Reflection:

I set out to show place as a part of myself and discovered that actually the relationship is the inverse. Part of myself is left behind hence the dialogue, “I have left something of myself behind”. I wanted to document who I was through places and as an only child, I have grown to learn how profoundly the spaces you are in influence the way you think.

The brief suggested that Lo-Fi elements could be incorporated and this presented a limitation I was excited to explore, how could I use Lo-Fi artistically in the piece. A key motif that repeats is the montage of images of the places I go from the city, to home and beyond and back again. The images and video clips, lead, in succession further and further away from the noise of the inner city and in doing so become less and less Lo-Fi. I manipulated the frame rate of the initial shots in the sequence by speeding them up, rendering them at 4x speed and slowing them back to 2x speed. The effect created was a vintage film effect that was then colour graded to reflect an old projector projecting the images back. This technique of course, created a sort of anachronism in the sense that modern train technology is shown with a vintage Lo-Fi film look and I think this is somewhat key to my personality in the sense that I love to explore things that don’t really belong.

The photo of my face which flashes is a screened image created from a photo, then a threshold effect added and animated, combined with a Screen blending mode in Premiere Pro to achieve the effect of the video transitioning through an image. Lastly I incorporated the titles and similar start and end shots to evoke that sense of repetition. The journey through these places is a somewhat routine journey, though the video ends with a black on white title instead of a white on black title, to reference the idea that through the journey change occurs and it is through this change that we leave a part of ourselves behind.

I think at our core, each of us want to leave part of ourselves behind, our distinct, irreplaceable mark on the world.

When I began Project Brief One, I suspected that it would lead on to an assembled project. I set out to document the places I visited purely because I couldn’t think of any other way to tell my story. I am an only child with no pets. My parents both work and I was far too busy to ask friends to participate, so I had to find a more abstract form of expression than taking photos of a subject, it had to become about something deeper than that. When I began Project Brief 2 I think that was when I hit the eureka moment. My video would be about place and what it means to have a place.

I had always found the idea of connecting to a place foreign, I suppose there was never really a place I connected to or yearned to go to. I never thought of distant countries where my ancestors grew up as my place, that was their place. This video is all about the places I go and the places from which my life happens. One of the videos was taken next to my old school on the way to the bus stop which takes me part of the way into university. And from here a hierarchy was created. The video essentially chronologies the journey I make from the city, to my home, to my home away from home at the Gippsland lakes. All places where, I believe, a part of me resides.

I tried to allow this idea to inform my practise. The way that I created the video itself creating a vintage feel on the train and a more modern digital feel, the further from the city I got, the closer I felt to home, the higher the quality of the footage. I liked experimenting with the look of different film stocks and experimenting with fast motion and drop frames to create an old fashioned look to the footage. This helped to fulfil the Lo-Fi aspects of the brief.

“We don’t have earlids”

Deep.

Sound, sound, sound and more sound!! In today’s lectorial, the discussion centred on the importance of sound and sound based texts. Something that really got me thinking is the idea that we cannot close ourselves off to sound. It takes a lot of effort to stop yourself from hearing and yet you can close your eyes in quite literally the blink of an eye. Therefore, unpleasant sound is more obtrusive than an unpleasant sight.

Whilst Rachel was talking about sound affordances it got me thinking about sound realism. When I was preparing for a short film recently, I discovered that in certain locations, there are unpleasant sounds such as the fans of a computer that generally you might want to eliminate, and yet, they’re meant to be in the scene, you should hear them so should you remove them? This puzzled me for a long time because in a film, when there’s something in the scene that would usually make noise, it does make noise and yet somehow the computer noise in the back of my audio recordings was making the video feel less than professional. What then is the sweet spot between realism and technical quality?

Rachel suggested that sound is an internal medium as opposed to an external medium. Though at first I didn’t really understand that because after all, all media is processed in the brain anyway, the idea that you see outwards but you hear inwards does start to make sense to me now that I am more aware of it and actively listening which brings me to my next point,

LISTENING VS HEARING

I guess the key difference hear (pun intended… spelling mistake absolutely intentional) is the idea that hearing is persistent, it is a constant reality but we develop listening as a technique to cope with the fact that we have to constantly hear, we almost filter out noise. John Cage “Composed” if that’s what you can call it a piece called 4’33” which was just 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. As much as it is said to have had a profound influence on people, I really don’t understand that because it’s not as if anyone in the room was new to the whole silence thing. It was suggested that Cage’s intention was to encourage the audience to listen to the sound around them and this makes sense though, I am still kind of annoyed that people credit this as a brilliant composition, he was hardly the first to compose nothing.

Jan Roberts-Breslin’s Foundations of sound and image production was very much a big long chapter of technical terminology and what stuff is and sound production for dummies. Which is great, and useful if you don’t know your sound terminology but I’m a musician for lemon’s sake and I’ve used all the mics there are from studio condensers to shotgun mics in my film projects, so the question is how can I relate the technical reading to the other perspective reading? Well here goes.

When it comes to sound perspective your main goal is to recreate the dynamic of the space your injected subject is supposed to be in. What I mean is, if the audience is meant to be placed in an intimate moment with two characters, then you need to get close and clean sound, however, if you’re putting your audience in front of a Pod Racer in Star Wars, you’re not going to hear Jake Lloyd from a foot away (is it okay to make a Phantom Menace reference here… leave a comment if you think that was offensive).

The single most important indicator of spacial size is reverb. The more reflective a space is, generally, the larger it is and thus by introducing reverb you increase the size of the space HOWEVER there is more than one aspect to reverb and some reverbs recreate spaces differently, for instance some reverbs may add lots of reflection to the higher register but have effectively no reverb in the base. Secondly, reverb is not an echo! The number of times I have seen people confuse the two is ridiculous, never mind delay. Ugh, people frustrate me.

So even once you’ve carved out how large the space is, what kind of space it is and how reflective the space is, you still need to give the audience a clue as to how far away they are from the subject. This distance is not necessarily equal to the visual distance (i.e. if the camera is 4 feet away, the sound should sound like it’s coming from 4 feet away, NO! There are no rules! But using a lavalier on an EWS is probably not the best practise.) Distance is defined also by reverb but in a different way, generally it’s defined by the speed of the reverb, how instant the reverb is, defines how far the initial sound was captured in relative relation to the subject. The second aspect of distance is the sound spectrum itself. We all know the sound of a downstairs party or night club back room where all you can here is the muffled bass, that’s distance for you. The further from a subject you are, the lower the cut-off of high frequencies is. For instance 50 metres away, you’re not going to here the crisp pops of an actor’s “s” sound, probably you aren’t going to here all that much.

So altogether, what does it all mean? Well you want something to sound close, use minimal reverb (or none), with a late attack you want it to sound like the Mic picked up the original sound first before it picked up any room reflections, secondly, keep as much high frequency data as possible and therefore of course, if you want to make the sound, sound far away, do the inverse, more reverb, Lowpass with a low threshold.

Of course there is more to creating perspective but those are just some initial thoughts for anyone who is confused about the connection between technical aspects of sound and the meaning they create.

When reading Chapter two of Speech, music, sound by Theo van Leeuwin, perhaps the most important thing I picked up on was again the semiotic relationship between the audience and the producer, but in this instance, it’s not so much a visual relationship as with screen media which exists within, kind of a window whereby you focus the audiences attention on a specific aspect of the world, but in fact is a relationship which can completely envelop you. Sound, can exist in the background, or in the foreground, but most importantly ALL AROUND. The closest that any visual medium can get to completely taking over your reality is Virtual Reality technology but even then, you can still only see what is in front of you, where sound can exists everywhere and can be heard from anywhere.

The other day I googled a product and the next website I went to it was advertised to me. Coincidence? How about the time I sent a snapchat picture of a item to a friend and two minutes later got a sponsored ad about it on Facebook? Or the time one of my contacts from my emails showed up on Facebook as a person I may know. Or Siri suggestions on my iPhone reflect the people I most recently message in a third party app. Welcome to the hyper connected world where Google searches you.

Facebook is currently building technology to almost pinpoint accurately describe the contents of an image, which at this stage is designed for the purpose of helping blind people to see, at least in a metaphorical sense, what their loved ones are posting on Facebook. This all seems well and good but I have seen Facebook identify the out of focus, underexposed faces of people in the background of my photos as exactly who they are. Imagine a world where your friend takes a photo of you and snapchats it to another person and within seconds the shopkeeper of a nearby store knows you are outside and walks out of the store with the new blender you’ve been looking at on eBay at a cheaper price. This is the future.

Google processes 52,300 searches every second which equates to roughly 3,000,000 every minute. Possibly the most influential and scary influence in the modern media landscape is integration. Films like Ex Machina and Corridor Digital’s Sync draw upon the idea that an AI could be created that may actually be able to process that much information. Google’s index now contains over  60 trillion pages, this is called the crawled web, as Google has thousands of computers constantly crawling the web and indexing pages. The question then follows… what can Google do with that data. Well aside from sending your search query an average of 1,500 miles and back, Google returns pages you searched for from the over 100,000,000GB database, ranking your search using over 200 individual factors and all of it in less than an eighth of a second. Every search uses about 1000 individual machines.

Every single movement you make online is saved somewhere, whether on a local server, in temporary files, caches, external machines, government metadata, it’s all there. Imagine if one person was actually able to see all of it, every site you’ve ever been to, every video you probably shouldn’t have watched. No one is closer than the search giant but even the like of Google can only index a portion of the surface web. What I mean by that is Google can index over a million pages a minute but there are more than twice that created on Facebook every second including every single comment, picture, status update. All of these elements have what are called permalinks (I briefly mentioned these in my first blog post about blogging). They are being created at rapid speeds, so much so that we don’t even have the ability to quantify the size of data creation on the net and every estimate only takes into account a small sample space. And here’s the best part, the deep web or hidden web as some call it is literally thousands of times larger, and that’s just conservative estimations.

It is quite possible that there are multiple hundreds of terabytes of data per person on the face of the earth.

So the question I’m putting forward is, how soon, in this hyper-connected modern internet age (where all the social networks and search engines are literally building a digital profile of me) will the information be no longer private. When the internet sends you ads for books about cheating partners when you didn’t even know your partner was cheating. When computers can serve up media campaigns tailor made to target your individual emotional responses based on your opinions, desires and emotions, the kinds of literature you read.

As media practitioners we need to update our vocabulary, more than ever we have the tools at our disposal to make informed choices about what stories we tell and why and whom will watch them and who will respond to them. Never before have we had enough data to predict down to the exact dollar, how much money a certain ad campaign will generate for a company based on exactly what colour socks a person in Guatemala prefers to wear.

Editing is essentially the practise of juxtaposition

In my post yesterday, I talked about my belief that the content of a shot is just as integral to the storytelling process and the way it is juxtaposed with other shots. After today’s lecture, I think I understand what the purpose of the gaps discourse is in editing practise, because so often editing can become a tedious process of putting together what has already been created and trying to display that in the most effective way, that as an editor you can forget that you’re there to add something else to the picture. That contribution is the meaning created buy the gaps.

Editing is of course involved in many media forms but film editing is by far the most complex. Some of the most significant quotes I took away from today’s lecture were:

Editing must be ‘a tendentious selection and juxtaposition’ – Sergei Eisenstein

Never make a cut without a positive reason – Edward Dmytryk

Of all of these, I’d say the most important is the last one. I have found myself cutting because the form dictated. The whole principle of “I haven’t cut for 3 seconds, what do I cut to”. Dmytryk would suggest that the best practise would be to wait until there is a story driven reason for making the cut. I think this is something I will apply not just to editing but to all areas of my practise (music, sound, costume etc.).

After our lecture we were asked to go out into the aether and look at all the media. At Melbourne Central we noticed that almost any kind of conventional media was represented, radio, television and print advertising as well as many pieces of signage that both depicted various aspects of the shopping centre and guided people around the centre. After collating our results we found a diverse range of not only media forms but also display media, different ways in which that media was consumed.

• A billboard on the exterior of the building itself
• Infographics for guides on signs
• Art installations
• Television screen array
• Price tags and stickers on products
• Mosaics, Street art and other wall murals
• High screens up high behind registers at fast food places
• Large LED Panel TV screen with football playing
• Small adverts on the floor
• Protruding dots for the vision impaired
• Motion Graphics on televisions
• Smart phones and watches
• Warning signs
• Backlit posters
• Ambient music and radio
• Buskers
• Shirt prints
• Payment applications
• Snapchat
• Product tryouts

Project Brief One was the first introduction to a university brief and already I am so incredibly lost. I love the concept of being able to poetically represent myself but I have honestly no idea how to do so and without the obvious things. Allusions to personality are extremely difficult to create because I almost feel like I have a very simple personality. And trying to represent ideas of isolation and introversion without a crew is almost impossible.

So I kind of tried to document aspects of my life as best as possible, for instance taking photos and videos of places I go with friends and places I frequently walk through on my way in every day life. But of course, this feels shallow and predictable. I wish I could be more expressive with the assignment but I’m just having trouble being inspired by the brief.

After shooting everything I narrowed it down to a few fairly normal photos and videos. But they still feel obvious, and worse, unprofessional, I mean I tried to go the whole Lo-Fi route but at least good Lo-Fi artefacts can look nice, my photos feel too stagnant and boring.

For brief two I will probably try to expand on what I have already created in Brief one, although finding something creative and unique is really quite hard for some reason. I have been recently inspired by the idea of using silhouettes as a representation of human form, so if I could find a way to show the parts of my life that are significant within my own self silhouette, but is this a selfie? What is a selfie?

I started editing, poorly, at nine years old, as I recall, I was editing on something called CyberLink PowerDVD and my camera shot in something south of 144p. Needless to say, what came of it was awful but I learned so much early on, by twelve, I was fluent in Premiere Elements, by 13 I started using After Effects, of course, averagely before I decided to take a break and learn how to write for picture.

This week in our readings, we encounter Scott McCloud’s Blood in the Gutter. I had never even thought of the connection between  comics and editing but it becomes extraordinarily apparent when reading McCloud’s chapter, of course implicitly as McCloud is only talking about comics and the connection/meaning created by the gaps. I was intrigued by this reading because it engaged with unfamiliar taxonomy. I have never heard of edits classified into moment-to-moment, scene-to-scene etc. only ever hard cut, jump cut, J-cut and the like. The gaps theory is something I am familiar with (the idea that audiences create meaning in what you don’t show them rather than what you do), though, I think there is an important case to be made for meaning in what can be seen.

When I made my short film Blind, I was attempting to tell a story in a similar way with many implicit nuances that were neither externalised or necessarily shown. Edits from certain scenes to other scenes that implicitly required the audience to make interpretations. In one particular scene we see the events that lead up to and follow a shooting, though the film leaves it somewhat ambiguous as to who actually was the murderer. The actual shooting makes little difference to the plot of the film and using a scene-to-scene transition I managed to take the audience away from the shooting as it happened. Still to this day people have asked me who pulled the trigger as if it was in some way meaningful to the story. Sometimes creating ambiguity in the gaps only distracts from the story you are trying to tell and for some audiences, spoon-feeding the story is essential.

I am not denying that much of the way audiences interpret a film is in the unseen, I agree however, I do think that in many cases, audiences, especially with my own work, respond better to having more information explicitly than having to read between the edits. Audiences can very easily become disorientated in a medium as diverse and stimulating as film and this is why I believe that the shots themselves are equally as important as the created subtext in between.