BAM! Justice in Diversity, my group’s final project for The Art of Persuasion, is finished at last. It was definitely a challenging final week, but I’m pretty happy with the results. A lot changed in the last week, as Ajeet’s computer troubles meant that he couldn’t animate the panels any more, which meant that the job fell to me. In exchange, Ajeet and Aravindha handled the sound mix and the final export and submission, whilst I concentrating on making some god damn speech bubbles fly around the screen.

But this project was very rewarding in how it built my familiarity with Adobe programs, mostly Photoshop and Premiere. I’ve had my fair share of technical troubles, but at the same time we were able to create some cool results such as the above comic book cover, which I’m pretty proud of.

All in all, this subject was pretty cool. As I wrote down at the start, it opened me up to the wide world of documentary, and these projects brought a variety of challenges that have helped me improve my craft and the way I work. I would’ve liked to have done a bit more in each class aside from look at class work every single time, and having to work with students from a different year level was another kind of challenge. But, at the end of the day, I enjoyed this course and don’t regret choosing it. Thanks Liam!

A post from 30 May 2015:

It’s the final stretch to the end of the semester and frankly, things are intense. My group missed the rough cut deadline for our final project last week which was a pretty big letdown and, honestly, it wasn’t that surprising. It took us a fair amount of time to get any sort of traction and see any sort of progress, and that was bound to catch up with us later down the track.

Even the pre-production phase (deciding on the concept, the script, the delegation of roles, workflow etc.) took like two or three more weeks than it should have. Disagreements about what we wanted to say with the project and how we were going to say it hampered us while other groups were goin full steam ahead with production.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t happy to be working on the project. The concept was great and it was something we all felt was interesting and also a topic we wanted to explore. The concept had a lot of strength, but we knew it was a lot of work. Planning out the story, writing a script, gathering comic book images, cutting out characters, constructing backgrounds…all that in itself is a huge task, and that’s just the prep work. I knew bringing everything together into the format of comic book pages was going to be a massively time consuming job, so early on I suggested to change the way our roles worked. Instead of one person writing the script, one person putting the pages together and one person animating, we ended up splitting the task of putting the pages together equally between the three of us: two scenes each.

The process of constructing the pages, whilst arduous and at times tedious and frustrating, was actually pretty fun and satisfying, especially once you finished a page and got to zoom out on Photoshop and see everything come together. Plus, I felt my familiarity with Photoshop increase tenfold. The only things that soured the experience were the stresses of deadlines and technical difficulties, as always, as well as the realities of group work.

It was probably the underestimation of the time it would take to make pages and animate them that caused us to miss the rough cut screening. A task like this isn’t something you can throw together the night before, as my group learned. It sucks, and it’s a mistake I hope doesn’t happen again when it comes time to submit the final cut.

Another Media 5 post from April 20 2015:

So I just showed the rough cut for the first documentary project this semester. For this project I’ve teamed up with Ajeet, and we’re in the process of creating two very different documentaries. As has happened with most groups in the studio, we started out collaborating on both films, but gradually delegated and diverged so that we’d handle one documentary each. The one I’m handling is a simple topic: the awkward silence on trains. It basically consists of footage recorded on board trains, observing the absolute lack of sound and conversation between strangers.

The shooting process was simple enough, yet brought with it its own set of challenges. I was only recording from the camera of my iPhone, which allowed me to be as covert as possible, since the obvious presence of a camera wouldn’t go down so well if I was pointing it in the faces of strangers. Still, I had to be careful with it. As soon as I started looking down at the phone screen and looked at what it was recording, or tried to adjust the angle, it was an instant give-away that I was doing more than scrolling on Facebook. I tipped off a few commuters, and that made for an even awkwarder silence.

The interesting and debatable thing about this whole project was how uncomfortable I felt as the recorder. In our readings there’s a lot of talk about how the presence of a camera inevitably affects those in front of it, but we’ve got to remember it affects whoever’s behind it too. I felt like I was, and I definitely was, intruding on these commuters’ privacy without their permission by recording them without notifying them. But the justification for this was that it was for a documentary trying to highlight the nature of the wider public, and not to highlight or zone in on any particular individual. Is it still wrong to go ahead with it? It’s debatable.

Another strange point that I picked up during this project was something that someone brought up during the presenting of the rough cut. They had noticed that the cut of the documentary featured almost exclusively male commuters. There were hardly any shots that had females as the focus. I don’t think I noticed this during filming or editing, but once it was pointed out it was impossible to ignore. Was there some sort of unconscious bias or sexism at play here, that influenced me either when I was choosing who to record, or which shots to include in the cut? It’s strange, but now that I think about it, it’s possible that I did feel a notch less creepier filming guys than I did girls, and maybe that’s a product of the ideology and attitudes permeated by society today. Should I feel more at ease filming males than females? Is it because I’m a guy? Is it because somewhere, deep inside, there is still the notion that females are more vulnerable and thus off limits compared to males?

Things to ponder.

YAY for retroactive blogging!

All semester I haven’t been able to access this old blog because I forgot the password and I was too lazy to have it reset, so I’ve just been writing down posts on the Notes in my iPhone. But now, with a few hours left till the deadline, I guess it’s about time I finally get the damn things online.

Anyway, here is my first post, from April 10 2015:

The Art of Persuasion: Impressions, Reasons, etc.

It’s been about a month into the semester and this new studio-based system for the media course. So far I”d say it’s going well, at least better than some of my previous courses. I’m not entirely sure why I chose this studio. I was never a big documentary buff, and I’ve never been really that invested in politics or social justice. It may have something to do with me getting only a P for Film TV 2, a course about documentary, and wanting to make up for the mediocre mark. One of the main reasons for that result last year was that I took a back seat in regards to group work. While the rest of my group were great and were totally on top of things, I was content to just sit back and cruise along. The group did fine despite my little input, but I still should’ve made the effort to contribute more. As a result, this year I’ve been trying to take the initiative again and be more organised in terms of collaborative work.

But I think the main reason I took up this studio might run a little deeper. So far throughout the Media program there’s always been a little dilemma at the back of my mind: I don’t think I want to be making fiction films for a living. I love being a part of the creative process, but a life of film making doesn’t seem like it’ll fit me well. I think one thing I’m after is a more clear and direct purpose to work towards for each project. This is one of the reasons I also took up Creative Advertising as an elective as well as choosing this studio on political documentary. There is an overt message and meaning you want to convey every time, whether it be to sell a product or  make a political statement, as opposed to the ambiguity that sometimes comes with fiction film making. This notion sits better with me, and I hope it stays like that.

As for the course itself, so far it’s been interesting, especially as I hadn’t watched much documentary beforehand. Seeing the breadth and variety of the form has definitely opened me up and made me more aware to the possibilities it brings.