Month: May 2017

Kyla Brettle ran the radio show this week in our lectorial.
Having worked in radio production, she was a sound guru.

You can always get a sense of someone who works in a particular discipline (sometimes).
It was clear after Kyla’s introduction that she worked in radio.
She was eloquent, succinct and because of the nature of her work, audio documentaries and voice production and background in music, she was well and truly ‘in tune’.

Kyla showed us various recordings, each resonated in their own way, all very personal.
A women recounted a traumatic experience, a recording of the development of the same voice as a baby, through to a young adult ‘discovering boys’, sound bytes of ‘um’s’ organised to create a motif.
One of the more visceral of her examples was the dismembering of a chicken – gross but interesting.

She named the types of shots that she creates to bring a visual element to her audio work; spot and tracking shots, transitions, trail-offs,  reverbs, the speed in which sound is captured or manipulated and mixed, the way in which she organises her atmosphere in order to evoke feelings in her listeners.

Kyla informed us all that Brian was unable to make our session today because of their unwell child.
Hope your little bubba feels better soon.

This week was an introduction to podcasts for me.
Oddly so, as my mum is a radio producer and I’ve spent my entire life around the teledubs, the studio’s, watching her on location, working at her various voice-over jobs etc.. I’ve just known sound but I don’t really listen to the radio, nor have I sought out podcasts.
For me, I’ve struggled to listen to something without visuals.
I’m a visual person.
I crave it.
It conjures a feeling for me and in that development it creates music for me.
Probably sounds a little lame but for me, it’s my way.

I like to take video snippets and overlay music that the clip evokes, or create an effect that is completely different, jarring, whatever.
A friend of mine introduced me to podcasts by Ricky Gervais a few years ago.
He would discuss and ridicule a friend of his with Stephen Merchant
I find them rather amusing and have re-visited them from time to time.
Before that, I had used Pandora. Mostly for comedy.
Walking down the street with headphones in and chuckling to myself over a politically incorrect joke categorises me as the ‘strange girl who laughs’ on my street.
I was actually labelled that way once by the local store owner one day as I went in for a sourdough.

I’ve also noticed that after the portrait interviews, I’ve been a little more attentive to sound.
As my grandparents have been ageing, I’ve asked if I could record them. Met with confusion, ‘what for?’
Old school Austrian’s, wretchedly modest – their lives are worth documenting, I tell them.
Furrowed brows and the waving of their hands, brushing their accomplishments aside, I’m not deterred.
I’ll be back in a couple weeks with my recorder.

Colour me inspired.

We watched a few video portraits this week in class; was great to see the content that others had decided to discuss.
The subjects ranged from gender fluidity to doctorates in biology, farming and pop culture.
What people chose to discuss was interesting and I paid close attention to sound. Most were really great in terms of quality and I later found out in the lecture that I had obviously missed out on a workshop that covered the technical aspects to creating a clean sound pattern, minimal noise and interference.

I had a giggle to myself at the thought of my film being played and hearing the jarring effects that I’d created.
Maybe I should have written that it was deliberate..
Next time.

Groups were assigned and aforementioned fears of group work were quashed as the people in my circle were actually reasonable people and we all took to figuring out what we wanted to discuss.
Media. What is it?
How does it grab our attention?
We swashed the word around, taking to a brainstorm and settled on television and more specifically, Game of Thrones.
How does Game of Thrones captivate us?
What is it about the show that engages us and keeps our attention?

We divided the topics surrounding the aspects that come together that create a piece of media and decided to take off and find what information we could.
Our game plan was to find what we could the earlier we could, in the off-chance that we couldn’t find any information and needed to re-think things.

So far so good!

This week’s lectorial focused on what it means to work collaboratively.

Just type in ‘group work meme’ into Google‘s search bar and click on images…

No one is a stranger to group work; if you’ve lived, you’ve been involved in something collaborative.
Life is a collaborative effort.
You’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t learn to work with others.
Learning to talk to people, relaying your thoughts and findings, then working together in harmony is definitely a dificult task.

Working as a photographer is more or less a solitary job.
That is, when you’re developing concepts, banging your head on the wall trying to differentiate yourself from others, banging other people’s heads against walls when they ‘steal’ your concepts (and do them better than you) scanning Pinterest, editing photos etc..
Otherwise it’s a very sociable gig, depending on your subject matter of course but mostly if you want to get better, you’re going to need to work with people at some point.
For me, that meant networking.
I did that over various platforms; Instagram, Facebook, I even used a Tinder account to find people to pose for me (it’s actually really useful).
I attended photography meets and met the people in the industry in person, or I contacted people whom I admired and asked if I could shadow them, spend time seeing how they worked – whatever your jam.
They had a team of people around them, artists in their own right; make-up, hair, styling, designers.. and the photographer has to be able to coordinate them all.
If the photog has an assistant, then they need to know how to coordinate too – so, the more opportunities I took, the easier it became to gel with others, especially models/subjects.

Learning how to delicately and diplomatically deal with different people is something that comes through practice and exposure – try and try to increase your chances of succeeding.
Research your area of focus, learn the lingo and tattoo the information to your brain and recall it when you’re going for a job, meeting someone new or just because you’re solely setting yourself up for future pub trivia.
Just make like a sponge and absorb.

Now, I’m not going to sit back and pretend like I’m the Great Kahuna of collaboration – no.
I can talk to people and I can and do enjoy working in (certain) groups but if you refer to aforementioned Google search, you’ll have to beg my pardon when I say that group work at uni usually sucks.
Signing contracts and alerting everyone in the group at the beginning of an assignment of everything that is expected of them will only lay on the guilt at the time they’ve let you down but it changes nothing in the grand scheme.
Additionally, some people have actually been born without ‘guilt’ and FUN FACT, I’ve been grouped together with five of these anomalies in the past.
I’d also be a liar if I said that I have my shit together, ’cause I don’t half the time.
I’ve been trying to fake a personality disorder to my therapist for years trying to score a ‘learning disorder’ freebie for school to help with projects like this but it turns out she’s genuinely good at her job and I’ve been diagnosed with being a straight out liar. What’ya know!
Not really.
Or have I?
.. we’ll never know.

So, collaboration.
I’m all for it.
– I read somewhere ‘Collaboration is the future’ – a girl I know started a 3D printing jewellery company and this was her tag line. She oddly only works alone, so that part confused me but hey, maybe she has multiple personality disorder and she counts all of those as seperate entities.

I don’t even have a therapist but this spiel seems to be centred around mental disorders. It’s the flavour of the evening it seems.
The above statement also proves that I am in fact a liar.
We’ve come full circle.
I can only hope this got a smirk out of whoever reads this.

In conclusion, however you choose to roll, there’s team effort embedded somewhere.