Category: Media Lectorial

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 🙂

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!”

Collaborative Brainstorming

April 30, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

Today we began the process of research and brainstorming an idea for our media artefact on Industries of Media and we have LIFT OFF. I’m very happy with how effectively Chrys, Georgina and myself have come up with a specific topic and focus questions to begin our research around. We have come up with the subject matter of Film Festivals and their surrounding social, cultural, political and economic features and factors. Here’s a little low quality snap of our butchers paper and such to prove it.

Coming in to this assignment I was afraid it was going to be the most boring thing on the planet (particularly since I generally detest any kind of research task), however I honestly think we have found a topic that I’d be happy to look into. I mean who doesn’t love a good film festival?

The Making of MADDISON

April 23, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

Project Brief 3: MADDISON

I decided to do Project Brief 3 on my older sister, Maddison Gillespie. I chose my sister because she has such strong views and so much passion for so many things in her life, including herself. With the audio, I focused explicitly on her mental health (depression), her incredibly impulsive nature and her views on herself, her freedom and how she is as an individual. These spoken explanations were teamed up with passing images of her other personal loves and interests such as her party life and care-free attitude; represented through the three photos of her mooning the camera on different occasions, as well as three of her own pieces of art. Intermixed with all of this were samples of text posts from her own blog on which she writes her every thought and opinion; the title screen of this film is the title of her blog. Footage of the beach around where she lives (another passionate love of hers) is used as a linking element between each feature. The found footage is symbolic of Maddison’s firm stances on feminism through the use of the iconic women cartoon characters, Betty Boop, Olive Oil and Wonder Woman.
A feature that I think worked well was the natural, unscripted sounding voice over. We recorded this by simply having a half hour long conversation like we would any other day, only this time I was questioning her on how she considered herself. I believe that by doing this instead of having a formal interview, the nature of her recordings come across much more raw.

What I struggled most with in this assignment was choosing a feature about Maddison to focus on as I find her so interesting in so many ways. It is for this reason (my indecisiveness on what to focus wholeheartedly on) I feel my planning was not adequate, making the whole project difficult to string together coherently. Maybe I tried to include too many features of her in too short a time, not going into enough detail about any?
Also, choosing someone who lives too far away to simply go to proved to be a bit of an issue. The audio was a pain to record as, at the time, I was not tech-savvy with the ZoomH2 and had the voice gain up too high and our connection kept on cutting out, causing the audio to cut out.
Having said that, I feel I compromised adequately and efficiently with these problems in order to make an overall some-what effective piece.

MADDISON

April 23, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

I focused the Project Brief 3 assessment on my older sister, Maddison. A person who I have looked up to all my life and who never ceases to interest me.
Two minutes is not nearly long enough to do her beautiful mind justice, but I have done my best so enjoy. 🙂

Week 6 Lectorial

April 16, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

In week 6 we focused on collaboration- a topic I dare say the majority of students of all ages from primary school to university generally loathe the idea of.
We’ve all had those group work experiences when the workload is one sided or someone hasn’t come through on their side of the work and we can all agree it’s the WORST.
Since a lot of our work from here on out will be collaborative, this week’s focus was on what makes a good team and how to avoid those collaboration mishaps.
The key to a successful team comes down to this:

Clear Objectives
Good Communication
Consistency
Respect
Support
Responsibility
Equitability

Pretty simple right?