This week has been all about the assignment. I have been watching many, many tutorials on how to use Audition so hopefully I know (at least roughly) what I’m doing when the time comes to start properly editing.

I have also been scouring the corners of Youtube to find Vlogs relevant to our project. There are thousands of celebrity gossip mini channels that are set up like proper news room. But what amazed me was that they all look legit, even though there can’t possibly be that many channels about the same thing that are equally successful.

It’s these kind of channels that amaze me when it comes to the different forms of attention we have looked at. Because you somehow find yourself addicted to them. I will sit there and watch one for information, and it is so painful to watch because I find everything so cringeworthy, and to be honest I don’t care at all about what celebrities are up to. And yet I caught myself watching multiple, hating every bit of it… and yet I would still watch…
Maybe there is something to be said regarding their quick headlines and flashy news stories that is both repulsive and addictive, or maybe it’s jus the human need and uncontrollable interest in the Hollywood life that keeps these channels running.
Regardless of the factors, and as much as I hate to admit it, they’ve got my attention.

One of the best channels I found during this research was ‘Hollywood Now’. Here is the link to the channel. http://https://www.youtube.com/user/HollywoodNOW
I’d definitely recommend a visit to see how these pointless channels stay up and running, but be warned… You may be there a while.

This semester a subject of mine was Pop Culture, during this subject we learnt about how mass media takes over the world and how we are (essentially) being brainwashed by every single thing we partake in. I mean, there are advertisements everywhere you look!
I was reminded of this during this week’s reading. That companies are corporate soul-suckers that do everything they can for you money.
But then… they’re not.

I would love to take this degree into advertising myself, which means that I will become that person looking for the best place to advertise. And… the school system is genius. (I mean it’s obviously bad because it brainwashes the kids who are too young to see through the charm of well delivered marketing). But, it’s also brilliant. These people have found a way to get a win-win (to a degree) situation. The school gets funding which means the children get a better education, and the companies get life-long loyalty from a very young age!

Another key point I got out of this reading was the idea of directing attention. This, coupled with the focus of attention in Project Brief 4 really brings out the key idea of who get’s attention and why.
I think the form of attention presented in the initial story is the unavoidable kind, the way that each company has just spread their marketing all over a compulsory space makes it impossible to ignore. Which goes back to my above point… the marketing is genius.

Today, was the final class (wow has that come around fast)! I didn’t actually realise this until the end… but of course it’s the final class!

To celebrate, we had special guests in to give us feedback  on our rough-cuts. Alright, I’ll be honest… my group didn’t exactly have our rough-cut down. But we DID go and interview a few people when we met up during the week. While we knew it wasn’t exactly our final product, it was really good to get some tips!
We found out that we needed to be waaay more specific with our questions, and ask less people the more nitty-gritty stuff. We ended up re-doing the whole skeleton of our piece based on the feedback (hopefully for the better, but then – that’s the point of feedback isn’t it? To change for the better.)
I think after we really mapped out exactly what we were going to do, and how we were going to do it (after we’d heard what to change and what not to change), the project became a lot less daunting. We each left with our own jobs for our own segments to do before we meet back on Monday.  (Goodness me, we’re an efficient group… Monday?)

I also really liked to be able to hear what another group was doing for their project. I mean, we’re all given the same project and that same inspiration word (attention) and I always find it so fascinating the different way’s people take and angle their work. The group we listened to were talking about Game of Thrones. While I had zero idea of where they were taking it, it thought it was great!

I really think it was a great last class. A way for us to do a final reconnect and review of our ideas, and receive professional feedback on them, and then go forth, into the world (earlier than usual #win) and finish our final piece.

During this workshop we got to dabble with audio. I however have never worked with Audition at all, so before I could even begin looking at how to edit the audio we filmed in our groups I had to watch some serious tutorials. I’m still struggling a bit with it, but getting there!

It took a little bit of editing, but as we had really planned out what we wanted the sound to… sound like, it was easy to place everything once it was all cut.

During this assessment I learnt that while in a video you can just cut different angles to make the edits flow, you can’t do that with audio. You have to have a consistent background noise to work with.

I also learnt that the placement of different sounds is important, and changes the entire scene. I realise that these are the things that were gone over in our lecture, and I mean… It’s obvious. Of course, sound is different to video! But still, as I always find: you can’t learn everything by having someone tell it to you. Unfortunately… you’ve got to experience it.

This workshop we learnt how to use the small recording devices we will hopefully use during the recording of our projects. We interviewed in our groups where someone’s favourite place to get a coffee on campus was. While we were still inside the classroom with minimal resources, we tried to make it sounds as though someone was swirling their coffee and give some sort of locational context to the piece. In hind-sight, a coffee swirl doesn’t exactly mimic that of a 1L drink bottle… I think this piece was a great starting point in regards to editing and sound placement though. While I was editing this is was kind of a “Pin the tail on the Donkey” kind of deal. Less in the sense that I was physically blind when placing the sounds, but more that I was creatively blind – I had never edited just audio before and the best place to put the swirling sound to make the most sense wasn’t obvious.

I think there are definitely things to work on in this, but I don’t think not the worst first effort ever either.

This week we had a guest lecturer, Kyla Brettle. I thought she was really good because she brought some of her material to the lecture which gave us such a good insight into what could be considered ‘real world’ material (mostly because they weren’t uni-set projects).

There was one that was very cool. It was a mixed sound that sounded like everything was underwater. She then went through all of the sounds she had mixed in and I found it really opened my eyes to they way that sounds can merge together (again in a real-life context).

She gave us a huge array of tips, which I think are obvious – but only once you hear them. The tips were mainly just pointing out the different lessons she had learnt along her way (for example; ‘save drafts’ and ‘use more than one sound channel’). However, I think it is lesson’s like these that are extremely good to hear. Learning from other people’s mistakes is an extremely underrated task. I know for myself especially, I have to make a conscious effort to do this, especially when it seems so obvious. It is only when I make the mistake myself that I TRULY learn what I should have avoided…

Secondly, her 000 Ambulance recording is very powerful. It was only the other day that my family and I were walking to the theatre and we saw a homeless man collapse. My Mum is a nurse and she stopped to check him out, and almost immediately told my Dad to call the Ambulance. My mum kept telling my Dad what to say, as he had never had to call one before.

However, in regards to Media, I think what makes it most powerful is the combination of music and silence. In one of Kyla’s tips she points out how hearing music is just as important as not hearing it, and I think that is really highlighted by her recording.

The reading set this week “Did Media Literacy Backfire?” By Danah Boyd raises a lot of interesting ideas. It explains how as a society (particularly American, but I think there are elements of the discussion in the whole Western World) now question everything they read and hear, and as a result we are segregating ourselves from each other and moving towards tribalism. In the way that people will now google information about possible illness symptoms that they are and trust a general online forum, instead of the Family Doctor as it was in the ‘olden days’.

Boyd talks about how ‘Fake News’ spreads around the internet, and suggests that it is mostly educated people sharing it as fake news and telling everyone how appalled they are that it’s spreading around the internet.

Now this is a point that really clicked. I have seen this in action and it’s only when it’s pointed out do you realise how ‘everywhere’ it is. My feed on Facebook is always filled with Fake News, and more often than not it’s shared by a someone I am friends with talking about how ridiculous it is that something like that could be on the internet…. The irony kills me.

I found myself only finding a few reputable sources that I have in my news feed that I can trust consistently. When I see a headline in my feed, before I even think about clicking on it and reading it I see where it has come from.
According to Boyd’s article, I’m somewhere in the middle of both extremes. On one end is someone that believes everything they read, and at the other is someone who questions every single bit of information out there.
I think I’m doing okay here in the middle. I mean, you can’t believe everything you hear or read, that’s not how society works. But you can’t exactly questions everything either, or you’d never actually be certain of anything. I’m not sure which is worse, to think you have all the answers but you don’t, or to have access to all the answers but you don’t use them.

This class we went through half of the class’s interviews. I do like watching how everyone interprets the idea and chooses to present their talent. I also found each person’s story interesting.

This kind of project is always amazing. It’s a special thing to be able to turn a story or person that would normally be considered relatively ordinary, into something worth watching. I really like seeing what people pair with what the interviewee is saying, whether is directly corresponds or not.

I think that there were a few left to the last minute, but overall the quality was fairly consistent despite the diverse range of styles.

We were then divided into our groups for the final assignment – of course it’s a group assignment…
We were then given the chance to muck around with (to a degree) recording devices. Last year during my Diploma of screen and media I studied how to use technical sound equipment and shotgun microphones, so it was good to be able to apply that knowledge to a more casual and everyday device. I remembered how cool it was listening to the world through the microphone, especially when the sensitivity is set really high. To be able to hear the sound of a pen scrape on paper or typing on a computer as loud and as clear as the microphone makes it is a weird experience.

Despite the notorious reputation around group projects, I think this one will be good. Hopefully it will find a way to all come together in a timely manner!