media communications

I think the most recent podcast that I had listened to was The Ricky Gervais Show with Karl Pilkington.
I remember my ex boyfriend would play it in the car on long drives. Romantic.
Karl would be the butt of every joke and I’d just love the real laughter that Ricky would bust out at the sheer disbelief of the density of his co-host/martyr.

I don’t think I’ve listened to many other podcasts, to tell you the truth.
The sheer thought of making one has confused me a little.

I’ve forced myself to listen to one now on the BBC.
I love the English. I just feel they do comedy so well because they’re often so warped, similar to Australians but then completely different, if that makes sense. Probably not.
Anyway, it’s called The Listening Project and there’s a little girl interviewing her father. She sounds about 8 years old (specific) and she just asked him if he likes mummy better than any of his ex-girlfriends.
Kids are brilliant.

Podcasts have this incredible creative freedom to launch and translate information accumulated in any direction.
The issue I think lies in the information found, the creative efforts of your group and the shared direction – let’s also not forget that there are a tonne of other deadlines that we all respectively have to get done, amidst the podcast flurry.
We opted for a simplistic format to kick things off.

I think now that the podcast has been done (yes, I was late with my blog posts), I liked constructing it all and watching it come to fruition.
Grasping each member of the groups strengths and weaknesses helps to gauage what they can tackle as their parts and then bring it all together and make a podcast pasta.
I think we did a fairly good job for our first try, to be honest.
We had a good laugh too.

I had the most fun tackling the first recording exercise ‘do I have your attention’, forming a narrative, which I believe may have actually been the idea that Ben, one of group members, was hoping the podcast, was hoping our podcast would have become.
In hindsight, could’ve been pretty great but it’s a learning curve that’s only just begun.

We presented our rough cut to Catherine on Thursday – link here.

I really liked the sound clip that Ben prepared.
Having not been able to come up with an idea as a group, Ben took the inititave and threw a recording together, akin to what he had been trying to describe to us a week prior.
We felt that it worked in jest, as those of us in the group weren’t keen on being too serious throughout – Ben had accomplished a happy medium.

Our rough-cut was very rough but it gave the overall idea for how we wanted to present our findings.
It began with Ben, narrating and setting the tone with a little sarcasm, which was later described as arrogance by Catherine.
She suggested that we use it as a means of further developing characters throughout the podcast.
Considering our limited time frame, we found the concept of creating characters for four people to be an additional weight that we didn’t wish to carry. We were aiming for simplicity.
Catherine mentioned that she had not watched the show we were discussing, Game of Thrones.
Having only watched one episode and seeing the stereotypical female roles as mother and exotic female, she was unimpressed and didn’t give the show a second glance.
Which was what a lot of my findings were telling me too – articles in abundance convincing the public that women do in fact like GoT.
Catherine’s reaction to it as being ‘sexist’ was something that we took on board, myself especially as gender was my primary focus on the project.

She went on to say that she liked the overall tone of the clip but she didn’t think that we should poke fun at the audience, as was lightly done in the recording – so we scrapped that but kept the overall theme set by Ben in the beginning; music intro, then narrator, then launch straight into the topics broached.

Overall, the feedback was helpful and allowed us to gain a firmer grip on what we didn’t want, which eventually paved the way for what we should do.

Thanks!

..Continuing on from the one shot takes reflection post previously, I wanted to talk about one shot movies.

Most recently, Russian Ark was a 90 minute film that adopts the single shot technique.
2,000 actors were filmed in 33 rooms with 3 live orchestras in the Hermitage Museum.

Rope, by Alfred Hitchcock is a notable mention. Although it wasn’t entirely filmed in one shot because the cameras could only run for 10 minutes at a time, it does appear to have been shot as such.
I really enjoyed this movie, it built on tension really well, as is the mastery of Hitchcock but it was oddly the least favorite of his movies.

Birdman, also shot to appear as though it was filmed over the course of a single day, received an academy aware for its efforts.

I really don’t have an qualms with whether a movie was genuinely filmed as a single shot, or if it was able to mimic the technique through editing – both are really masterful in their own right in keeping with continuity.

Do you think it matters?

My brother provided the basis of the story for our one shot filming exercise for the week 6 workshop.
We had a really great group, we all gelled and brought some of our own spice to the mix.

Our story was prompted by the theme ‘misunderstandings’, using inspiration from my brother who that morning used a play on words with me, replacing ‘can’t’ to mean something uncouth.

The story played out with a couple of friends talking in the corridoors discussing work they had to finish and one of them mishearing what the other said.
That friend then proceeds to continue about her day, encountering friends along the way, telling them what her friend called her – a trail of gossip.

We filmed the shot next to the old Melbourne jail, behind building 9, wanting to be indoors for the most important verbal cue and then heading outside.
Ideas kept coming to us as we worked through our movements, trying to coordinate one meeting of friends to the other.
Lines were missed, laughs were had and we eventually finished the take and went upstairs to edit.

We hurriedly added bleep noises and some fades to neaten the video up and presented.
We enjoyed the process a lot and I think we were all a little excited to see the end result.

It was unfortunate that we didn’t have the best sound quality because of microphone positioning but it was a great first effort and we can take that knowledge into a next project; learning from mistakes made.

Overall, it was interesting to observe who took on which roles; Jemma managed and coordinated things quite well, which was great because that’s always a running issue among group work, and I know it to be a weakness of mine.

Find the link attached here