Category: Media Practical

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 🙂

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.

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?

ZoomH2s Are Pretty Great

April 28, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

This is a throwback post from week 6 that I just never got around to posting.
…But better late than never eh?

In week 6 we had a little play around with the ZoomH2 sound recorders as it was a requirement to use them in project brief 3. Here’s an insight into the stuff we got up to recording.

Props to Jamie for putting together the video 🙂
Overall, most of them were relatively useful with just a couple here and there that were too loud, too soft, too much background noise, etc, etc, etc. We got the hang of it as we practiced.

So I Guess This Is Feedback

April 25, 2015 / emilygillespie / 0 Comments

After screening all of our projects one after the other as you would in a film festival, we were put into groups to give each other feedback. I was put with the wonderful Georgina and Chrys, so here’s their feedback from me.

Georgina: (click here to view it yo)

This is a straight up beautiful piece. It’s clear, to the point and obviously well planned out. I loved the archive footage of brain scans teamed up with the news report voice over to initially introduce the subject of MS. I think this clinical view of it was well contrasted with the family-effected side with the footage of the house and home and the candid shot of her catching you filming her. The only criticism I have is purely technical and it’s that some parts of the audio were a tad louder than the others and didn’t properly fade in/out. But I know I have the same problem in mine and we all know audio is a heinous bitch. Overall, I thought it was a lovely piece!

Chrys: (clicky click to viewy view)

I am in awe at how well put together this piece is. I love how the interview is in close quarters and being filmed with a hand held camera, it gives the piece a more comfortable and intimate feeling. What I loved even more though, was the archive footage of raunchy, sexualised women juxtaposing the actual subject of the film being about asexuality – awesome. The only criticism I have is perhaps having some kind of music or sound play during the ending credits just to finalise the film (I’m clearly reaching here).
Basically, I think it’s a fantastic piece of work!

Clearly, giving feedback is just another thing I need to work on.

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.