‘New Media Innovation from Old Media Techniques’, promised to be the the subject of this studio. Certainly the idea of evolving media is not a new concept, however, does media truly evolve or does it just become faster and simpler as time goes on. The digital revolution has clearly ushered in new processes and streamlined workflows but every one of these processes can be traced very easily back into the analogue world and in some cases, the analogue method is still preferred for aesthetic reasons. The question is whether or not New Media is really Innovation or is it just Old Media, evolved.

David M. Henkin in his journal article, On Forms and Media describes the historical process of media analysis in academic circles, “one could of course describe this traditional scholarship, as concerned with the forms that knowledge and information have taken. But modern media studies are often doubly formalist in the sense that they analyse the formal properties of media as well as the formal conditions of mediated messages.” Henkin suggests that the messages and communications that these media communicate, or their meaning is often separated from the formalist aspect of the medium itself. In the case of filmmaking process. A shot that used to be achieved using paint, film stock and plexiglass glass, can now be achieved in photoshop. The communication, however, is still identical, the outcome is still the same, one might argue, therefore, that only media processes are innovated.

At the beginning of this course Dan asked us to analyse why certain objects are media. Our group was given “doors”. We decided that doors are media because media by definition is a something that communicates something else. A door communicates people, if we change the mechanism by which the door opens, but the same person comes out the other side, is it innovation?

As much as new media isn’t necessarily always innovative, a few create entirely new ways of interacting with the media world.”From the iPod has emerged related ideas and terms in the new media sphere as well, including podcasting, which basically means producing and distributing audio files (not necessarily music) via the Internet for listening on computers or portable MP3 players.” John V. Pavlik in his book Media in the Digital Age explains, “Audiences are transforming into users in the digital media age. For most of the history of the media, the audience was characterized by pas-siveness—in the position of only receiving the reports published and broadcast by centralized news and media organizations. […] Through the advent of digital and networked technologies, the audi- ence has dramatically begun to reinvent itself as an active participant in the public-communication process.” These are certainly not new ideas, and I make an important point of that. But it does highlight that the form of new media is instrumental, not so much in the way meaning is constructed but certainly, and most importantly the way it is consumed and herein lies the innovation of digital media process.

It is difficult to extrapolate such a board idea and apply it to filmmaking. Certainly the creation of new genres and the ability for audiences to participate more easily in films is certainly a result of new media process. The accessibility of filmmaking techniques has made it easier for once passive audiences to not only participate but become creatives themselves. Pop films no longer exist on their own self contained tape, but they are constantly parodied and ‘memed’ by audience-come-critics.

In creating my final assignment for Old’s Cool, I set out with the intention of creating a very much more analogue outcome. Having explored the idea aesthetics, formality and materiality in my second and third assignments, I thought it would be important to add an old media feel to my new media artefact. However, in creating the piece I realised, as so often is the case that time restrictions in production and tight turn-arounds in post limited my ability to use older media. Digital media is faster, more malleable and quicker to experiment with. The conceptual change that the artefact underwent was significant and this was necessary. My focus changed from my initial awe and wonder at old processes like matte painting, “Wow, there’s a magnificent amount of time and effort that went into that effect.” to the more creatively open-ended question, “If I can achieve anything with digital technology, how far can I take the concept of mattes?” The result was an exploration of human form and media form. Media being a distinctly human pursuit, communication through anything other than speech, really, being a uniquely human trait. Expression is really what gets innovated by technology. New Media techniques are just evolved forms of expression, formality that is easier with deeper possibility.

Christian Schwarzenegger’s Exploring Digital Yesterdays – Reflections on New Media and the Future of Communication History delves into the idea that digital media technology is extremely transient and the line between private and public, the line between audience and producer is so blurred. “these are the challenges posed by digitalization, which is routinely said to be possibly one of the most important phenomena to have influenced Western culture over the last few decades (Jenkins 2006; Grant and Wilkinson 2009; Balbi 2011).” In attempting to make an accurate comment on New Media Innovation, I think what we have to ask ourselves as media practitioners is, “What are we ignoring that we have lost with new media?” Part of the difficulty of looking back on history is attempting to not taint it with nostalgia.

What I have learned across this studio is that to truly understand any new media process, you first have to understand its origin. In class someone made a comment about how they couldn’t believe that a record worked; that grooves on the surface of a piece of vinyl could produce music. I responded, “isn’t it more unbelievable that a laser would read ones and zeros on a CD and it make music?” but I suppose it isn’t really. In making our “Super 8” films (and I use the term Super 8 loosely), I realised how much of an impact that style of filmmaking had on me. I would never have thought that I would find myself learning from shooting with DV tape but there is something you learn, something that’s forced on you, in economically shooting, that you don’t learn when you have an infinite amount of digital storage media at your disposal. Each imperfection, each roadblock that old media’s legacy systems present, is really just a gateway to new media innovation. But I’ve learned to respect old media so much more over this course because now I understand its worth so much more.

Henkin, David M. “On Forms and Media.” Representations, vol. 104, no. 1, 2008, pp. 34–36. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2008.104.1.34.

PAVLIK, JOHN V. “INVENTORS AND INNOVATORS OF DIGITAL MEDIA.” Media in the Digital Age, Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 214–233. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/pavl14208.16.

Oggolder, Christion. “Inside – Outside. Web History and the Ambivalent Relationship between Old and New Media.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 37, no. 4 (142), 2012, pp. 134–149. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41756479.

Having come to the end of the editing process for Project Brief 4, I can say that the outcome is nothing like I imagined.

Click here to watch video.

My intention with Sleep was to explore Matte Paintings, which kind of morphed into Mattes in general and in the end, became much more about the process of creating picture in picture mattes with my main character. Thomas was kind enough to offer his services as an actor, especially kind considering the script I gave him and it’s complete non-sensical nature. Unfortunately the venue we had to shoot in was not going to allow more than two hours for the day that Thomas was free to shoot and the script in it’s original form would have taken the whole day. It was at this point that I had to condense the idea and figure out how to achieve the lighting effects in far less than half the time. The solution was to use two LED panel lights to light the entire film. I balanced one light at 5600K and the other at 3200K to give the scenes a warm look and swapped the lights along the 180 degree line to indicate that Thomas was asleep.

This enabled me to shoot between the classroom location and Dominick’s daydream location quickly and because of this replicate shots and camera moves so that they could be matted later between the two. A great example is this shot:

Matted, Combined shot from both sides of the set.

The shot on top is a shot of Thomas at the desk lit in only 5600K from behind which has been Black matted over the bottom shot. The bottom shot is the inverse of him at the piano lit with 5600K directly above and in front of him, with 3200K filling it in. The shots were shot sequentially with the same lens at the same distance so that the image would overlap in the right place.

The process of editing was the most excruciating because even then, I felt really rushed. The shot that I had planned to use as my primary matte painted shot in the film didn’t really work out as I had hoped due to the short time I had on set.

Digital Painting on the iPad with an Apple Pencil

I wanted to bring a level of authenticity and old school to the film but the work I had painted on the iPad ended up being not only far too cartoonish (I’m not really an artist) but also would only have worked with the original shot I had been planning for the film and due to the rushed nature of the shoot, I had to improvise. Still, I managed to work in the moon rock and stars into the final video.

The mattes themselves took a while to get right. At first, I wanted to use a Screen blending mode (which would have been much simpler than the effect here) however, the screen blending mode was too weak and even slightly off-white tones were still rendered transparently. Linear keying Black also produced a similar effect except it desaturated the image too much and was laced with artefacts. The final effect here is a blend between a Luma Matte with a very high threshold and lots of Level compression.

I think, overall the video is a success. It incorporates and explores the elements I wanted to explore, the way I got there in the end was a little shaky and I desperately wish I had more time during production so that some of the ideas I had for Post Production could have been more fully realised.

The beginning of Project Brief 4 has been quite shaky. At the beginning of semester I wrote that I was fascinated by the idea of exploring matte paintings, knowing full well that that was next to impossible as the technique is basically never used anymore. The immediate question became what aspect of matte paintings can I use, how can I use them to inform my process in creating something that works.

In our studio class for Week 10 Dan linked me to a blog tribute to Golden Age Hollywood effects called NZ Pete’s Matte Shot (mouthful). I was extremely impressed by the fact that Dan knew of this obscure blog’s existence but also by the content on the page itself.

Many of the shots detailed on the blog were impressive but the one which stood out to me and the one which triggered my idea for my project was the shot with the incredibly large moon. It was actually sort of a call back to an image I had seen in conjunction with a song I studies in high school called Sleep by classical composer Dominick Argento. The song is for classical voice but my idea was to remove the vocal track and attempt to narrate the lyrics with visuals.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my [languish]1 and restore [the]2 light,
With dark forgetting of my cares, return;
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventur'd youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, th' [imagery of our]3 day-desires
To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

My concept is to build the song out of lyrical pieces with certain beats having certain actions associated with them. One of the hardest things about actually shooting this will be finding a space that makes sense to shoot it and how on earth to pull off the technical challenges of having a character fly with only one-two weeks to actually shoot the film.

For the mattes. I wanted to use still shots predominantly and use Visual Effects and digital painting to create the final shots. As the Old’s Cool course is designed to explore the dichotomy of New Media from Old media techniques. I thought it might be worth exploring new media techniques that incorporate the ideas of old media like digital paint process. I am unsure yet how to achieve this but I would love for the stars scene and the moon climbing scene to use actually painted mattes.

The next step is realising the human matte. My main character Dominick has several scenes that need to take place whereby the lighting changes very quickly and then the silhouette creates a screen matte for the background. This is very simple in the computer (much simpler than the film days though the concept of screening is again, much like painting, the same.) This is something I can explore in my final reflection, the idea that techniques may change medium or the process become simplified but we never really invent new concepts we just morph them into new ones.

Reflections from an interview with a bespoke shoemaker

So often, when asking someone about their job, you hear about how busy, difficult or frustrating their job is but one of the things that most excited me about this assignment was the invitation to interview someone who loves what they do. My approach to the task was relatively straight forward but I certainly didn’t expect it to become so last minute. One thing that became apparent towards the end was how fast the turn-around was going to have to be to have a finished product worthy of even submitting. In thinking about the process it might even have been wiser to start by choosing a field and doing my own research and not relying on other people’s connections to get me in the door. There were three times where I thought I had an interview subject and they turned me down after already saying yes to an interview.

What instantly struck me about José was not only his passion for his job but also a humble authenticity. He would be the first to comment on his faults or an imperfection in a piece he had worked on. As I was asking him the questions I had planned, simple questions, “Is there a bit of a renaissance of bespoke fashion in Melbourne?” I started cottoning on to a deeper story, somehow José had gone from a nine to five desk job to a bespoke cobbler working downstairs in what feels like a basement and loving every moment of it. Something I realised whilst talking to José was just how much time it takes to make one pair of shoes. His process and focus are extraordinary and I was surprised that he was only working on one pair of shoes at the time of my visit. I almost began to wonder how he earns a living and yet he didn’t seem to want to work on anything else except his shoes.

The materiality is interesting, like what I discussed in project brief two the physicality of the shoes (like physical media) is so intrinsically linked to the way in which we interact with it. The process of designing them, sowing the pieces together, slicing the leather. There is something tactile and authentic in the act of creating with your hands. I think often in industries the process of innovation is void of reflection. Reflection of not only what could be improved in a previously existing thing but what makes the original thing great. No matter how extensive and ordered our iTunes libraries, it’s nowhere near as satisfying as an alphabetised vinyl archive and I think the way we interact with things, small insignificant things makes a huge difference. In my second project brief I explored materiality in the context of changing technology and though I didn’t directly quote his work, Giovan Francesco Lanzara’s book on materiality probably had the most prolific role in inspiring my thoughts. He states that, “The thinkable functionalities to be pursued and the forms to be designed are not independent from the potential hidden in the materials available for molding. A paper chair will not sustain your weight, your name cannot be written on water, an aircraft cannot be made of wood[…]We must therefore learn to think of matter as a dynamic generator of materials waiting to be actualized and trans- formed by design.” What I love about the way he articulates the sentence is the way in which he perfectly describes the affordances of each material what I then wonder is, what does the new technological advances mean for these affordances? What can we no longer do? What was critical in not only our interactions on a basic level but also in a “social context” as he puts it? How much of our unique imprint, our personality (as José would say) have we lost in fashion because of the advancements made by technology and manufacturing? How much of our self-expression as creatives is hindered by our modern process?

I stumbled across Mary Blewett’s article in the Journal of Social History about the ‘artisan tradition’ of shoemaking, almost accidentally as I was doing research on materiality. Interesting that those exact words are used on José’s business card. In her article, Blewett spends a good deal of time reflecting on gender attitudes but early in the piece makes a fascinating statement, “The pre-industrial phase of New England shoe production was a golden age of artisan life, and shoemakers were central to the rise of worker protest against early industrial capitalism.” This was the sense I got from talking to José, when asked about the significance of shoemaking today, his reasons were very much about creativity and uniqueness in stark contrast to large corporations mass producing soulless products in Asia. Of course, that doesn’t mean someone didn’t take pride in the design of those products and I think it’s very easy when listening to José to get caught up in the emotion of the craft and the overwhelming sense of beauty in the material.

I started thinking about filmmaking and how many actual ‘hands on’ practises still exist. Is there something that we have lost in cutting in the box. One of the most obvious examples of craft being demanded above technical perfection is the incessant practical vs digital effects debate. A similar argument is put forward that there is a tangibility to practical effects and, naturally, a falsity or a sort of uncanny fake-ness to digital visual effects. The love and care that went into building and crafting the miniatures that flash by the frame for seconds or painting a matte painting with an actual brush. I think this is almost entirely what José was attempting to suggest, that there’s something more real about a real paint brush on Perspex than a tool in After Effects, there’s something real about selecting a leather and fitting it to the customer than just buying a shoe that’s already made.

As you can imagine, there isn’t a whole lot of academic writing on cobblers however, as I started to connect the dots between such an obscure occupation and their identity as an artisan or craftsperson. Gerald Porter’s journal article suggests that in almost every song a character is identified by their occupation. His article is an interesting exploration of cobblers and music, interestingly a thread echoed by José as I interviewed him; he talked about how his heritage (more specifically his memory or El Salvadorian artisans and the music of El Salvador) links to his practise. He even mentioned how he dances whilst creating his shoes. There seems to be not just a renaissance in artisan shoemaking but also a renaissance in a desire for authenticity in almost every creative discipline. Music artists similarly often record acoustic versions of songs without any of the electronic additions we’re familiar with in modern popular music. Of course, this music also goes through a computer, it’s not as if the defining factor is the lack of machines in the process, it’s the lack of decoration, the lack of perfection, even. There’s a link between identity, authenticity and craft that I think it becomes an interesting relationship. When José talks about personality he’s talking about the uniquity of someone using their hands to express themselves. Where the identity of the creative provides their own unique signature and style, the authenticity of the work is what communicates that aspect of them; something that isn’t authentic, that isn’t true to the artist and can’t speak to their heritage and their passion. Finally, the craft, the actual skill in making the thing is what draws people to the work itself.

For my final project, I would love to find where these three facets intersect with my own practise, what my identity as a creative is and how it could be inscribed on my work through authenticity. The truth is I’m entirely unsure of what that is. I think my interview with José taught me that no idea is truly realised until you interrogate it from an angle you weren’t expecting. When I interviewed José I was finding myself constantly adjusting my questions to fit something I was noticing about him, about his space, about his process. And I left with a very different idea of him than I would have had purely from asking the questions I was writing in class. When I arrived, I was so much more interested in understanding shoemaking and why it’s important and the craft of it, that I almost missed the person behind the craft.

Blewett, Mary H. “Work, Gender and the Artisan Tradition in New England Shoemaking, 1780-1860.” Journal of Social History, vol. 17, no. 2, 1983, pp. 221–248.

Porter, Gerald. “Cobblers All: Occupation as Identity and Cultural Message.” Folk Music Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 43–61.

Lanzara, Giovan Francesco. “Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World Edited by Paul M. Leonardi, Bonnie A. Nardi, and Jannis Kallinikos (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 384 Pp. $34.00. (paperback). (ISBN: 978‐0199664061.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66.12 (2015): 2717-720. Web.