Author Archives: jackfahey

For this weeks class we were required to shoot a quick ~1 minute film in small groups with the theme “Pursuit”. The film had to be done purely in camera, with no editing allowed. We planned our video for quite a long time, around an hour, storyboarding it and planning each individual shot. Once we were out shooting, we quickly realised that we didn’t have time to shoot what we had planned and decided to alter the ending to get it finished within the time.

Honestly the film came up quite well, probably the best I had made so far this year in class. As Paul had talked about previously in one of our lectures, when something goes wrong it always works out for the best. Serendipity.

I felt we used the cuts well, especially at the beginning of the film. We wanted to portray haste and quick movement in a very short amount of screen time, without just filming the talent getting up and running. So we used a technique that Edgar Wright often employs in his films, hitting action moments for a fraction of a second one after the other with quick smash cuts. I thought it worked perfectly, creating the sense of urgency without having to actually film very much content.

So I get the camera next Wednesday for a week to interview my subject. Problem being that I have no idea who I’m going to interview yet.

A few ideas floating around in my head, but nothing concrete yet. Someone I know would be easiest, a family member or family friend or something. It would also mean I’d have plenty of access to them whenever required outside of the actual allotted time to shoot the interview. So I’ll probably end up going that way.

But I also have a few people I know who work for the herald sun and I was thinking about maybe trying to see if I could swing an interview with a sports journalist. It would make for an interesting interview but it would also mean that if I don’t get everything I need in the shoot, I can’t really just go and ask for more of their time.

Another week, another guest lecturer.

This week we had Paul come in and talk to us about what it means to be a media operator, specifically referencing our interviews for the most part.

He focused a lot on something he seems to have developed a large philosophy on…Serendipity. Its an interesting concept, namely the idea that things that happen by chance are beneficial. His idea of a serendipitous action was slightly more specific though in relation to media, that being whenever something goes wrong on a project/shoot, it is always for the best. He believes that the outcome is going to be better than what you had originally planned. But not only that, he also believes that it is necessary to believe this in order to keep your project moving forward.

Its actually quite a nice idea to be honest, and actually quite helpful. If something bad happens, just will it into being something that will work out for the best.

Our workshop exercise this week was to split into groups and create a short video with the theme “misunderstanding”. The video was to contain one single shot (i.e. no cuts) and we had to try to rely on as little dialogue as possible to progress the plot. We actually ended up using no spoken words for the video.

In our workshop we were split into groups of 4 or 5 and set off to script, film and edit a short interview about how to

survive university.

This week we had a guest lecturer who gave us a one hour crash course in interview skills, as our next assignment is to cut together an interview that we will conduct over the next week or two.
The different aspects of interviewing were cut into the Who, What, When, Where and Why questions we need to ask ourselves in order to give a proper interview. Namely, who are you interviewing, What is your interview about (the subjects history, their profession, their interests etc etc), How to actually conduct ourselves when we are in the interview and Why we chose to do an interview with this person/why we chose the questions we did etc.
As of right now, I’m not entirely sure who I’m going to interview, though I have a few ideas of what direction I might take the assignment. One is to try and interview some form of sports writer, and try to cut together a classic “quick fire round” of questions hitting a few broad topics in their sport of expertise.
Another idea could be to interview my housemate, as he ran in the last federal election. Though Im not entirely convinced I’d like to go the political route on this task.

In my video titled +/- I was trying to portray my life by showing things I love and things I hate. I also tried to cut the components in such a way that reflected me as a person. For example on a basic level, there are pictures and videos of little parts of my life, I play football, I love basketball, I love shoes, I hate the vacuuming (shown with the sound of a vacuum), I dont like running for the sake of running etc etc. But I also tried to make the cuts between the different sides of the video quite jarring to show a disconnect between the parts I like and the parts I dont, while keeping the transitions between similar themed photos/videos smooth.
So what worked. I think the broader ideas behind the video are what worked best. So, trying to show something more meaningful about myself by showing superficial aspects of my life and trying to separate the two halves of the video without letting it feel like two different videos mashed together.
I also think the snap changes with the recorder clicking noise was an effect that worked really well. It was difficult to time it perfectly but it came out better than I expected. Especially at the end when it is timed with the music.
As for what didn’t work, basically the technical side. I’m not at all familiar with premier pro, or any editing software. Shooting/directing/writing are aspects of film making that Im much more familiar with and this side of the project was really outside my comfort zone. But I enjoyed figuring out how its done.
Along a similar vein, something that didn’t work with the overal project as a whole was just my ability to figure out exactly what I wanted. It changed a lot throughout the process, which made it difficult to continually edit.
On a different note, something that definitely didn’t work was my planning. I had to hand the assessment in late because I had no idea videos took that long to render/upload and I just couldn’t embed the video onto my blog in time because it was still uploading.

+/- by Jack Fahey

On Tuesday, I went to a studio workshop class for Media students further into their degree to get a better understanding of what to expect. It was a class about documentary film making, and it was very, very interesting. It was concerned much more with the philosophical aspects of media than I expected, rather than the actual creating of media projects, though that was obviously still an integral part of the class.

What I was drawn to was a point the tutor made, which was we need to be concerned with what things do, rather than what they are. This was further extended to talk about the fact that the artifact (or piece of media created) imposes meaning on the producer/creator, and not the other way around. For example, a director is only recognised as a director, if they have actually directed a film. Someone who claims to be a director but hasn’t actually directed any films, isn’t really a director at all. It was interesting to think that the media that we create, actually imposes its own meaning onto us, rather than the other way around.

So, when I started this assignment, I spent a number of hours trying to come up with various words and concepts that describe myself. Which in and of itself I found hard to do. Then the next few days I tried to link those concepts and attributes to images and abstract ideas like we had been briefed to do, but i really struggled to do so. I continually came up empty. After a while I began to get frustrated with the assignment, and that just led to less and less creativity.

I literally couldn’t come up with any reasonable ideas that were usable for this assessment. What I finally settled upon after days of trying to come up with something, was that I was terrible at abstract thinking, and that I was finding the assessment difficult. So I thought I’d try and represent that in an abstract way. At least something would be better than nothing.

The collection of images, sounds and videos I have brought together on the most basic level represent my struggles with thinking about the abstract. For example the video of lines being drawn on an empty space represents my inability to think creatively when given a blank slate. Or the picture of a hammer on abstract art symbolises my initial approach of trying to just brute force the answer and how I tried to use the wrong tools cognitively to create these pieces of media.

However I realised after I had compiled the various images and sounds that they also reveal aspects of myself. Many of them come from outside, showing that I’m an active person who enjoys the outdoors, they show that I am logical, analytical and somewhat rigid in the way that I think (very much like the image of the piece of wood, deliberately measured, carved and sanded with a single, specific purpose in mind).

As for whether I think it works or doesn’t work, I think on some levels it does and others it doesn’t. The audio components could have been better. I liked the idea of the sound of flowing water represented what I needed to do in order to finish this assignment (go with the flow), but the other two weren’t home runs. In terms of how I’d approach it different next time, I would definitely try and be more free with the assignment. It took me literally days to figure out that I needed to stop trying to come up with the perfect idea and just come up with as many ideas as possible. Some of them were bound to work, even though many didn’t. I’d also definitely try to bounce the ideas I had off of more people, I involved my housemates but I think involving more of my classmates as well would have been worthwhile.