While most of the sounds in my audio-visual project for Assignment 4 Solace were created by me, a few of them had to be sourced from creative commons domains. They are as follows.

Auction Ambience 1 SOUND Effect – SOUND Effects Public Domain

Auction Ambience 1 SOUND Effect

Close Church Wedding Bells Ringing #2 Sound Effect – SoundEffectsFactory

Close Church Wedding Bells Ringing #2 Sound Effect

Happy birthday song music only best ever – Mobile Mania

happy birthday song music only best ever

Needle Drop 02 Sound Effect – Sounds Recorded

Needle Drop 02 Sound Effect

Romantic | Royalty Free Music – www.bensound.com

https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music/track/romantic

Small Group Whispering Sound Effect – SoundEffectsFactory

Small Group Whispering Sound Effect

Noticing and Non-Fiction are two things that before this studio, I would of never considered crucial aspects of any type of filmmaking. However, after completing Seeing the Unseen V2, these ideas and practices will stay with me forever, whether I’m making a film centered around these ideas or not. The term ‘non-fiction’ no longer just means factual or real to me anymore. Everything in filmmaking, whether it be narratively driven or not, focuses around aspects of non-fiction, and always need to be considered. Furthermore, for me, noticing is now about being present in something, whether that be in the shooting stage, the editing stage or even the viewing stage.

And it is the latter statement that has really been a big part about my creation of the Assignment 4 audio-visual project over this past month or so. Just watching how people experience your work, noticing what they react to and what they don’t react to. Whether it be when you’re pitching your initial idea, showing a demo or even the full project, just lingering on how a person interacts with your work has been so beneficial to my reflective and creative processes throughout this assignment, and is something I have never really considered to this extent before Assignment 4.

A prominent example of this for me was watching people interact with my Korsakow project Solace on the exhibition night. Just paying attention to how people maneuvered through my interactive world, how long they lingered on a particular frame, whether they just rushed it, what order they proceeded through and so on. As soon as I came up with and developed the idea for my final project for STUV2, I wanted each person’s experience with Solace to be different in some way, and to actually see that in person was really beautiful and inspiring. In a really wanky way, I wanted everything about my film to be self driven in the way of understanding. I want each audience member to form their own opinions and theories about what each scene means, the narrative of it all and what they noticed in each frame. I have an understanding of what it is about, but what I am personally really proud of about it is how i still pick up on little details in the shots that I didn’t necessarily before, and how that tiny details can say a whole lot about what you notice in a  scene. This also allowed me to see some flaws in my work however, such as how the safety lives on the locations can confuse a viewer on if they are finished with a scene, or if there is more to discover. I couldn’t fix this ultimately, but it is impossible to get stuck now, unless you’re supposed to, so that’s good.

Something that was unlike my typical creative process that occurred during Assignment 4 was my lack of sticking to my original plan. As evident by my research posts, I originally wanted to create a traditional video filmed on mobile that had you viewing different things moving within a frame and layered on each other, similar to Midtown by Max Schleser. Pretty much the only aspect of my original concept that continued into Solace was my emphasis on stillness, and how you can notice so much through so little movement, as every change is heightened.

I was originally skeptical about this studio during the first few weeks. I felt like I had misunderstood what the classes were going to be about, as I have typically been a narrative film maker, both for school/university and for recreational tasks. However, as we started delving deeper into the ideas and patters of noticing, the different techniques to notice as well as the assignments themselves, I then started to realise that I had definitely made the right decision being in this studio. Seeing the Unseen V2 has taught me so much about filmmaking but it has also taught me a lot about myself and how I operate as a creative. It has given me insight into what I generally notice when trying to create, or what I tend to look out for in my day to day life.

If I were to create three learning outcomes that I have sustained from the class as a whole, it would be:

• Listen to the feedback of your peers and tutors. You’ve got a big head, and sometimes you miss the small things that someone from the outside notices.
• Try to do something new with each project you make, even if it is only something small.
• Don’t be afraid to scrap anything and everything if you’re not 100% proud of it.
• And a bonus one, sometimes, you just need to sit and let yourself absorb the world around you.

projects.hannahbrasier.com/student-work/solace

(Recommended you open in Firefox)

On Wednesday the class each showed rough drafts of their audio / audio-visual components of Assignment 4. It was really great to see almost everyone’s ideas slowly and surely come into a reality, and it was really inspiring to see how passionate everyone was about what and how they chose to notice. I was a little nervous about showing mine. I really wanted feedback, but I wasn’t sure how to express what I wanted to tell and get people to notice. I think this was the case because I really feel like the best way to experience my Korsakow project is knowing nothing and just diving head first into it, and seeing what you as a viewer notice.

On a side note, I discovered RMIT had cords for my underused micro-HDMI input and was actually able to play it through my computer, which was pretty cool and a first time for me.

I only had the intro and a room complete in Korsakow to present, but I felt like that was a clear showcase of what my project was going to be like and how audiences would experience it. Some great feedback I received was to use screengrabs of where the actual video leads to. To elaborate, when we open up to the shot of the front door, instead of the preview of the next video being a shot of inside the hallway, it should be a close up of the door, so people can connect to the journey more.

I’m really excited to continue crafting this process of noticing. Korsakow is nothing like I have ever used before, and I feel strongly about its ability to allow people to notice more, because the interactive aspect of it is such a different type of engagement. I really hope people notice different aspects of the project in my Assignment 4, and that each person walks away feeling a little different.

So for the past few days, I have been filming for the audio-visual aspect of my Assignment 4 around my home. A key aspect of my film is sound, and how sound can add meaning and get people to read between the lines of a shot and notice new things. And for that reason, a majority of my shots need complete silence, including from me. While most of the filming sessions have been done whilst people are out of the house or tucked away in their own rooms, silence has been hard to maintain. I have been recording with my DLSR, and while I will probably replace the audio linked to the video with the mic I have borrowed to record sound with, it’s always good to have backup sound.

One of the biggest things I’ve learnt from these sessions about filming your subjects in complete silence is how much more you notice in and out of frame. There’s something about not utilizing a sense that enhances the others. For example, one of my close up shots an audience member can view is a dusty record player, hidden away by plants. After framing up my shot of the object and pressing record, I noticed a soft spinning noise and saw that the record player was spinning a record without the needle pressed down to it, creating this mesmerising cycle that audience members may not pick up on.

Two things I love about this discovery is the previously touched on subtly of it. Not every viewer is going to notice that in their first viewing, maybe even at all, and is there for the people noticing and paying the most attention to what’s on screen. Furthermore, the idea of a ‘broken record’ spinning with no intention plays into the subsequent narrative/theme of my final piece, in which the house suggests a broken home and a lost marriage. Again, two things only the people who are truly noticing will pick up on, and something I definitely wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for the silence.

In Wednesday’s class, a handful of the class sat around a table and gathered all and any pieces of our Assignment 4 project we had ready. For some, this meant pulling out test footage and/or audio. For me, this meant inspirational research pieces and idea briefs. We went around the circle in a round robin fashion and both people were given 5 minutes each to present what they had at the time for their partner, describe and evaluate on their ideas, and get feedback from the person they were presenting to, and vice versa.

My idea for the audio-visual aspect of Assignment 4 is to create an interactive journey through a house and tell a story using audio about what happened, using the application, Korsakow. This was a very new idea to me at the time of pitching to my peers, and while it is more developed as I write this development blog post, during Wednesday’s class, I was very bare bones.

One of the most helpful ideas my partners and I developed was to talk about how you ‘know through vision, but you learn through audio’. This is exactly what I want to with my final piece. Static or slow panning shots of still objects and environments, but with the soundscape I want to create, the story and context of the piece will be clearer / more open to interpretation.

Some other ideas that have been really helpful were the idea of slow pans, an excellent mic hired from building 9 and how moving through a space can tell a lot about the environment. These have helped me develop the narrative and choice aspects of my final piece. How to guide audiences through a story and make them think they are discovering it for themselves.

This feedback session was really helpful, especially in inspiring me to make what I want to make and evaluating how I want to do it.

In class today, we learnt how to create and experiment with creating interactive films using specific programs. The idea of an interactive film is to have the viewer guide themselves through the story, picking what they watch next, and how they experience the project overall. I found it really interesting how simple the tool we actually used to create the interactive films Korsakow was! While the interface is a little dated, and the software itself isn’t scaled to the right resolution on my computer, I’ve really enjoyed messing around with the software, and creating patterns and rhythms of videos for viewers to navigate their way through.

The feature I find most interesting is the way you can create tags, and link pieces of media together through these tags to create an algorithm that suggests the next videos to watch based off the similar tags. Alternatively, you could have a completely random process, but the calculated and formulated tagging method is really unique to the Korsakow program. We experimented with both the randomized and calculated tagging in class, and while I struggled to formulate a neat layout I liked, it was exciting to see such little programming equate to such endless possibilities!

I was inspired and experimented with Hannah’s method of grouping and linking videos together, and had four tags in my calculated linking test using Korsakow. These included; water, industry, stillness and movement. While I need to work on my theming skills, these four tags allowed me to link all the videos together to at least two degrees of separation so that you couldn’t get stuck in a loop of the same looping videos. Furthermore, I’ve been having troubles setting layouts for the videos, as the layout is always a couple changes behind my newest version, and I cannot really get it to update without creating a new project.

These are all minor issues that can be ironed out over time, nevertheless, and I am excited to continue to use Korsakow in the future for my final audio-visual piece for Assignment 4

One of the biggest struggles I’ve had with developing my Assignment 4 (besides a little sickness) is my indecisiveness when it comes to picking what I want to ‘notice’. Throughout Assignment 3, my main theme/idea I focused on noticing was the interactions between nature and industry and their byproducts. While that came quite naturally to me, new ideas for the audio-visual component of Assignment 4 have not come as easy. Throughout this semester of Seeing the Unseen V2, I’ve had this fascination with ‘stillness’ and ‘movement within stillness’. Almost like a real-life cinemagraphs. While I’m not entirely sure how and where I want to explore noticing through stillness, and small movements, something that inspired me to lean towards stillness was this poem by Myronn Hardy named STILLNESS.

While this poem has nothing inherently to do with this course, they way Hardy builds this scene and has the reader go through this delicately crafted journey where everything feels still and silent. Hardy’s beautifully constructed passages tell this emotionally gripping story about lost childhood, empty promises and torn relationships. But to me, it feels so self-driven. While Hardy has meticulously crafted the structure of this poem, I feel like I am exploring it alone, the first time ever. That feeling is something I want to evoke in my interactive final piece for Assignment 4.

If I were to visually imagine this poem, the whole world would be still, with a camera panning around to these focal points within a story, all taking place in one location, a house alone on a hill overlooking the coast. This isolated, still, moment in time location is something I might consider focusing on for the audio-visual aspect of my Assignment 4. Like one park, one house, one room. These are just first ideas, but I feel a lot more confident in exploring noticing now for my final assignment after unpacking that poem.

Hardy, M. (2015). STILLNESS. Callaloo, 38(2), 328-329,426. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/docview/1680991007?accountid=13552

One of my biggest points of contention when starting to produce and develop the audio-visual aspect of Assignment 4 is whether or not to use a phone camera, and if I don’t use one, use a DSLR or a hired camera from RMIT resources. There are pros and cons to each, while the convenient, portable and spontaneous nature of my phone lends itself perfectly to ‘noticing’, the quality of the content I capture, both movement wise and picture quality, wallow in comparison to the steady and crisp footage gained by using a DSLR and tripod. However, the aesthetics of the phone camera add a layer of noticing in itself. So, which do I pick?

While I had been leaning more to the DSLR and tripod side of filmmaking, my opinion changed after reading Aesthetics of Mobile Media Art by Camile Baker, Kasia Molga and considering how much I’ve spoken about him in this assignment already, my idol Max Schleser. This paper published by the trio discusses the history and insane potential for creation that the progression of mobile phones has had on media practitioners, from the now nostalgic pixel quality of primitive phones to the now incredible HD (and now 4k) capabilities of today’s smartphones. The article addresses the pros of smartphone media creation that have been rattling in my mind; its ‘intimacy’ ‘portability factor’ and their ‘predilection for close-ups’.

While being an interesting and engaging read, this academic work by 3 worldly scholars have given me a whole new perspective on how mobile media has been progressing, and their confidence in the platform and its inferior picture quality (in comparison to media specific gear) being portrayed more as an aesthetical choice has given me the confidence to almost certainly use my mobile smartphone as the main filming device for Assignment 4.

Baker, C, Schleser, M. & Molga, K. (2009), ‘Aesthetics of mobile media art’, Journal of Media Practice 10: 2&3, pp. 101-122