Author: emilygillespie

Melbourne. Media @ RMIT. 19yrs.

Reflecting on ‘Itchy Feet’

July 31, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

Semester 2 has well and truly begun with our first Radio’s New Wave Studio project; a peer portrait, done and dusted. I had the pleasure of working with Emily Wade who I find incredibly chilled out and easy to chat to. We started this assignment by sitting outside a pub with a beer (Stone&Wood get in ma belleh) and a Zoom H2n each, and simply questioned each other one at a time in more of a conversational manner rather than a straight up interview. Looking back on the recordings, I found I had a fair amount of stimulus on Emily’s experiences living around various places in Australia and decided from there to make that my focus point.

I found the quality of some of the recordings were somewhat marred by the traffic going by us. However, I feel the traffic noise was appropriate for the subject being spoken about by Emily – travelling. What better way to soundtrack travel than with traffic? Having said that, if I were to do it again I may have recorded in a quiet room and layered in the traffic to allow more room to experiment with sound and creativity.

I managed to utilise layers in the ambient sound effects of rainforest sounds and seagull cries to emphasise the point that Emily’s favourite place is the Border Ranges, where the rainforest meets the sea. I also used layering the names of the places she’s been in the beginning, as well as when she talks about her hectic time in Sydney.

A factor I found particularly difficult with this project was simply learning a new editing program from scratch. I used Reaper which I had never used before, so the process of editing was slow in the beginning, but Emily and I met up and managed to get the hang of Reaper faster by working together. Hopefully in the next project, since I’ll have the basics of Reaper almost mastered, I’ll be able to do some more complex sound editing techniques and effects.

Overall though, it’s been a blast working with Emily and I’m relatively happy with the outcome of my piece on her.

“Itchy Feet” – Emily Wade

July 31, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

My first attempt at radio documentary: a peer’s portrait.
I had the pleasure of being teamed up with Emily Wade, who has been to a fair few places around Australia.

H is for HOLIDAYS

June 5, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

This first semester on university has been a blast. I’ve learnt so much not only about media but also about myself. With Introduction to Cinema and Sound Design accompanying the media one course this semester, I’ve learnt much about how media is absolutely everywhere. I’ve become a lot more aware of how media impacts my life and it’s importance as well as technical aspects of manipulating sound and, of course, I’ve learnt that I’ll never again be able to just sit down and relax watching a film without analysing every single little tiny detail about it (thanks cinema). I’ve most recently learnt that collaborative work doesn’t have to be painful and horrible like I thought it was in high school.
I’ve found over this semester that my most effective way of learning is by doing. I found more information stuck with me throughout experiential learning or through discussion rather than through listening to lectures.

I suppose I could combine what I found most challenging about the course with what I’ve discovered about my own creative practice and say that the part I found most challenging was the fact that it’s all creative and I find myself going in and out of creative mindsets. I once read somewhere that creativity is like a fruit tree, it blooms only on certain seasons. It’s very hard to force the fruit production all year round. And I guess I could relate because my creative moods come and go where this course asks for creativity in virtually every assessment piece. So that’s what I found the most difficult.

A definite struggle I have had this semester (which is purely and admittedly my own fault) is procrastination. I leave things to the absolute last minute, and not just homework and assessments, I’m talking about everything I do and it’s a character trait that I’m working on eliminating for the future. Procrastination and laziness is the whole reason this blog doesn’t have quite as many posts as it probably should so I’m going to work on that.

Here’s 5 posts that I think were this blogs highlights:

1. Food for thought on hyper and deep attention

2. E is for Emily loves sound

3. Week 5’s collaboration readings

4. Collaborative Brainstorming

5. Dreaded Research

As a final cap off for the semester, here’s my ‘learning graph’. It’s backwards but you get the gist of it.

Key:

Red: How much have I learnt about making media objects/stories?

Purple: What is my ability to work independently in unfamiliar ways or with new systems and tools?

Orange: How much do I understand and think critically and creatively about what I make?

Brown: What is my understanding of the role/value of the blog?

Adios and happy holidays 🙂

G is For Group Work Reflection

June 5, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

Since my reflection is a good 700 odd words I’m just going to slot it below

F is For Freedom

June 5, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

This week marks the end of the first semester so here’s our project 4 media artefact; Festival Spotlight.
Enjoy 🙂

E is for Emily Loves Sound

May 31, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

I could talk about the Texts side of week 7’s lectorial but I am so much more invested and interested in sound so I’m going to have a little spiel on that right now.
Sound is a beautiful thing, it’s everywhere, you cannot escape it and for someone like me who hates ‘silence’, comfort can be found in sound. I previously did a post vis-a-vie week 2’s lectorial on silence and John Cage’s 4’33” (check it out here) and wrote what it’s all about etc. It’s made pretty clear by that piece that there is no such thing as silence. Sound is so invasive it will always find a way to be heard. I’ve always found it so interesting that there are so many sounds reaching our ears everyday that we don’t even register. In my sound design class we learnt just how much effort and attention to detail the sound production team must take into account when designing anything. Here is a homework piece we did on re-creating the sounds for every single noise in a Mario gameplay; a task that was both fun and incredibly tedious.

All in all, I dare say, I think I find sound the most interesting aspect of most forms of media.

D is for Dreaded Research

May 28, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

Week 6’s lectorial was mostly based around the idea of using media for research. It included a talk from the librarian on how to utilise the RMIT online library as well as how to find primary, reliable sources which can prove to be difficult at times. I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post my intense dislike for research tasks and writing up bibliographies; particularly annotated bibliographies (ew), so it was a good clump of useful information on how to minimise research time and find what’s needed as painlessly as possible.
Though, in regards to using media as a research tool, I think I can safely say that we are learning new things everyday through different forms of media. Even if it is unconsciously, our minds are constantly doing little bits of research on what we perceive throughout the day. We watch the news and learn something new about politics or another country. We go to a restaurant and learn what foods are in a dish. We read a book and maybe pick up new words. Media never ceases to amaze me with it’s glaringly subtle influence on our lives.

C is for Catchup Time

May 28, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

This past few weeks have had my head rolling around work, uni and personal life. It’s a busy new life that I am STILL getting accustomed to and I can now see why it’s a kind of unspoken fact that most people who decide to take a gap year between high school and university never actually end up going to uni. I totally lost my study groove for a bit there.
It’s come to my attention (or maybe it was always to my attention and I was just stubbornly ignoring it) that I am unbelievably far behind on keeping this blog updated with my course work. So consider this post the beginning of the mother of all catchups; starting with week 4’s lectorial of media integrating theory and practice.

Media brings the world together in all ways – this linking to week 2’s lectorial on how media is everywhere. It has become the pinnicle source of research, entertainment, communication, EVERYTHING. I am noticing how large a part of our lives it is becoming, particularly in the last couple of weeks after Zac and I moved into our own place. It’s a beautiful place, however at the moment we have no internet and no cables to allow our TVs to receive digital free to air. As a result I feel completely out of the loop. My phone is out of data already, I can’t see what people are up to on facebook, can’t send or view friends pointless snapchats of what I’m doing, couldn’t even watch the State of Origin last night (an absolute tragedy for a Queenslander). On top of this, uni work is proving to be difficult to complete and it’s all got me thinking how grateful I am to be growing up in such an age of technology and how bloody annoying it is to not have that technology. This was more of a rant post about how much I miss the internet at home but still, it all links with the general consensus of this course; media brings the world together.

B is for Bring the Noise

May 14, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

So we pretty much decided on a sound-related media artefact for this group project. A podcast/broadcast piece that essentially markets the marketing of film festivals hitting Melbourne in the month of May.
We have our sass-filled scripts and basic interview questions ready to go. We plan on interviewing a myriad of people of all ages on their opinions and views on film festivals – in fact I’m calling my grandma tonight and I am going to hard out interrogate her on the subject. Even though she’s probably never been to one in her whole life but that’s besides the point. Rounded research people!

Georgina’s festival focus is the St. Kilda Film Festival, Chrys’s festival is the Human Rights Film Festival and mine is the Audi German Film Festival. That’s one indie, one message driven and one rather large, culture-fuelled festival. A good mix, I feel. Next is starting to record and throw together some kind of first draft. As Mario would say: “Here’s we GOO!”