Category / Project Briefs

by harrietread

MOI Wk 11

So this week I was shooting for my short film for the final assessment. It is going to be short from what I am seeing so far, aligning everything in the timeline in Premiere Pro. Will it be too short? Don’t think so. I intend to go crazy on aesthetic detail, so this will involve Premiere and Adobe After Effects as well.

Biggest issue I had was wrangling the dog, Missy. Delightful dog, but not super obedient. Another issue that I had was that I did not feed my cast for a while when we were shooting, so we all got hungry and tired pretty quickly.

Now I am in the process of editing. I am fiddling with colour grading and split screening for one shot, and so far it is creating a fairly surreal effect. I want to do some more testing and see if I can improve this effect even further.

by harrietread

MOI Wk 10

This week I am doing more storyboarding but also some film/lighting testing. For one scene in my film, two characters are sitting in daylight in front of a fire having a conversation. First problem: can’t actually have a fire on the beach because there are laws.

I was going to use a heavy duty torch covered in cellophane and strobe it across my cast’s face to give the illusion of flickering firelight. I went and spoke to the AV techs in Building 9, however, and they suggested a battery powered lamp they had.

Tested it indoors and outdoors before the lamp got buggy and stopped working. I definitely love the way it looks in natural daylight. From the 30 second mark in my test video, it cuts to a different test shot with a narrower f stop and faster shutter speed. Definitely going to consider this in my final video, since I want there do be a balance of both natural daylight lighting the actors and also have the firelight showing up appropriately.

by harrietread

MOI Project Brief 1

This semester, I am looking forward to practicing my technical skills in visual and audio media. I mostly want to improve my skills in Creative Cloud, especially Adobe Audition. I also want to broaden my understanding of the definition of immersion, and get a better sense of how I can apply this knowledge to my creative practices.

 

Recently I watched Baby Driver from director Edgar Wright, whose films I adore. It was so much more subdued in comparison to his other works like Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs the World, but I felt that it was as immersive as his other pieces and probably more hypnotic. Especially in diner scenes with Baby (Ansel Elgort) and Debora (Lily James), I felt a sort of mellow lulled feeling that drew me into their world.

There is also a moment when Baby and Buddy (Jon Hamm) share headphones to listen to music, and the music literally surrounds the audience in the cinema. It was incredibly effective and really immersed me in the world of the film. What I want to get out of this semester is a stronger sense of how to use technical skills and understanding to create an immersive experience.

 

Firstly, I want to improve my skills in audio. I’m not very confident, to say the least, and my understanding of sound design is not as strong as my understanding of visuals which I have from film and photography. I want to get better at using Adobe Audition, and I also want to get a better understanding of how to use sound design, ambience, dialogue, foley and soundtrack to immerse an audience in my work.

 

Secondly, I want to be a stronger storyteller. What I want out of this semester is the confidence to use less cliches and veer away from being too expositional and too hand-holdy in the media works that I make. I love storytelling, and I want to get better at it through sounds and vision.

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.

by harrietread

Week 12

Finishing up my photo compendium this week, I made a couple of changes to the final construction of my photobook. Firstly, I chose not to print a book out. The final day that I had to shoot, at the Dutton Garage in Richmond, was yesterday. That gave me one day to shoot, pick and edit the photos that I would need for my photo, and I also knew I would be taking a lot of photos that I would need to choose from.

I also chose not to have interviews for my compendium. The main reason that I chose to do this was firstly because the salespeople at Dutton Garage told me that they would be too busy to be interviewed on the showroom floor. Secondly, I chose not to have interviews because the process of approaching strangers, especially at the Benalla Historic Car Races, would be confronting and challenging for both me and the interviewee.

To compensate, I have chosen photos from my collection that link people and cars together. I had a fair few shots of both people and cars in frame. I was concerned about privacy and consent, but the figures in the photos are unidentifiable so it’s appropriate to use them. I also tried to focus on making connections between cars and people over a period of time. There are a couple of photos of older people admiring cars at the car show, and at the Dutton Garage there was a display up on the wall of young people admiring them as well.

The most difficult part of my experience was working out where to go to take photos. There are not many car meet-ups happening locally at this time of the year, and most car shows that are on are in other states or simply to far away. Fortunately, I was able to make it to Benalla and I managed to gather strong material at the Dutton Garage. I also had help from the official photographer there who toured me around the showrooms and gave me help and advice on technical and aesthetic concerns when photographing vehicles.

by harrietread

Week 11

This week has been about thinking more closely about our photobooks. What I have been considering and planning has primarily been what kind of story I want to tell about cars through photography, and also how I will improve my technical and aesthetic practice when photographing cars.

So in my consult with Brian last week I was thinking about presenting my photobook like Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, in the sense that I wanted to go up to strangers with their cars and have a quick 2 min interview with them about why they like cars etc. What I want to get out of this approach is a humanising perspective of car culture.

In terms of my technical skills, this week I began doing some practice photography of cars. I practiced light painting, which i mainly done at night and involves having a really long shutter speed and then literally painting the car with light from a torch. My practice has proven effective so far. Now I need to practice composition and framing.

by harrietread

Week 8

This past week has involved finalising our photo essay projects for this assessment. I went into the Laundry Station this week for my photo essay, which is owned by the friend of my classmate Chynnae’s mum in Wyndham Vale.

What I wanted to convey in my photo essay was this notion that the laundry is a private space, but when we make it into a public space like a laundromat humans tend to find little bits of community and friendship even though they don’t go to the laundry to do so.

Technically, I chose to use a fixed 24mm lens for this shoot. The reason for this is that I wanted to expand the space that I was in and a wide angle lens tends to do this well. I wanted to create a sense of depth in the space. Additionally, I chose to use a fixed lens because I wanted to create an aesthetic consistency with my shots; I was aiming for a cinematic appearance to this photo essay. This created a difficulty for me in that I was more aware of how close I was to people, since I could not zoom in on figures. I noticed in editing that the edges were often more bowed out like a fisheye lens that I originally intended, but I find that aesthetically this creates a Wes Anderson-ish, quirky mood.

by harrietread

My Take: Uses of Photography Wk 1

Uni is back, and once again not super sure of what I’m doing half the time but that’s life. Got a way bigger focus on photography this semester: studio is Uses of Photography and I’m also in Photojournalism. That, and I’m doing a fair bit of work as a photographer doing parties and headshots for dancer/actor friends.

It’s interested doing photography as a media subject, since I’ve only done it before as an artistic subject. For UoP, it’s linking back into the significance of photos in media (social, etc.) and for Photojournalism theres a lot of focus on journalism and news, which oddly enough will be new for me.

For now, honing my technical skills in both these classes is an important factor for me. But being a media practitioner is the main focus that will be communicated and absorbed over the course of this semester.

by harrietread

Course Reflection Post

My biggest struggle this semester has been organisation. I have been doing alot of things at the last minute, which I will try to improve on next semester. My greatest strength this semester has been technical work and submitting initiative blog posts. I have improved the most in doing group work, because every single class’ assessment piece this semester has been a group assessment. I’m basically a complete expert now.I need the most improvement in my motivation and general initiative to do work. In the grand scheme of things, however, I am in the very complicated process of moving house and also have had to find a new job  in that time and so alot of my energy was sapped during this semester.

This second half of semester has been an arduous one to get through. Completing the PB4 group assessment was more difficult than expected. I felt as though we were thrown into the metaphorical deep end of group work, in the sense that we were given a very large assessment to complete together and that what we were asked to do ultimately was communicated to us in a distinctly vague way. Essentially, we were told to make a video and audio essay on Mediums and Technology, but it took us a while as a group to narrow down what was meant by that prompt until we finally decided to talk about photography, smartphones and Instagram. Next semester, I will make an effort to be more organised in preparing for an assessment.

While I did do the readings on Mediums and Technologies in an earlier week (http://www.mediafactory.org.au/harriet-read/2016/04/30/my-take-on-medium-theory/), looking back I realise that we did little to discuss how communication of a message affected an audience or viewer based on the actual medium that the message was given in.

One of the more interesting lectorials that I recall from this semester has been the one on Copyright (http://www.mediafactory.org.au/harriet-read/2016/05/02/my-take-on-copyright/).

I also was interested in the lectorial on broadcast media culture (http://www.mediafactory.org.au/harriet-read/2016/05/02/my-take-on-broadcast-and-the-post-broadcast-paradigm/) because I am very interested in human psychology and its relevance to media.

I found this half of semester that I was able to make clearer links between my classes, in particular to New Media New Asia with Terry Johaal. In this post (http://www.mediafactory.org.au/harriet-read/2016/05/03/basic-comms-101-by-me/) I highlighted some aspects of this class that interested me and will remain relevant in my core studies.

Finally, I had a look into my stronger suit of cinema studies and made this post about my thoughts on what makes a horror movie a) good and b) scary. (http://www.mediafactory.org.au/harriet-read/2016/05/30/my-take-on-why-good-horror-is-scary/)

by harrietread

My Take on Medium Theory

For our PB4, my group has been given the subject of Technology and Mediums, and we seek to explore the evolution of cameras and photography since the beginning of the 20th century and its place within society as a media form. Relative to our topic of Mediums, I read through Meyrowitz’s reading regarding Medium  Theory.

To start off with, Medium Theory is the study of the distinctions between mediated forms (audio, print, text, visual, etc.) on social, psychological and physical levels. The simplest summary of the definition of Medium Theory in my opinion can be found in a quote by Marshall McLuhan, a literature scholar: ‘The medium is the message’ (1960s). The meaning behind this quote is that social influences that arise out of the media are influential not because of the message that is decoded, but because of the medium’s effect on recipients.

Distinctions made between different medium forms include the degree of verisimilitude (dictionary.com: ‘the appearance or semblance of truth[reality]”), the degree of human intervention and interaction required of varying mediums, and the degree to which a medium can be distributed or received simultaneously to many people in many locations at once.

Something that interested me in this reading was the history of medium theory being dated back to Socrates in ancient Greece. Now, first and foremost, I am someone who admires Socrates; my favourite quote by him is ‘All I know is that I know nothing,’ and it really feels relevant to my brain at this point of the year. Anyway, he argued that writing had negative effects on the mind; he believed that we literally no longer needed to use our brains to remember things because we could write it all down. This interests me in regard to the subject of mediums and medium theory because I see it as a fitting and humbling show of the beginnings of communication media studies, way before media was even a thing. Additionally, I find it ironic that Socrates thought writing was bad for you because if he was zapped across time to the present day, imagine his reactions to phones, tablets, laptops, smartboards, printing presses, etc.