Clip #1 Increased Senses

                ASMR, Intimate, Freedom, Warm,

-change in pace with death-  eerie, loud,

Clip #2 The Duke of Burgundy

Calm, Peaceful, colourful, intricate, beautiful (specific focal points)

-change after intro- quiet, lonely

Clip #3 Aliens

                Cold, Dangerous, Emergency, Confusion,  

scene with mother– warm, safe,

bomb approaching explosion– stayed calm instead of getting more intense.

 Joshua Houston 

The reason I’m particularly interested in the Mechanics of Immersion is that I’d like to know what changes a boring student film into an interesting and immersive short film. I would like to learn what it is that editors, actors, and directors think and practice to make their films successful compared to amateurs. I would like to learn how to convey emotion with the use of cinematography, and audio effectively and without using the cliché techniques.

Personally, I’ve listened to music that has really had me drawn in to experience the piece rather than listen to it, predominantly by artists like Pink Floyd and Simon and Garfunkel, but also subgenres like Lofi and Binaural Beats. I understand that the artists create the experience often with ambience, contrasting volumes, speed, and frequencies, but I would like to be able to practice this myself, learning the order that these techniques should go in. I would like to learn to be more critical of movies and music that attempts to create this experience, and decide whether the experience is created following a formula, or a more original approach. Aside from audio, I’ve enjoyed movies such as Mad Max, and the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, which uses cinematography, music and sound to create very immersive experiences. I’d like to become familiar and more observant with the techniques they use and the planning that goes into them. I understand that video is a more complicated medium, but I would like to leave the class knowing that I could create a piece of video that would keep the viewer entertained rather than thinking it was just another generic student film.

Lastly, aside from the observable techniques, I’d like to learn about why the brain perceives certain subject matter as immersive, what makes those things so enveloping, and how that influences what people create in order to stimulate it.

In short, I would like to leave The Mechanics of Immersion Studio with

• A reasonable understanding of an audio making application
• Having produced work that I can consider to be immersive and captivating, both audio and visual
• Have a more critical awareness of how directors, musicians, editors and actors create a captivating experience
• Understand why and how the brain responds to an immersive experience.

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.

Sam and I set out to record footage that was immersive through the use of symmetry, the rule of thirds, and camera techniques such as panning and zoom. We wanted to contrast but also show the similarities between man made structures and nature scenery, we also wanted to portray this in a flowing and easy to digest manner, similar to that of a nature documentary.

Following the recordings, we edited the footage to make to make the brightness, saturation and exposure matched the subject matter. For example, we had the shots of nature that were bright and colourful, contrasting the footage of man made structures were more greyscale. We wanted to edit the footage very lightly so that it wasn’t obvious that there was much post production. We also had the transitions between each footage soft and easy to follow.

Originally, we wanted our footage to follow a narrative or motif, and we had decided on a paper plane or a marble that the camera could follow. But as we tried to put our ideas into practice, the variables like the objects direction made the process very difficult, so we resorted to focusing on camera shots and angles rather than focusing on a story.

Our first shot transitioned from greyscale to colour as it panned up from busy streets to a skyline with birds flying in, which linked to the second shot coming down from the trees and the skyline. From this, we were able to pull back away from nature through the brick wall, loosely representing the confinement of people. The piece finished by showing the contrast of the city roads against bright dying flowers to a bright view of the sun from a garden.

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.

In this workshop, as well as talking about sound’s perspective and social distance (Mentioned in previous post) we examined the audio documentary regarding Howard Dully’s trans-orbital Lobotomy. The audio piece followed Howard through trying to look into the reasons that his parents decided to have him receive a frontal lobe lobotomy. I found it very difficult to examine the audio essay conventions being used, as the story itself was very interesting.

Howard mostly speaks during the audio documentary, but often when the story progresses, music will be played in the background. Throughout the documentary there are snippets of quotes from people like Walter Jackson Freeman, the doctor who performed the lobotomy, and a few snippets of other guests often regarding new information.

Overall the audio is very straight to the point, and up until the point where Howard talks to his father, there isn’t much of a pause to take in the emotion.

In this workshop, we discussed posts on the internet that aren’t considered authentic, and to basically not trust everything that we read. We were also put into groups for the PB4 assignment. I was set in a group with Qiming Zhang and Matthew James.

We discussed what we’d learnt in the lecture regarding research in contrast to academic research. Research is a core Media Making Skill, not just an academic skill. Talking to people is good, but needs to complimented by reading/researching.

Academic Research: Souring information from multiple sources to make a well-educated and logical decision and conclusion

Research: Having biased research and information based on other people opinions and often marketing schemes.

Our focus on knowledge produced within Media Studies as an academic discipline, we should be looking at a topics core principles, references, abstracts, conclusions and Works that are cited and peer reviewed. Journals are created by multiple academics, and reviewed by multiple (and often anonymous) sources, which is why they’re a very trusted form of information.

Lastly we figured out how to effectively use the Zoom H2N. Parts that I noted were the fact we could change the direction in which the microphone would record, either surrounding the microphone, or pointing in a particular direction (uni-directional,bi-directional or omni-directional). and other parts like connecting to a computer, and formatting the card.

We presented our audio draft to one of the media practitioners named Catherine. After listening to the first few minutes, she old us that we delivered our lines with hesitance, and that we should have our lines more rehearsed and to make the points we make more precise, which I somewhat agreed with. However, we had decided to go for more of a radio talk show kind of feel. With that in mind, Catherine said that we could create an interesting dynamic of discussing our ideas and talking our essay whilst driving in the car, to give it a more talk show feel, and also create an interesting soundscape. Lastly, Catherine said that we should make the dymanic between the 3 of us known, with Qiming’s shy silence, and the age difference between Matt and I.

With this in mind, Matt, Qiming and I set out to create

• More precise ideas within individual audio recordings
• A audio recording done in the car, on the way to the vox pop
• An interesting dynamic between the 3 of us.

Next time, I’d like to add some more diversity of soundscapes.