Last Workshop we were given a podcast about sleep. It’s no rare knowledge that sleep is important, but i really liked how they present the material, by showing the sleeping nature of other animals. We discussed the techniques used in the podcast, like how the use the background noise of the found recordings, to create a somehow visual appearance…
Category: Media 1
Media and Fear
Have you wondered what those posters of portraits with Aussie word written on them are?
I first realized that there were a number of similar posters that begun appearing in different wall across the Melbourne CBD, from the lane near my apartment, to the plaster walls in front of building 10. At first, I thought this was some kind of “graffiti” that has no meaning whatsoever. But I kept seeing the damn (I don’t know why, I got annoyed seeing these posters to be very distinguishable) posters everywhere, and I finally googled it. I was directed into Pozible, a project fundraising started by Peter Drew, much like Kickstarter/Indiegogo, and found it to be very profounding and ‘cool’.
The project asks us what it means to be the real Australians. It tells about Monga Khan, who bypassed the White Australian Policy by being a cameleer, proving essential to the Australian economy back in 1850’s. The White Australian Policy was a conduct created to limit the number of migrations, mainly because of the gold rush, and to only allow immigrants from Britain or Europe to come in Australia. The Policy was abolished in 1966, and soon the 1975 Racial Discrimination arose. The legal side has been put to justice, but has the spirit of the nation justified?
“What is a real AUSSIE?” is not the first project by Peter Drew. Before this, “Real Australians Say Welcome” posters were stuck up all across Australia. The arrow Peter is trying to direct us here is that good citizens of Australia must accept every refugee in need. I solemnly agree on this matter, and if you ask why, it’s because almost all of us are immigrants ourselves. Excluding Aboriginals, All first generation Australians came from overseas. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2011 over a quarter of Australians are born overseas, and one fifth of Australians have parents that are born overseas. Australia is basically a nation filled with refugees, and closing our gates to the little boats is cruel and hauntingly ironic.
There are plenty counter-arguments to rebut my statement earlier, but I will not be discussing into that context. Rather, I want to discuss the borderline of racism, and fear perpetuated by the media, the all glory source of information and entertainment, given light by my recent reading by contextual studies. that I am currently taking. The media, let it be the internet, radio, television, posters, has created a specific image, specific value towards some people with a specific race and religious beliefs. An article by the Brisbane Sunday mail 28 March 2010 (source: Refugee Council), showed a picture of a woman wearing a hijab with her child in a supermarket, depicted by the newsletter as “suspected immigration detainees”. The word ‘suspected’ heavily implied a negative connotation towards the matter. Fear that the number of illegal boats were rising were abused by politicians to stir Australians left and right. You can see how easy people are swayed by the media, by looking at the 1938 War of the World radio drama, broadcasted over one hour and managing to create a mass panic, despite the fact that usually they had only a few listeners. Imagined what would you have done at the time of the broadcast. You would be calling your friends, telling them to switch channels because you are listening to the humankind’s extinction. Fear is a powerful tool, powerful enough to group ethnicities, to group beliefs, and to group our societies.
This post won’t be an essay. I’m just noticing the topic that I am currently discussing is somehow connected to the media i’ve been watching. Do you guys have an opinion on this matter? Do you agree? that Media is a powerful tool, but sometimes used to toy with our perception?
Noticing
So two days ago i just read John Mason’s “the discipline of noticing”. Of course, I didn’t try to do any of the excercise he mentioned but he taught me one thing, that to notice, we require effort. Because we are given thousands of stimulation every day, our mind would have to be selective and blurs out all the ones not necessary for us. Maybe that is what marketing student try to overcome #randomthought.
To notice is not just to experience, but also to reflect upon it. We see advertisements, we feel the heat, we hear the taxi’s engine, but we do not notice. What the text meant by noticing is by realizing that I am typing, I am looking at my screen, I have acomputer with, I am studying abroad, my carpet pattern’s is circular, and so on. When I travel to a new town, I always have this perception of unfamiliarity, that a place is new, and thus everything that I saw wasy interesting to me. But the roads that I had travelled in my hometown for the past 17 years seemed colourless and not vibrant. But when I try to change my perception, as if everything that I saw was new, I began to notice how much things had changed. Another simpler example is your growth. You seem to never notice that you were getting taller and older, until you’ve seen a photograph of yourself when you were still an infant.
To notice is to make a distinction, to create foreground and background, to distinguish some ‘thing’ from its sorroundings.
John also describes about recording. To him, recording is the desire to keep a memento of the things you notice, in the form of a note, journal, or for me, photographs.
By making a brief-but-vivid note of some incident, you both externalise it from your immediate flow of thoughts, and you give yourself access to it at later date, for further anaysis and preparation for the future.
I think this is one of the reasons why we are subjected to read this article. To make great media content we have to notice all the media sorrounding us, to be inside the group. We would use that to show people the things left behind, un-noticed. Because sometimes we try to create the most interesting and complex form of media, when we forget the simplest ones. What I learn from this article is to notice the simplest things, and figure out the best technique to represent what I notice in the most interesting form.
Nichols Barbershop
I had the amazing opportunity of interviewing one of Melbourne’s best barber. I hope that you guys would like this video. I used the sony MCE50 to record the entire video, mainly because I don’t know how to use an external on my own camera, and to fill in one blank in the requirement. But because I hadn’t tinker with the camcorder very long, I didn’t know how to set the audio input, and that’s why you’ll hear quite a bit annoying noise in my videos. At first I didn’t know how to structure the video, but after reading a bit of the exercise sheet, I understood a bit what I was going to do. Peter Nichols, the person I interviewed, turned to be a very photogenic person, and not camera-shy at all, mainly because he already has an article made after him (shown in the video). He told me one of his favourite type of music is jazz & blues, so I searched the best creative commons jazz music that would suit the mood. I finally used all of the music from Bensound. Truthfully at first I didn’t like this song, but after an hour searching other music, I realised I kept comparing them to the one from Bensound. Since the video is about Peter and his Barbershop, and I don’t think his family would kindly accept me to record all of them, plus the time limit, and the release form they would had to sign, sticking to his barber shop would be better. I luckily got a footage of him in action, to show his skill, being in the hair styling industry for 24 years! For the video transitions, since I haven’t been using Premiere Pro for long, and the only other Adobe apps that I’ve used is photoshop, I stick to using the transition presets from the app. For the colour of the video, I desaturated them to make the video a little bit older, and I liked how it turned out. one of the challenges I had in the video is searching for found footage. I wanted to find videos of old 90’s barbershop but didn’t manage to find one. Luckily he told me he grew up in a horse-racing family. But the worst challenge I had to face would be the audio. My tutor Louise Turley was true, editing audio is 100x harder that video! There’s was no concrete visual form of the audio, and trying to cut out one spot sound is a nightmare, you had to do it without breaking of the subject’s vocal, yet the sounds are all integrated. You will notice in the video, an Alicia key’s song playing in the background. I basically couldn’t get rid of the sound, given my zero expertise on using Audition. So I let the background noise in to somehow cover Alicia’s voice (sorry Alicia Keys, I still love your songs). I got inspired by one of the videos Paul Richard gave, that showed the multiple frameworks, and tried to implement it. But I didn’t do it that extreme, just a couple of video cropping and combined together. At the end of the video I changed the music to introduce a brighter mood and personality, and give big titles in front of the video. I did that mainly because his quotes were very empowering, and because I don’t want to raise the audio’s decibel. I don’t want to ruin people’s ear. Overall the best aspect I think from the video is end part, I liked how I just bluntly smash a +100 font size there, and the worst aspect would be the audio where you can hear Alicia Keys singing, but honestly I am very happy to be able to pull a video like this, and to had the courage to ask Mr. Nichols, because I had never met him before, he was a complete stranger to me. but after this, I think I would go to his barbershop every month. There are some things that I regret not doing for this video, for example asking Mr Nichols to repeat the question before answering them, and I forgot to ask him to mention his name :’). The irony was I tried so hard to get all the best shot, and I missed the fundemantal ones. This assignment had taught me to be more confident in asking people, but at the same time knowing the ethics and the procedures in doing so
“We even use it behind bars!”
I read the article by Oscar Schwartz this afternoon. It kinda surprised me, positively and negatively. well when I thought that media technology is everywhere, I didn’t think this would be really everywhere. Oscar Schwartz tells us a unique experience he had with a current inmate. how he got to talk to this stranger? through tags. Thank you Brian, Rachel, Paul,…
Collaborative Work
Rachel gave us a link for Tom Wujec’s ted talk explaining about collaborative work and taught us how impvortant collaborative work is. When she asked our opinion about group work, she was met with a loud loud sound of sighs coming all from our mouths. It is true, and from a personal perspective, almost all of the group work that…
URBAN LIFE RMIT
So at week 5 we did an interview exercise using a Sony MCE50, a “cute” handy camcorder that does a very good job at recording videos. The topic for the exercise was our tips on surviving university life. My team and I did the exercise quite well and after storing the files on our own computer, we edited the footage individually. This is what my edit turn out like. I am quite pleased with the video, the music makes the fun vibe that i want, although i didn’t put all of the question and answers inside, I feel the video is already complete. Maybe some of the minor problems was the audio, the background noise was pretty loud, and we had a little confusion using the tripod. Why is the opening sequence that red you ask? because the RMIT logo is red. Actually i tried to put just an overlay colour to the video, but it didn’t turn out quite well, so I tried playing with other types of blends, and turns out the blend mode “hard mix” makes it look like a pop art, so I just went with that. Overall i was quite happy with how the video turns out.
Inspiration Week #5 Angelica Dass
I was scrolling through Ted Talks and i came across a very interesting thumbnail. I watched the video and was introduced to Angelica Daas’s project Humanae. (if you’re too lazy to watch the awesome video, continue reading) Humanae brings a new perspective about human’s view of diversity. She took the photograph of the participants in a white background and white flash light,…
A sense of relief
Reading Michael Rabiger and Robert Mckeee’s article, i realised that one of the crucial aspects of a movie is the ending. A good movie creates a sense of relief for the audience. Some filmmakers challange this idea and still manage to make great movies, but for the most part, the ending sets the comment for the movie. We’ve always have our…
Inspiration Week #4
I love this video by Andrew Norton so much. A travelling montage like the ones you would see on a youtube’s channel, except you don’t only see their face filling half of the screen. I like how he narrates the video by having a phone call with his partner, it makes me feel closer to the video and more engaged somehow. He shows the beautiful galapagos island while having giggles with his wife.
Another video edited by him was the one you would see people share on Facebook. This video explains what your older self would tell to your younger self. I feel like they were giving advice to their younger self to just shrug it off, don’t give a f*ck to your insecurities, and just be who you are. A very inspiring video