In this week I went out and shot for PB2. We also learnt about the bit of equipment and revised a lot of the ideas that were explored in the past three weeks. I focused on the more technical side of documentary making, in which I took out the Sony camera to shoot one of our classmate’s (Taylor) PB2. Taking inspiration of of Grizzly Man, I wanted to record him hand held to make it more casual. We also used the professional microphones to record the audio.

We also practice convectional film production methods for rolling the camera. Every time we went for a take there would be “Rolling, Frame and Action!”, followed by a clap. The clap was to give a distinct sound profile so that I could sync the good audio from the professional microphone with the reference audio from the footage recorded on the camera. These conventions make the entire shoot more efficient and easier to edit in post.

In my own time I looked up film set videos on YouTube. I want to be able imitate and apply this system so that I could use it in the future. Allowing myself time to be confident and comfortable with the professional gear will give me more breathing space and time to focus on the actual content and direction.

This week I decided to start brain storming on my own so that I could develop a concept for the direction of final documentary for the semester. I begun by looking back to all the previous documentaries that I have watched to find some inspiration.

I remembered watching Grizzly Man in media one, and I really enjoyed how the interviews were conducted and shot and edited with old footage of Timothy Treadwell. In terms of finding a subject, I wanted to find an interesting subject who has a story.

In a few weeks’ time I shall be filming a hype video for a friend. The hype video was to build and draw attention to a bigger fan base for him. This friend is named Ethan, who left his home town in New Zealand to purse professional basketball in America but suddenly dropped his ball career to become a professional wrestler (the WWE type).

I felt that Ethan had a good story to tell as he has experienced a lot of challenges for the decisions that he has made. Having dropped a promising career in basketball for something so risky was a big move. His move from basketball to wrestling has also had impact on his relationship with his parents and this is something that plenty of people, including myself, face in deciding their own future. This kind of choice has a big impact on a lot of parents as they were raised very differently in comparison today.

Other than going out to practice, making and learning from mistakes, I felt that there was not much I can draw from in week two. Most of the readings were discussions about what is a documentary, how should you start and the many different types of documentaries. I guess that reading these articles would be a good opportunity to observe the spectrum of documentaries.

There are two extremes of the general type of documentaries. One side would be for entertainment and the other then is educational/informative. Reality TV shows such as Jersey shore or Big Brother contain documentary style of film making. However, these lack the educational and informative side. It is still a documentary because it is an account of events, though interviews and commentary, but serve no other purpose other than to entertain. In contrast, some thing that may fall in the middle of the spectrum, or a little bit biased towards the educational side would be David Attenborough’s ‘Planet Earth’. This form of documentary has plenty of educational content, but draws in a bigger audience because they animate the animals in such way that makes the content very entertaining. An example of a predominately informative style of documentary would be the ‘Invention of the Automobile’. This kind of documentary would not appeal to the masses as the bulk of the content is just educational with a less to none dramatisation in the narrative.

Week one was an interesting introduction to documentary making. In class we had multiple discussions and explored ideas related to the broad topic of documentary making. The class discussion really tapped into my general knowledge of documentaries that I have watched in the past. Through various questions and responses my perception of documentaries has slightly changed. The series of activities during class gave me perspective of the reality of this style of film.

A general response to what a documentary is by the common person would most likely be a historic account of events to serve some kind of educational purpose. However, there is so much more to it. The context of the film does not necessarily have to draw from past events, it can look to the future and draw on certain contexts. Obviously when we think about the future, it would also have the draw on the past to give contrast or support a case.

It would be easy to think that most documentaries are there to unveil the absolute truth. However, through the series of talks in class, most documentaries are far from it. It is undeniable that a lot of the films of this nature, draw on actual events, but we have to questions ourselves”

“Is there a bias?”

Most documentaries have an argument, a view point, and the people who are behind making these films manipulate these real events in the favour of the underlying argument. I do understand that it is not a complete lie, but with every film there is some degree of bent with real events. So to say that documentaries tell the truth, form what I have noticed, is a big stretch.

What can I say? This assignment has been a roller coast with a few downs, but overall, plenty of ups. The last minute factor was certainly a down but came with a number of up with it. During the later stages of our planning we eventually decided to present our topic along the lines of: ‘the effects of music on the brain’. We all agreed that this was going to be presented as a podcast format with a science theme to it. My group partner and I shared the workload pretty well, and worked together to help each other with our own respective parts.

At the start of the assessment it was fair to say that the group chemistry was not really there and morale was not high at all. Originally we had three group members, and there was not much communication between us to kickstart our project. This lack of communication definitely contributed to the low spirits of the initial stages of our assignment. Furthermore, the loss of a group member did not help either. So ultimately in the first two weeks our assignment we really had no sense direction and also confused about the condition of our lost member. However not delving into the lost member matter too much, we decided to make light of the situation by moving on and focus on our task at hand. I am glad that my group partner and I are able to talk about the assignment as well as on a personal level. This made the communication aspect of the assignment easier and a definite improvement from the first week of the assignment. Things looked promising after the first two weeks. Further examples of this progression included, much more frequent messaging and setting up a date and time to meet and plan the work.

There was a brief period during the middle of the assignment period that we stagnated and struggled to maintain the progress that we made. I do claim fault to this, as I was focussing on other different things. I figured that this was extremely unfair on my group partner and made a strong effort to improve every element that is necessary to form a successful collaborative work. These elements are a reference to Week 9’s Lectorial on collaborative work, where Dr Rachel Wilson highlights that: respect, consistency, clear objectives, good communications and support, are the many factors that result in good collaborations. I placed a huge emphasis on communication, respect and clear objectives to get the project moving. The motivation and the pressure behind completing the assignment was also a motive to really push ourselves to work together and finish. We tried our best not to rush it, despite the little amount of time we had left because we also wanted to do a good job at the same time.

The topic of Music and the Brain was a very scientific topic and most certainly related to the broader topic of ‘attention’. Although for the common folk, this topic can seem technical and dull, there is abundance of information that an be valuable to know, especially for your own psychological health. Music is found to be healthy for the mind, and we really take it for granted. Given the complexity in this field of neuroscience, researching was quite difficult as there was a lot of scientific jargon and complex vocabulary. However we managed to highlight the most relevant parts of our references and use it in our project. We split the topic into two parts. The first part explores the physical aspect of music and the brain; primarily in the context of entrainment. Myself, I decided to talk about the emotions that connect music and memory together. Both parts support each other and ultimately argue for the same thing, which was showing how the brain places a great amount of attention towards music.

In regards to the technical aspect of our project, my group partner, who has a background in music production was mainly editing the audio mix. We felt that it was better to have on person editing as there would be too much confusion between two different styles of editing. As my partner would finished the edit I would go over and listen to it, to give some feed back and refinement. This process worked really well for us and managed to achieve it in a very short period of time.

What I lacked in the contribution to editing was compensated with the direction and the formation of our talk. We all recorded our individual parts and then recorded together where necessary such as the introduction. My group partner was also apart of this process as well, as she pitched in ideas for music and experiments used in the audio.

The stress factor was somewhat helpful, but we still managed to complete the task in time. Overall I am very happy that I was able to partner up with Tianshu, my group partner, as she is someone who is critical and but giving at the same time. These are qualities I appreciate in a group member

Piled up with work, this week was the week to work hard and pump out the assignment. All of our references have been sorted out and now we know what to say. We have had multiple discussions on what to say and not what to say, in conjunction with the style of talk that we were going for. Given the time that we had we set aside our differences and focussed on working together and helping each other out. This proved to be successful and we got along really well. We made a continuous effort to communicate I am sure this will carry on for our last week before the due date. There is not much else to say but complete the project at all costs. How we were going to make this happen was:

• stay on top of booking studio rooms
• constant feedback and refinement of audio takes
• help guide the other person to talk
• stay on top of time and focus at all times
• constant communication
• establishing good team chemistry and morale

For our group, this week was hardly a workshop, but a lesson to be learnt at the same time. As my extracurricular activities got in the way of things I found it hard to prioritise our group audio project. This week there was a valuable opportunity for us to present our rough cuts to get feedback from the teachers. Unfortunately we have not yet finished ours. This moment was a wake up call to put everything else to the side and fully dedicate ourselves to the project. Since we could not make use of the time in the workshop, we decided to hit the basement and start wrapping our ideas around our heads and begin recording. Since this was a stressful time, it was quite understandable for my partner to be frustrated. For that night we stay in the basement we got a fair bit of work done and did most of our recordings that night.

As media practitioners we often make mistakes during collaborative work when it comes to communication and dedicating our time to the work. In our group assignment’s case, this was shown to be exactly that prior to week 12. We have also stagnated as things were left last minute. However we ultimately had one goal, and that was to finish the task. This incentive to finish really pulled us through to work as hard as we can. Doing work can last minute can be frowned upon, but quite often, depending on the individual there can always be a silver lining under all of the work we had to do in such a short amount of time.

This week was the time to plan a meet up with my group partner and select our references and ideas for our audio project. We are running short for time and we still have not figured out what we want to say. We made a priority to learn and understand our references through the structure of an annotated bibliography in order to make sense of what we are going to talk about it. My partner has decided to emphasise on the rhythmic side of music and how that affects the brain, and I my self decided to show the connection between the emotion in music and the brain.

Before our planned meet up, I wanted to research in the way I wanted to present my talk. I will be going for the elements of a podcast, but in terms of the pacing and tone I was inspired to approach it in this way:

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5_APAxM5Lg

Although not directly related to our group topic, he draws on multiple elements of music in relation to brain and presents in the way that I want in my own section of the group talk.

Pens down, recorders out! This week was all about learning how to record and edit our audio tracks. To be honest I was not present at the time, but in terms of knowing the technical elements of this work, I am quite competent in. As an elective for the semester, I also study sound design. A number of the technical requirements mentioned in the task have been touched on in sound design. However what is more important is what I would actually record and mix to give my own audio take on the topic of “can I have your attention please?”

My first recording would be a conversation between a mother and her child who is roughly in his twenties on the dinner table. While the mother talks, she will mention about the son never coming home, ignoring her calls and never talking to her. Throughout the conversation, the mum will say ‘look up at me’, alluding to the fact that the son is always faced down and absorbed into applications on his phone.

The second recording will have a recording of the air conditioning to give the sound mix an ambient background to give a sense of depth to the narrative. Furthermore I would record unique social media notifications and beeps and add them to the mix to show that he is always on his phone.

In terms of editing, I would not put in any plugins, but rather just nice cutting of unwanted dialogue and constant adjustment of the gain to get a consistent loudness in the dialogue if required.

This week was a tough one for our group. Unfortunately one member had to leave for some unknown reason. Now there is only two. To be honest , the situation did not felt so dire as we thought we would be, because the work needed to be done regardless. Moving on from the unfortunate circumstance, my group partner and I knuckled down an devised a plan. We were going to meet up on the weekend to make time for brain storming. At this point we were still unsure of what theme we wanted to do and how to approach it.

At this point we had to think of something. We need a topic that is related to ‘attention’ and that it would form some kind of argument so that we can give our talk a direction and a side. Through conversations on our chat group, we were pretty set on the effects of music on the brain, as my group partner mentioned the idea of entrainment.

With not much long to go, we decided to research on this topic as much as we could and meet up again to discuss our ideas on our topic and forma and argument.