Monthly Archives: May 2017

Jon suggested we take a listen to “The Truth” podcast, as it would give us an insight into how to effectively create sound scapes that rely on little dialogue. I listened to the first couple of episodes, and took a lot from it, specifically about hyper realistic sounds and how to make the audience feel like they are in the location. We decided to give our soundscapes a somewhat looser feel, not focusing on complete realism but just trying to put the listener in places they don’t expect, and trying to give them a certain feeling or mood rather than make them feel like they are exactly in the moment

Jon Gave us some great feedback on how to focus on this looser, more surreal feeling rather than complete realism. For example the ambience within the car – where are the ears in relation to the objects making noise? Did we want to make it exactly how it would be in real life, or make everything varying levels of noise to create the feeling and push our message across, rather than feeling hyper realistic. We opted for the latter.

He also gave us a few ideas for other scenarioes such as

Crossing the road with headphones.

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Music – honk pulls you out of the music.

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putting on headphones.

Guest lecturer Dr Ramon Lobato – week 11

Television, Streaming & Audience Fragmentation

• The definition of TV as a system is shifting atm with the influx of self produced shows and rise in SVOD popularity

Hours of Broadcast TV – 2.7

Hours of Online Video viewing – 0.5

Devices per household – 6.4

Households subscribed to netflix – 25%

TV in Australia

• 1977 there were 4 channels on free to air.

• 1997 there were 5 free to air and 20 Pay TV options

• 2017 there are 30 free to air channels and 150 Pay TV

  • DVD/Bluray

  • Download

  • Streaming

  • IPTV

  • mobile

The Online TV Ecology

• Catch Up

  • a channel on demand

  • eg iview

• SVOD

  • curated catalogue

  • Netflix, Stan, Hulu etc

• TVOD

  • paying per download

  • itunes, google play etc

• PTV

  • ISPs version of foxtel

• AVOD

  • youtube, facebook, twitter

• Informal

  • illegal streaming/download sites

What Does this mean for Audiences?

The Marketplace of Alienation – James G Webster

Strong link between the history of television, the state and the nation.

• used to address a vast portion of the nation at once in a controlled manner

• that is no longer available with the mass audience of today, it is fragmented over various different forms of media streams

Personalisation has been a huge shift in media consumption. No longer does the audience all get exposed to the same television choices.

Netflix

• Worlds largest SVOD service

• 125,000,000 hours of viewing per day

• Operates in 190+ countries

• 100 million subscribers globally

• US$41bil market cap; US$6.7bil revenue

• Headquarters in Los Gatos, California

Global Netflix

• • Tracking the global roll-out of an internet TV platform

• Netflix doesnt do well in India because of the lack of Indian Content

• Europe is attempting to put a 20% European content quota on Netflix’s library in European markets

• Kenya was critical of Netflix’s content and saw it as immoral

• Netflix was blocked in Indonesia

The exercise for this week was to create a short Audio project in groups of 3-5 on the topic of attention.

With the audio we recorded, I decided to try and simulate what its like to try and have a conversation with someone while also texting on your phone. I used a heavy reverb to drown out the conversation while the texting was happening, then faded it back in after the text was sent.

In class we then spoke breifly about our assignments

Be experimental

This piece is not intended to be a report/scientific discussion. Do not need to quote the references or specifically duscuss them. Just use the information and draw upon what they say in a creative way to make the podcast interesting for the audience.

In the tutorial today, we listened to a 20 minute radio show about the origins and impacts of the lobotomy. It was narrated by a survivor of the procedure.

We then examined this piece of work in order to break down the difference between Story Elements and Sonic Elements. The different aspects are as follows, with added clarification by me on each topic ;

Story Elements

• Focus/theme

  • what is the piece about in a succinct sentence

• Hook

  • what would the pitch to a producer be

• Plot

  • The story that evolves throughout the program

• Setting

  • where is it occurring. Not necessarily just where the narrative is located

• Conflict/tension/obstacles

  • Who are the villains?

  • Who opposes the main ideal/objective of the piece

• Characters

  • who is in the piece

• Mood

  • what is the feeling that the show creates

  • how does it make the audience feel

Sonic Elements

• Narrator

  • Who is telling us the story

  • What perspective are they using?

• Studio Interviews

  • interviews conducted within the confines of a studio

  • creates a very professional feel in the audience

• In Field/Location Interviews

  • Interviews shot at a location relevant to the interviewee or the content of the discussion

  • creates a raw feel

  • genuine

  • creates difficulties in sound editing later on

• Music (diagetic/nondiagetic)

  • what source is the music from? Is there a source within the world?

  • How does it feel?

  • What is its purpose?

• SFX

• Archival Sounds

  • previously recorded footage/found footage

• Location/ATMOS

  • sounds of the environment around the interview

  • just generally record lots to fill gaps

This topic has intrigued me since I begun my research on PB4. With attention spans being shorter than ever, how can content creators ensure to keep people interested once they click to their page? A lot of media creators offer deals/giveaways, advertise on bit social media pages or tag famous people/videos in order to draw in the crowd, but if the attention span has become so brief, how can these creators actually retain the audience they have drawn in?

One thing that has been studied more and more recently is eye movements while web browsing. Seeing where the eye is drawn to on the screen, and where to place the most important information on your website in order to get it to the consumer as quickly as possible. If you only have a few seconds to capture the interest of your reader, you need to get the important information in front of their eyes immediately after the page loads. You don’t want them searching for the info because if it isn’t found extremely quickly, they will move on.

Another way to solve this problem is spending the money and time on a good, clean interface. People who frequent the web can tell if a site is easy to navigate almost immediately and, going off my own experience, will just leave to find something else to browse almost immediately if either its difficult to find what they are looking for, or even if the site is just a bit rough on the eyes. When every second counts from the get go, first impressions are hugely important. It can make or break a websites ability to retain eyes for extended periods, thereby being a more attractive prospect to advertisers.

We have been given our groups for PB4 this week. But before we were able to work on that, we were given a workshop exercise for us to work through.

We had to conduct an interview with each other on why we like the RMIT city campus location. One of the constraints was recording the interviewee “interacting” with the environment during the interview. I found this particular task to be a little difficult while working with the medium of sound. Obviously in a video, thats an easy thing to do. But without visual clues its difficult to convey to the audience a person interacting with a university through sound, especially when you can’t use spoken word, because they are already talking, as they are answering the interview questions.

After we recorded our interview, we started to discuss our topic. We landed on the idea that we would explore social media/multiple media streams/multi tasking and its impact on the attention span/cognitive function/information retention of youth. Its a topic that is quite relevant to us, considering we are young people who use social media frequently.

Once I started researching the topic, I found a lot of it quite relatable. Even while just searching for articles that outline how bad multi tasking is for us, I was multi tasking by opening several tabs for searches, and simultaneously checking those. Also I was continuously checking my phone in between searches loading. I’d never really thought about the impact of multi tasking on my ability for information retention and how it affects my attention span, but its very noticeable almost immediately.

I think my initiative post will explore the impact of this on internet based content further.

The first half of the lecture this week we had a guest lecturer speaking about the importance of collaboration, both in our degrees, but also in terms of our future careers.

The lecture was focused around the key characteristics of collaborative work, and why it is valuable to employers in the media industry. There are barely any jobs that don’t involve a large amount of collaboration within the media world, so it is important to cultivate that skill while at university, in order to be appealing to future employers.

The characteristics stressed throughout the lecture (of good collaborative work) where;

• Respect
• Consistency
• Support
• Responsibility
• Equity

These 5 components are all vital for effective collaboration. I think that the two most important of these attributes are respect and equity. While all the skills are valuable, those two, in my opinion, need to come first. If everyone respects each other, and everyone shares the workload evenly, then there will at least be no cause of finger pointing once the assignment has been completed, and everyone will feel as though the contributions made were of equal importance.

The lecture also moved on to talk about group conflict resolution. The main point to be taken from that part was to use a consensus, rather than a majority rule. Using a majority will alienate one of the members, whereas finding compromise and coming to a consensus is the best way to keep everyone involved and satisfied with the end product.

The rest of the Lectorial was focused on Researching and Academic Referencing. I had already covered most of this in my first degree, but it was still nice to get a refresher in how to reference.

The concept of fandom was brought up in this weeks lecture, and I think it has an extreme relevance to the growing online sports community. Quality sports media content (such as articles, podcasts etc) will always be available online through established outlets, however one growing trend in the online sports world is fan created content. There are people with rabid interest in not only their teams, but also entire leagues in general. These fans have begun creating in depth content, both analytical and more broad, and posting them to various message boards such as reddit, or even their own free blogs. This content has started to rival even that of ESPN, TNT, FOX etc in terms of analytical depth in my opinion.

The reason for this shift is funding in my opinion. Case in point with ESPN having to fire 100 of their sports contributors because of cable cutting. The kinds of people they decided to let go were beat writers, analysts, in depth statistics driven content etc etc because it just doesn’t make enough money. The kinds of shows/presenters/journalists they kept were much more involved in click bait/”hot takes” content creation. This is the content that draws in casual fans who don’t really follow the sport in depth, so it is the bigger revenue stream as it has a larger appeal. The more in depth, analytical content is only aimed at avid sports fans, and so those fans have taken it upon themselves to pick up the slack. A lot of the more statistically driven sports content has become self published, which gives them a freedom to build their quality content at their own pace, without a big investor pushing to make it much more general and accessible to a less involved audience.
I could see this sort of content really pushing into the forefront of fandom consumption. I myself am a huge NBA fan, but I very rarely even bother to check the bigger sites like ESPN, TNT, FOX, NBC etc and solely focus on much smaller content studios, or free, fan made content. For the general public who don’t take a huge interest in the sport, it isn’t important, so I can’t see it becoming huge nationally produced, “big money” content. But I can definitely picture a new kind of media outlet that specifically caters to those who are heavily invested in the sport, possibly even without having anyone employed, simply contracting out their content to active members of the community who have enough time to create content about their areas of interest.