Plain and White – Page 3 – by Jason Hendriks

Coming up with Ideas

by jasonhendriks on March 13, 2017 in media 3 • 0 Comments

Progressing further into the month, I had a love & hate relationship with my bed. My bed kept flirting with me to put my body on it. I have work to do. but then it put on this blue sheet and and it somehow pats itself, and I couldn’t hold it anymore.

Anyway, during this peaceful Labour day I start to brainstorm ideas I want to do for my second project brief. I decided to do a mimesis on Duane Michal’s work, around the whole concept of how his photography works, and that is a self-expressed story. The unique style of Duane Michal’s and his flexibility photography style caught my attention. He succesfully expressed the questions and visualized emotions and thought he has in hi mind. He is expressing the reality of his state-of-mind and I love that he is brave enough to do so. I like to call that behaviour “not giving a f*ck to society” .As I posted before his work usually revolves around love, mortality, philosohpy, sexuality. But since I react like a 5 year old when talking about sexuality, I wouldn’t indulge in that topic. Instead, I would focus the theme around technology, Friendship, and Happiness. I want to visualize something that I have in my mind for a while now. The things that I have brainstormed were mostly expressions I want to tell the world, about technology and self-imagery, One funny story I experienced, a question that has been on my mind, and one of my hidden personalities. It is a first step, brainstorming, so the ideas would have to be carved and carved until it’s perfect. For the project’s technicalities side, I have thought about the project’s process that utilize different kinds of light situations, and what I have to do to achieve it and with Brians’ suggestion, I rented a camera from the A/V loan for the photo shoot day. Looking forward to how my project turns out.

Further practice for Projec Brief 1

by jasonhendriks on March 12, 2017 in Inspiration, media 3, Photography, Uncategorized • 0 Comments

Within the second week of the Month/Semester, Brian allowed the class to experiment and find our styles of photograhy by sending us around the CBD to practice using manual setting in a camera, whether it is from a DSLR or from your everyday-smartphone. It was a super-bright and sunny day, what a coincidence. I had the opportunity to check around A’beckett street. After 1 hour of sight-seeing and picture-taking, I went back with the others to check on the photos and saved it in the shared class folder.

3 days after Tuesday we had our second class. Project Brief 1 was due, which everyone in the class had to present a photographer/visual artist that inspired them. For mine I chose Duane Michals, an American photographer whose work I find very attractive.

He is the person first known for his Photo-sequences, mini movies that entails a narrative around love, mortality, sexuality, life & celebration of youth. He also likes to put his handwriting as an extension of his picture to give more context and background he believes the picture alone can not tell you. He doesn’t believe that “a picture speaks a thousand words”. Because you can only learn so much from a photo.

I love how Duane likes to break the rules, since he doesn’t know that there is a rule. He does what his mind provoked him to do, and let his emotion lead the creative process of his work. While often criticized, it only inspires him more to continue his work.

Re-live

by jasonhendriks on March 7, 2017 in media 3 • 0 Comments

Falling back to the well of education, I resumed the second year of University. It’s blazing hot here in Australia, and my pig-body isn’t helping. But why am I here to nag, when I can tell you about core subject. I get the opportunity to explore more about photography, different way it is used. I read an introductory project: Photomediations: A Reader and I learned that popularly photography is divided into 2 aspect; photography as art and photography as social practice.

Photography as art is explainable by itself, you’ll mostly associate it with it’s value, exhibitions, galleries, abstraction sometimes in need of interpretation. An extension of panting, photography as art is another medium for artist to express their sense of artistry.

The latter aspect, does not only explain that photography is an agent of social change, but it is also a representation of society, it’s behaviour with photographs, and the popular taste in photography.

The photographs above are a result from Tuesday’s practice with Brian, there were supposed to be more photos, but these ones were the only one I took with my camera.

Uses of Photography

by jasonhendriks on March 3, 2017 in media 3 • 0 Comments

Brian printed some of the photos that the class submitted, pinned them on the wall and gave us a chance to pick a favourite. It was challenging because everyone made such good photos. Group and individual photos were all up in the wall, and we started to put red and purple sticky notes over them. I put mine on a black & white trio photo, Which I really loved but wished to improve because one of the subjects was looking at a different way. After giving feedback on the photos, Brian talked with the class about the reading, the common conception of photography and different quotes given by auters in the book.

Uses of Photography, First day

by jasonhendriks on February 28, 2017 in Uncategorized • 0 Comments

The first day of our media class, Brian introduced himself and immediately we were shown a 20-minute documentary of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photographer and the pro-creator of Magnum photos. The video told us about Cartier-Bresson’s intake on photography. Famously known to create the genre of Street Photography, For Cartier-Bresson, a photographer needs to be quick (quick, quick), to get the decisive moment right. One of the most profound lesson I learned from the French photographer is not to label your photography. Because it limits on what you are capable of doing. Do not focus on what kind of pictures you take, but how you take your pictures.

Other than the incredible documentary, our class were handed with lots of canon DSLRs to start learning how to use them. With a 4-member group, we tried calibrating ourselves with the cameras and took some pretty interesting shots. The fact that it also was a sunny day makes it all the better.

Week 13

by jasonhendriks on October 28, 2016 in Media 2 • 0 Comments

Week 12 felt like a race for me. I know I should’ve started organising all the videos and plans before, but I didn’t, so pity me. I just finished recording IMCV a couple of days before and now I have to sort through all the clips, and make scripts to align the narration. A friend gave an advice, that I should rename of all the files, so you could organise it with ease. How thankful was I, had it not been renamed, it would take me a minute just to find an image/sound that i wanted to see. Another important organising tool that I learned was marking. I use mark to mark certain scenes that I want to cut into the movie. And sometimes I use marks in the sequence to bookmark chapters, or to put notes, to remind me what I should put around those two videos. It’s really handy and I’m glad to have learned it. The picture above was me spending I don’t know how long to create the most possible coherent narration that I could make.

Week 12

by jasonhendriks on October 26, 2016 in Media 2 • 0 Comments

with a sprinkle of stress because of my other projects, and topped with my interviewee that kept postponing the interview, I would say I was ready to jump off the bridge (figuratively). Because of their busy schedule, my subject of interview from Baitul Ma’mur had to do the interview on the last minute. This gave me a considerable strain because her narration is 50% of the whole interview. But thankfully we did it anyway, and fortunately the interview went quite well. There was some problem with the audio, because some kids were playing in the background, and the frame for that interview was perfect, so changing location was a bad idea. But because of the noise, I had to ask my subject to repeat her answer several times, only to be interrupted by the kids again. We had a pre-interview, so my subject was not very uncomfortable/surprise to answer the question, so it went smoothly. The only thing that I regretted was for some of the questions. I felt like the interview didn’t have the personal touch that I wanted, and it looked too formal sometimes.

Week 11

by jasonhendriks on October 26, 2016 in Media 2, Uncategorized • 0 Comments

Like the picture itself, my progress this week was quite dim. I finished interviewing my first subject ago, Wilfred from Bethany International Church (BIC), and his story about the BIC community. I managed to get a shot of the biggest auditorium and interviewed my subject there. The composition of the chair creates good background for the shot, hence why I chose to record there. I had a little problem with the sound, because it turned out lower that it should have, I must have set the h4n microphone to the wrong settings. But never fear as I still had the original audio embedded in the video. I might have to increase the volume for it to be hearable, risking background noise.

Media Week 10

by jasonhendriks on October 2, 2016 in Media 2 • 0 Comments

Week 10 is interesting. After coming to many festivals i have many potential subjects that I contacted and agreed to be filmed upon, unfortunately I can only start recording around this week. The only best thing I can do now is to create a solid structure and use the materials I already got. The community that I found rest in Lavernton, called Baitul Ma’mul, an Indonesian muslim community under the Indonesian Muslim Community Victoria (IMCV), and another group called Bethany International Church (BIC). You may ask “why are they all religious groups jason?” It’s because Indonesia is a very religious country. Just look at the first principle of Indonesia’s fundamental politics, Pancasila:

Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa

it means: Belief in the one and only God

Indonesia is a very religious country. It has it’s ups and downs, but I respect it’s integrity. Since my documentary wants to focus on community activities, their religious practice will also be observed, even though not as detailed as the concept of their general community.

Found footages will be important as part of my documentary, as I recall their history and their commitment to the community.

For post-production, I will try to the best of my ability to edit it well. Using music in documentaries is not my forte, as it seems. I am still struggling to incorporate music, and I will ask Kim a lot for help (I’m sorry Kim)

Fun fact: Indonesia is Not a muslim country. Indonesia is a country with muslim as a majority, that is why many people mistook it to be a muslim country. Not trying to implicate anything here, just a fact.

thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

Week 9

by jasonhendriks on September 29, 2016 in Media 2 • 0 Comments

During week 8 I was unable to come to class due to an unexpected circumstances. But still I asked around friends to see whether my topic can be approachable with potential subjects. Unfortunately all of them still considers the topic to be very sensitive, and is not open to discussing it. I do not understand if the topic still to harsh, even though I had directed the narrative not towards the victimised story, rather the survival one. It was very stressful as everyone that I asked advised me to change the topic again. I tried very hard to think how to manipulate this dire situation, and alas, I brought a more positive vibe to the topi. Instead of the the subject’s journey after 1998 May riot, I want to find 2/3 subjects, each planted on his/her own indonesian community, and find out how they find and what do they consider about the community. I hope in this very condescending situation i am still able to find good materials to work to.