There are two guests for this week’s lectorial: Adrian Miles and Liam Ward. The topic of this week’s electoral is that media is a combination, or integration of both theoretical knowledge and practical skills, thinking and doing.

Adrian talked about the doco ontography studio,below is the link of its blog.

http://www.mediafactory.org.au/2015-documentary-ontography/

Then he also talked about something about theory and practice. Like ways of approaching the study of media that aren’t so meaning or story-centric; mind-body relations and ideas as material things (thinking translated in to a thing); and what skills he thinks might be most important for us as a media practitioner.

He gave the impression that craft is not important. High craft skills comes from a deep tacit knowledge of our stuff. He gave a further explanation in his blog, he mentioned that the more we read, watch ,think about things in our field then the larger our basket of knowledge is and the richer our ability to reflect upon our practice becomes. I totally agree with him. Take myself for example. When I first made video, I just shot something randomly. Sometimes I might use medium shot to shoot two people talking, but I didn’t know the reasons, I just thought that it may be better. However, after I read the book film art and watched some tutorial videos online, I learnt so much. I finally know that when should I use medium shot and close-up shot, what should I shoot and how to shoot and so on. Theory should be connected with practice. Without theory I can’t make progress in filming, and without practice, theory is useless.

The other guest is Liam Ward. He talked about the magic of the edit and the gap, the Kuleshov effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect), and Sergei Eisenstein’s montage of attractions. All of these impress me.

What impressed me most is the edit of 2001: A Space Odyssey he showed us. I also found that online. It’s a great edit. It utilises the similarity of the bone and the spaceship, making a transition from ancient time to technology era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP4riIK0fa0

This video enlightens me. When I was editing video before, I just used some transition effects, like dissolve effect, card wipe effect and blinds effect. They are meaningless. After Liam’s presentation, I learnt that meaningful editing is quite important, which makes your video significant. I will try to do more meaningful edit and keep practising.