Sal’s research unveiled a gem in the sand. It was Niklas Luhmann’s analogy about when an artefact becomes a bonafide medium. He likened it to a footprint embossed in the sand, where, without the embossed message that someone has walked here, the sand is just, well… sand. This will be the foundation for our group collaboration.
Minutes on Paper
José van Dijck and Thomas Poell’s paper, Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media (2015), holds significant pertinence for me as it is a central theme to one of our team’s P4 mission statements. Aside from the many notions that have been discussed in our group’s correspondence about our assigned topic, mediums, Marshall MsLuhan’s The Media is the Message being among many, José van Dijck and Thomas Poell’s discussion on evolving platforms in media bares semblance to one of our own themes of adapting to media change.
Alterations in societal thinking, be them good or bad, must be acknowledged.
It is admirable how the BBC stepped back from an editorial logic to embrace the inexorable progression of contemporary society to make public the thoughts of those fervent enough to contribute through Twitter and the likes but, was this social model masked with company propriety? According to José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, the filtering of realtime tweets and comments in programs like the BBC’s Up For Hire, may have been biassed, tipping the scale toward the beliefs of the production company officials and ostensibly the ‘button pressers’ in the control room. Such imbalances were investigated, ironed out through policy and placed into a new mantra. But if the BBC had rejected this, they would have undoubtably lost an integral social voice and gained a new place in broadcast purgatory.
For our team, and again I really want to get a name like Team Antimatter or something like that, we seemed to gravitate to this notion of adapting to change.
28 April 2005 – Lectorial – week 8
Dan spoke about causality (cause and effect), narrative and non-narrative in a story.
The Princess Bride, Gone Girl and an old satirical Warner Brothers adaptation of Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood were used to communicate these points.
Our group exercise was to determine the narrative and non-narrative elements in a short film by Daniel Askill entitled We Have Decided Not to Die. For me this film was teeming with narrative though not formulated in a conventional way. There were three narratives running concurrently which were all concluded to an end, represented with day-to-day artifacts residing in a surreal mise-en-scene. The three characters in this piece were seemingly escaping from an impending demise; possibly, drugs, addiction or suicide. The figures were eventually freed from the chaotic and confining forces.
I believe that, if a project is void of narrative, it is no longer ‘art’ but ‘arts and crafts’. Daniel Askill’s piece was most definitely far from the latter, rather a poignant and thought provoking work of art.
We Have Decided Not to Die by Daniel Askill (2006)
We’re getting closer to establishing our P4 premise and I am really impressed with the ideas that have been workshopped so far. Sal and Tim worked like a machine today coming up with some great concepts.
Our project statement is yet to come though our goals are clear; to produce a high quality product in a medium that neither of us have explored… that’s in a nutshell.
We spoke a lot about the history of our set task, mediums, and frequently referenced Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan who coined the notion of the medium as the message.
Our team (we really need a name) created a shared folder in Google Drive and entered minutes, ideas, meeting times and meeting places that work best for us. We will need to convene outside the classroom though, should we not be able to attend these meetings for whatever reason, team (insert name) agreed that Skype would be our go to form for beating the drum. Aptly, the media that we may choose to communicate our ideas through will most certainly become the message.
Stay tuned!
Sal’s aesthetic mind map creation.
Hazel Ocskó and Benedict Kazlauskas in All War is Deception (2013)
After reading the reading by Robert McKee, I was inspired to bring my focus back to my first theatre production. I had received much positive feedback about the story that I was telling however, there were criticisms that, most of which, were centered around the story’s development.
Forced to adhere to an encroaching deadline, I had to fast track the preproduction process and move things to the stage as soon as I could. Despite each character being thoroughly developed and explored, there were still gaps for the audience; I ascertained this from surveying those in the know, some audience members and the performers themselves.
I guess the reason I keep banging on about my play is that, I want to rewrite it and apply all that I’ve learned from Robert McKee, Lajos N. Egri, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Gilles Deleuze and bring these characters back to life. Because the majority of the play’s development was centred on character, I, and some of the performers, feel that we have become friends with our creations. I have empathy and sympathy for each character as they represent a part of us.
I believe that McKee’s idea of the switching protagonists could be applied, also, Bordwell and Thompson’s notion of establishing a primary narrator.
So, just to offer a synopsis in a nutshell; it is a tragedy where a box of toys come to life within in the mind a young boy, there is a box ballerina and 3 toy soldiers, each of which have their own character traits. The toys world is set in the time of the Second World War and the ballerina ends up being gunned down before the third soldier can profess his love, this is paralleled by the boys story whose dysfunctional family is falling apart. The protagonist model as it stands goes, A) ballerina B) young boy C) Soldier3. Long story short, it’s confusing… there is no one to root for. Should this production be revisited, the protagonist model with need to be strengthened by simplification, perhaps it begins with the ballerina until it is superseded by the boy.
Jasmine had us consider soundscapes and how our mind prioritises different sounds in order of their importance and relevance to us. We categorised the modes of listening into figure, ground and field. The figure sound is perceived as the primary sound source and it is brought to the forefront of our attention because it is either the loudest noise or most poignant. The ground sound would be the sounds that are resonant, though, are not as important. Then there is the field sound which is audible, but only through actively seeking to observe it.
This was contextualised by the presentation of the photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc and the child survivors of a horrendous napalm attack during the Vietnam War. It was photographed by Nick Ut and entitled The Terror of War.
We were asked to categorise the sounds in this shot, and for me they were;
Figure – The sounds of the children screaming in terror, one can almost hear their crying.
Ground – Would be the sound of the flames, the pops of gunfire and perhaps the yelling of the soldiers.
Field – I imagined as the loading of the rifles, the tiny feet on the road and sound of the wind pushing the smoke to the right of frame.
The Terror of War by Nick Ut
A sound designer may choose to manipulate sounds in order to emulate this human prioritisation. With the use of reverb, a listener may get the sense that the sound has been captured in a large room, likewise, the sound of a whisper brought to the foreground (figure), may thrust the sense of intimacy upon the listener by the use of amplification.
On a theatre production that I produced the sound for in 2013, I had to start a piece with the sound of a child whispering which began as the figure sound initially until, the hum of a war plane grew louder and louder until it dominated the soundscape. This was achieved by the use of various automation techniques on the software program Protools. The plane sounds were sourced from archival files on Freesounds.org.
Working with sounds on Protools.
Either faked or lost in translation, the truth conveyed by the media will always be in question. Media outlets with an underlying agenda may bias a topic in a way that serves to their specific ethos, likewise, different languages can have an expansive vocabulary of words to describe the same thing. Structuralism standardises or aggregates the language of how to critique.
Being employed in a workplace which harbours a myriad of muti-disaplined and multi-cultured workers, we are constantly inventing new ways to communicate ideas as thoroughly and succinctly as possible.
2. G.Branston & R.Stafford, ‘Approaching Media Texts’ (Ch.1) in The Media Student’s Book. London: Routledge, 2010.
After the screening of our P3 Briefs, we were asked to critique our peer’s work.
I remarked on Alex’s warm and honest film Bits and Piece (A Portrait of Zoe) and suggested that the topic of autism, a fleeting comment made in the film about Zoe’s brother, be explored further. Having a cousin with the disease, I know too well that it is something that is often misrepresented and in order to quell the stigma toward those with autism, more stories need to be told about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt26oqeSW7M
http://www.mediafactory.org.au/alexander-angliss-wilson/
The criticism that I received about my piece was that my subject mightn’t appreciate an edit that displays an imperfection in his dancing. As I non dancer, I was initially oblivious to this but have now taken this on board and will certainly consider this when working with dancers in future.
Moving on from the P3 discussions, we were assigned our groups for the P4 Brief. I’m excited to work with 2 legends, Sally and Tim, both of which had made memorable portraits in the past and both are obviously creative. Furthermore, as a group, we’re all mad about audio.
I’m very much looking forward to fleshing out the idea that we came up in class!
Our guest speaker Amy Saunders reiterated some important tips on how we can utilise the library website. Amy suggested some meta data tactics that can help refine a web search; for example, the use of the asterisk after the beginnings of a word like ‘narrate’, the search will reveal all words that incorporate ‘narrate’ within a larger extension, some examples could be, narrative, narrator, narration and the likes. Likewise, a question mark ‘?’ can be used as an ‘and/or’ if you were looking for a two word topic… and with two word topics in mind, you will need quotation makes ‘””‘ to group the two words together to form a singular meaning. As mundane as all this sounds, I have returned to a new state of digital syntax zen that I am eager to put into practice on further research.
We switched to the subject of collaboration which was presented by Rachel covering points like consistency, respect, support, responsibility, fairness, trust, autonomy and clarity. It was a highly encouraging motivation talk on what to expect for future projects.
The word ‘trust’ resonated with me the most. Any project that I have walked away from and said to my self, “Hey that went well and… whoop whoop I had fun!”, was conducted in an environment of like minded people sharing the same the vision with an underlying faith in each others ethos.
Filmmakers working at an intermediate level often overlook audio, preferring to focus more on the visual aspect of the mise-en-scene.
In class we explored sound, chiefly, the use of sound recording devices and their application. We played around with the H2 Zoom Recorder which is a good unit to start with as it is compact, simple and delivers good sound quality at a high resolution; it can produce wav. files which are considered to be the industry standard in digital audio collection.
As I normally work with similar devices, the technical side of this wasn’t new to me; however, it is always good to be made aware of new sonic surroundings. I’ve established that the exterior of the RMIT campus is not a good place to record as it abuts several busy roads and the accumulative sound of trams, cars, trucks and students make for one gigantic hum. Compounding this issue, is the hard glass and concrete surfaces that bounce the sound around making it hard to get a clean recording.
Whenever I’m able to, I record audio in my home office, I have more control over how the sound waves behave as I’ve applied numerous sound baffles and bass traps. To economise, I sometimes use my surfboard cover to diffuse the sound.