subject as it means that more people like and obsess over something means that they are willing to pay for their needs and entertainment. For me i have been a slave to Netflix ever since i made an account. All the shows I’ve come across are great but my favourite is definitely the Gilmore girls. Some of the signs i personally came across that prove how much of a mad fan i am are

• I know the opening song almost word by word and sing along to it whenever it comes on and i even plan it to sing it for my best friends wedding.
• I steal their style i love what they wear and i have actually once googled Rory’s yellow school backpack which has unfortunately discontinued sales.
• I spend hours and hours watching it. I finished a whole season in one seating and that time we ran out of all our internet datas in a week or so.
• I want to name my future daughter Lorelai. I think it’s really pretty.
• I sympathise with the characters way too much. When theres an annoying character i hate on them really badly.

Theres so much more but these are all i can think of for now. I’m thinking of deleting Netflix for a while as it’s getting to the point where i might fail uni because i  spending too much time on it…

Ok our church went camping during the Easter break and the place we went was up in the mountains well not really but super far away from the city there weren’t even any network connection. I had a really good time but in the back of my head i had the interview in mind since my subject was only available during the weekends and because of the camp we got back on the coming Monday, so the date was set on the saturday after which was about 1and a half weeks before the due date and i felt like i was already behind compared to the others. It just meant i had to plan every single detail of the interview starting from the exact location i wanted my subject sitting, what kind of shots i wanted and of course the interview questions. Roughly i wanted the interview to be about her life story of a successful immigrant which meant i had to write good questions that could draw that kind of sentiment out of her. I really hoped she didn’t get sick during the camp as she is pregnant and the early stages of pregnancies are quite dangerous which is also why i only had one day to shoot everything with her. Everything aside i’m thankful that she even accepted to be interviewed in the first place so i’m not complaining. 🙂

Oh and our church has a media team that i am in and as a media team member i have been making all the ads for the camp and it was really rewarding to see so many people attend whether it was from watching the ad or not haha. To top it off LTE, a hypothetical band that does comedy, music and acting explicitly within our church which i’m also apart of made a parody rap music video to promote the camp performed the song live and did a mini photo shoot there. This was one of the photos.

This week we went out in a group of 4 to practise our interviewing skills and getting used to the video camera. We took turns being the interviewee and recording. Our question was “What do you need to survive university?” My answer was laptop, pens and notepads. How boring but i couldn’t think of anything on the spot at that moment but now when i think about it i would say food, good shoes and a good old afternoon nap. Still not exciting but i guess its more profound. I found out from this exercise that sometimes you can’t always get a good answer out of your interviewees, which is a bit risky but i think that can be handled through the interviewer’s good question making and a bit of ice breaking. Personally i was really awkward on camera and kind of froze when questioned so i learn a lesson that no matter what the story is how interesting the interviewee might be, to get the goody out of them you gotta make sure they are comfortable and relaxed during the interview.

‘Ghost in the shell’ originally a Japanese animation very recently has come out in the cinemas. My roommate and i went to see it with high expectations as it was one of the movies where it already seemed good before even watching it because of all the hype. We talked about how the fans of the original animation were deeply disappointed by the casting as they all expected a Japanese girl or at least some one Asian but unexpectedly Scarlett Johanson was casted to be the main character ‘Major’ aka ‘Tomoko.’ I think it was fairly reasonable since the film was targeting audience internationally and they needed someone who were world wide famous not only in Asia but in Western countries as well. Although i also think that it would have been nice to see the story in its very authentic form which i believe might have been even more successful. Anyhow looking at the key elements of a story

• Controlling idea
• Charactere
• Conflict (completing goals)
• Structure (progression)
• Character change/growth

I can safely say that the narrative of the Ghost in the shell was very strongly constructed as all of those points above were prominent but for some reason i found it a bit too predictable and boring…