Category / Uncategorized

by harrietread

MOI Wk 2

This week in Mechanics of Immersion we watched a few movie clips in our Wednesday class like Mad Max: Fury Road and Interstellar. What I found was that Interstellar actually made me really super emotional right there in the middle of class which was mildly embarrassing, but also kinda made me think about how it affected me.

What affects me the most when I go see a film is more often than not the familial aspect, so movies where the conflict between family members or the relationship between family members is shown in depth is more affecting. So Wild with Reese Witherspoon was pretty challenging for me, and when I first tried watching Spirited Away I was pretty scarred by the parents turning into pigs.

I think that it is not necessarily just talking about these relationships that gets me because anyone can give some exposition and make me feel sympathetic. But the scene we watched in Interstellar, there aren’t a whole lot of words spoken as the music swells but we here Murph yelling for her dad, Coop is in tears and the sombre music with the big dramatic organ just makes me feel intense grief. My own relationship with my family which is very fortunate and lucky and happy makes me feel this grief a lot, but maybe my own perception is different from others in similar situations as me.

I think that what affected me the most and immersed me the most in the clips we watched this week was the sound design. Since I am very much so a visual person, and not strong in understanding audio, the subtlety and nuances feels kind of magical to me.

by harrietread

Week 10

This week, having finished our PB3 on Strangers and Stories, we are starting our next PB which is the photobook/compendium.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do initially. I was going to do cosplayers, but it quickly became apparent that it would be a bit complicated and I would rather keep it neat and accessible and simpler for this project. So I’m going to do car photography.

We had pitches and feedback on Tuesday. Considering I tend to get easily nervous, I felt good getting up and talking about what I wanted to do. I felt as though one of the tutors who gave feedback was more discouraging than encouraging, whether she meant it or not. The session definitely made me think about how I want to construct my idea.

Something that I can already see myself struggling with is the technical aspect. Taking photos of cars, especially as a speciality or for commercial purposes, is difficult to make look good. I’m going to do some research, practice and get some help from friends and my partner who have more experience in it.

by harrietread

Week 9

Having just finished our PB3 on Strangers and Stories, we will next week be starting on our final PB4, which is a photobook.

The only photobooks that I really know or have looked through include Underwater Dogs by Seth Casteel and this gorgeous book from the Australian Ballet.

I want to do something about people who love what they do. I’ve thought of a couple of things: illustrators, comic book artists, cosplayers. I really like the idea of doing cosplayers. It reminds me of the TED Talk by Adam Savage about the culture and community of cosplay, and it would be a great opportunity to get an insight into the process of creating an idea of a costume and becoming a character.

by harrietread

Week 7

Going to the NGV was an utter blast this week, really good to get out of the classroom!

Bill Henson’s almost Mapplethorpian aesthetic grabbed me immediately. The juxtapositions of youth, the natural world and classical art all melded together into this moody, harmonic image of the human condition for me. The dark, shadowy, cool toned aesthetic was so easy to absorb and ponder as well.

William Eggleston’s portraits felt so cinematic, like every image told its own story. I think that the first thing that really gripped me was the literal clarity of each image; the resolution, colour and technical brilliance of each picture made them look like they had been taken yesterday. Turns out the film that he used was a high quality cousin of Technicolour film used in cinema, which I believe is a contributing factor to the cinematic feeling of his series. I find that Eggleston’s method of composition and using high key or low key lighting also creates this feeling of a story being told. We get a sense of context, perspective, wondering where the characters have come from, where they are going and what they are thinking. I want to be able to apply this idea to my photo essay and create a sense of a story, simple or complex, being told.

by harrietread

Week 6

This week we have been looking more at photo essays and storytelling practices in photography. This is something that I have been looking forward to since to me, storytelling through visual imagery is incredibly significant through human history.

Something that I have taken away from Sebastio Salgado’s documentary, Salt of the Earth, was that there is some auteur theory that goes into how a photo essay is received. For instance, Salgado came from a background of commerce and economics. His photography explores, to an extent, the circle of life and the unity of the earth. He looks at how humans behave with eachother and with nature and our landscapes. He often uses a wide angle lenses to show a sense of depth within an image, and also the grand scale of the earth. Conversely, Vivian Maier was a nanny who looked at suburban and city life, at the individual characters within an urban space.

I will be sending my partner Chynnae hopefully to the office where my sister works as a social media marketing coordinator for a company that imports raw coffee beans. Part of her job is taste testing coffee beans in an intricate process called ‘cupping,’ and I hope that Chynnae finds the process visually interesting for her photo essay.

by harrietread

My Take: Wk 5 Uses of Photography

In this week’s tute we watched ‘Finding Vivian Maier,’ a documentary made by John Maloof, about a woman who practiced photography during her time working for forty years as a nanny. Something that I found both endearing and troubling about her character was how much she reminded me of people that I know in my daily life. Both her struggles with mental illness and her sense of self, however much she concealed it from people, are things that I recognise in myself and many of my friends and peers.

I find this significant because since so  many of these peers are highly creative and productive, I can recognise that creative people often tend to seek creative and productive activities to cope with or stay in touch with their mental health.

For our upcoming Project Brief, Strangers with Stories, I am a little nervous just because it is a daunting thing to have to go up to total strangers and ask them about their lives and interests.

by harrietread

My Take: Wk4 Uses of Photography

For this week’s Project Brief, we had to submit 5 original photos imitating a photographer of our choice. I chose dance photographer Lois Greenfield and submitted some photography of my friend Ciara, a classical and contemporary dancer. I focused primarily on lighting, since Greenfield’s photography of dancers and figures are lit with soft, bright high key lighting that illuminates the subject perfectly in motion. My friends and I used our old high school’s media and photography room, and it took us a lot of trial and error to actually set up the lights and softboxes until we had Ciara perfectly lit. I then used Adobe Lightroom to complete that perfect, weightless airbrushed aesthetic. I focused mainly on bringing up Highlights until the white background was completely smooth and seamless, and so the subject lit up smoothly and prominently.

by harrietread

My Take on Alternate Realities

When I say alternate realities, I’m not necessarily talking about Narnia, the Matrix, space-time travel or anything like that. I’m talking more about the realities within our minds that are constructed by our experiences and perspectives.

About a week ago, I made a post about how some of the things that Donald Trump says look good on paper, and that people do have reasons for wanting to support him. I’m going to extend that post a little further, thanks to a recent publication by the Wall Street Journal after they did a study on how social media news feeds can affect who people are more aligned to.

What Wall Street Journal’s Jon Keegan has done is set up two feeds which have real conversations and posts that individuals have posted on Facebook, and aligned them into a red ‘conservative’ feed and a blue ‘liberal’ feed. Users who posted all of these uploads, of which there were up to 10.1 million of them, were anonymised but had their political label analysed.

Based on the study’s findings, and the presentation of conservative vs liberal posts on Facebook, one can logically come to the conclusion that as long as you are receiving media texts from entirely one political standing, you are reinforcing your already existing beliefs. It seems fairly logical and simplistic, but at the same time it’s interesting to consider how different the political situation in the US would be if social media were different to how it currently is. It makes a little more sense in the world in terms of exactly how people align themselves to certain ideas or political figures. The reinforcement theory we learned in high school comes into play, as how we tailor what we prefer to see and choose to omit from our feeds reinforces reality as we perceive it.

by harrietread

Recap SEM 1

In semester 1, we have been covering:

  • Practices
  • Professionalism
  • Theory
  • Technical practices

Over this semester, I want in particular to put more practice into the professional aspects of this course. This includes my desire to find work attachments, which could give me opportunities that will contribute to my professional career.

Theoretical studies in communications are something that I am incredibly interested in pursuing further. I want to do more studies involving human psychology and sociology, because the ideas and studies in these subjects  interest me deeply.

by harrietread

Feedback on PB3

Grace

  • The composition of the interviewee in the neutral eye level mid shot was very elegant and pleasing to look at with the colours white and pink dominating and I felt it matched well with her story of working in primary schools
  • The only thing that I think had real room for improvement was the initial shot of the interviewee, the high angle long shot. The background in this shot distracted from the main subject, and it could have been improved by re-angling the camera to eye level or removing the lamp from the background.

Andrew

  • The emphasis placed on sound was clever in using it as a motif to carry this story of a girl who essentially can’t hear anything. I was also impressed by the different aspects of her life that were presented and the way that they were expressed by her signing and translating at the same time.
  • My only issue with this film was that, despite the importance of sound in this story, the opening sequence introducing the importance of sound was too jarring for the story itself. I felt that the overlapping sounds were too overwhelming for a positively vibed interview about a young girl