How do I produce a portrait that reflects who I am within a time frame of one minute?

Thankfully, I decided to rely on the fifty words that I used in my Project Brief One, weird quirks.

Since it was only a fifty word description, it was fitting to do a fast paced video that consisted of rapid shots and cuts. Upon editing, I struggled to try and control the promptness of each frame as the viewer may not have the time to process what was just shown on the screen. In order to overcome this obstacle, I decided to extend each frame by an extra second and eliminate unnecessary footage that wouldn’t be considered a “quirk” of sorts.

Particular transitions such as wipes, slides and quick dissolves were used in order to dissect a scene from another. For instance, the purpose of the quick dissolves between the cheese and the ironing sections was to juxtapose how I hate one thing (raw cheese) but love another (ironing). Furthermore, wipes and slides were to keep a consistent pace and light-hearted flow throughout.

I aimed to convey a vibrant aesthetic that fits with the theme of “weird quirks”. The RGB curves tool, was used extensively to distinguish one scene from another as well as complimenting images with the footage. At the beginning where the constant appearance of lips appeared, were all provided with a red undertone colour and high saturation in order to achieve a consistent aesthetic. Moreover, the images of the lips as well as the walking of each person at the end, were to reflect the idea of individuality. Using the map tool on the RGB curves, I was able to change the colour of the gum from clear to pink in order to give a pop of colour onto the footage.

I used the tool of “Motion” to crop and manipulate the footage to give the illusion of symmetry. However, the walking sequence is definitely something I could improve on during production.

Audio gains was used in order to adjust the decibels of the background music from the narration. A few takes had be done in order to achieve clarity in the narration, and re watching it now, it’s something I still need to work on.

I purposely didn’t feature on my self-portrait film as I wanted to present a piece that was purely filmed and edited myself. So all I’ll say is, I hope you enjoy!

So how did I celebrate this 2016 Labour Day public holiday? By playing around and adjusting to the tools on Premiere Pro. Fortunately, I’ve had experience with this software before due to Year twelve media. This time, I focused on intricate details such as colour grading, transitions and audio gains in order to provide a certain aesthetic.

Since I’ve almost completed production on my Project Brief Two, I aim to convey a realistic yet vibrant aesthetic that fits with my theme of “weird quirks”. By utilising the RGB curves tool, I’ll be able to adjust the saturation of the footage and even manipulate the colour balance. Unlike my Haiku exercise, my Project Brief Two will consist of colour so it’s essential to keep a consistently vibrant aesthetic throughout.

From the Haiku exercise I was able to embed text through transitions. This time, I’ll be using transitions in order to move from scene to another and to provide a continuous fast pace. Upon looking through the Video Transition folder, quick dissolves, slides and wipes would be the suitable options.

In order to have a balance between the background music and the narration, I would have to rely on audio gains. The background music shouldn’t be too loud nor too faint while the narration should be the main focus in clarity and volume. Through adjusting the decibels, I’ll be able to control the strength and intensity of the noise.

Fingers crossed my audio and footage meet my expectations. As I’ve learnt the hard way in the past, not everything can be fixed in post-production despite Premiere Pro to be such a user friendly editing program (thus far).

After a day full of lectures and tutorials, I needed to take my daily of caffeine. Since time was on my side, I decided to visit a local café that was closer to home and take the time to reflect on this week’s tutorial conversation as well as de-stress (well, try to) about the upcoming assignments in week three. It was around the lunch peak hour where people in their business attire dash in and out of the front door, mums with their bubs, friends catching up, and couples here and there. As I observe my surroundings, I’ve noticed that at least every person on every table is constantly on looking down on their screens socialising with other people. That seems to be the norm nowadays. I’m not saying it’s entirely a bad thing, it can be when it comes to proper etiquette but then again I can’t judge, but it made me realise how much social networking has added another dimension to what it means to be “social”.

According to the Pew Research Centre, 49% of smartphone owners’ aged 18 to 29 use messaging apps followed by 37% aged 30 to 49, and 24% aged 50 and older. Almost half of 18-29 year olds prefer using Wi-Fi in order to communicate with people rather than text messaging or phone calls. If I can get access to free Wi-Fi why not? Even finding out if the person has read your message or not comes in handy (most of the time). Despite the convenience and efficiency, text messaging and phone calls are still prevalent for times when your data runs out, when there’s no Wi-Fi or even communicating with people who don’t use messaging apps.

Moreover, Facebook has become a global community with more than 1.3 billion accounts existing in 2016. It would be the most populous nation in the world. According to The Guardian, Facebook’s user base grows by eight people per second, or 7,246 people every fifteen minutes. Due to its popularity, impact, and cost-effectiveness, Facebook ads have made the site one of the most popular online advertising platforms in the world with approximately more than two million active advertisers. However, using Facebook for free comes with its catches. Ever seen an ad on the side of your timeline or news feed that relates to something you’ve posted or searched about recently? Maybe those shoes or those concert tickets that you’ve been continuously Googling? We are consumers who provide our own personal information as data. Furthermore, this personal data can connect you to your other social media sites and could potentially cost or win you your job. Employers have resorted beyond a resume in order to employ according to their checklist such as how well a person presents themselves to the whole world.

Snapchat has revolutionised the way we socialise. According to Expanded Ramblings, as of March 2016, there are more than 100 million users with 1 in 4 being teenagers. Compared to Facebook, it’s more of a “personal” way of communicating where the Snaps are basically an instant recount of someone’s life within a few seconds or “day in the life of…” Some have even dubbed SnapStories as “diary account of sorts” (minus the privacy part). The only way Snaps can be released into the world/an entire audience, is through a screen shot or saving the video.

As I said before, it’s necessarily a bad thing when people are on their phones while having coffee with them. I’ve seen the mums exchanging their phones on hilarious photos or stories of their bubs on Facebook, a couple bonding over silly memes, friends catching up on their latest adventures by flickering through their Instagram pics. Ironically, at the front of the café, a bright sign in chalk says “Sorry, we don’t have Wi-Fi. Talk to each and pretend it’s 1995 again”. It’s hard to pretend its 1995 again when we’re in the middle of such a shift with what we perceive as “social”. Balance and proper etiquette is ultimately the key.

 (may contain spoilers, click back now if you wish)

David Gauntlett describes media to fall into two peaks. The first being “basically inspiring and optimistic” and the second is “basically troubling and pessimistic”.

The latter peak that involves data manipulation, surveillance and evolving forms of “extreme… computerised capitalism” is heavily explored in Sam Esmail’s hacker tech drama Mr .Robot.

Other than being an asocial computer guru and frequent morphine user, protagonist Elliot Anderson is employed as a cyber-security engineer for the massive corporation E Corp (or in Elliot’s terms – Evil Corp). By night, he’s a cyber-vigilante to “saving the world, saving everyone from the invisible hand”. For instance, Elliot uses his ability to expose and lead the police to a coffee-shop owner’s child pornography content from hacking into the Wi-Fi the owner uses in his cafés. On the other hand, Mr. Robot would introduce characters through Elliot’s meddling ways into their online personas rather than through every day interactions. At times the hacking works in his favour to bring justice, but on the contrary, it becomes an act of breaching privacy. Thus, Mr. Robot puts emphasis on how vulnerable privacy is in the Internet age and the current inequalities of the world.

As Elliot successfully resolves a series of serious cyber-attacks onto E Corp, he attracts the interest of Mr Robot – the leader of FSociety. An alliance of underground hackers, who’s main agenda is to take down E Corp. In conjunction with struggling to establish the moral compass as a hacker, Elliot also struggles as a clinically depressed young man who is attacking a society he’s displaced within.

Having only watched the first few episodes of season one, Rami Malek’s portrayal as Elliot draws the audience into his complex persona and into his world that can often become an illusion of his reality. The witty dialogue also provides the audience with plot twists, realistic character development and while maintaining the episodes on Elliot’s perspective.

A cracker of a show and definitely made me perceive media in a different light, or in this case, at a different peak. Check out this snippet from the Pilot episode:

According to David Gauntlett, “media boils down” to three aspects: conversation, inspiration and making things happen or in other words; being practical. We can “study” about how media came to be (the theory), but living within a time where there’s a rapid shift in technology and how we interact with each other makes it much more interesting.

(To name a handful of scenarios)
What seemed like a small world has suddenly become smaller. We can communicate with someone on the other side of the world and raise awareness on issues through comments, likes/reactions and hashtags (to name a few).
In that process, inspiration can weave in. Media convergence allows anyone to be a filmmaker (for example) when all they need is a smartphone and creativity. Inspiration can blossom from a simple and humble YouTube or Vine video, not just from big-budget production made films.

Gauntlett’s emphasis on “making media” made me reflect on why I decided to do this course in the first place. With creativity regularly oozing out of the depths of my mind, I want to access as many opportunities as I can to convey my (sometimes weird) ideas through a vast range of mediums and platforms. It’s the third week and I’ve already edited at least two videos on Premiere Pro (used by the professionals too and user friendly, so far) and I’ve got a blog!?

Just like ourselves, media is fluid and undergoes metamorphosis on a regular basis. Gauntlett hits the nail on the head when he says that “we need to make things with media in order to think more thoroughly” rather than digesting (possibly biased) information and perceiving things as either black or white.

Don’t fall into the “there’s always post-production” mentality whenever you find yourself in a hiccup during production, is something that has stuck to me since Jeremy Bowtell’s presentation in the Week 2 lectorial.

As someone who can have a “don’t worry / fuhgeddaboudit” attitude, I’ve become extra careful of my filming during production for Portfolio Brief Two. Therefore, my mantras now include:
“Cut long rather than short. When undecided about the exact frame to cut on”
“Is the cut necessary and convey the intended emotion?”
“Always leave at least three seconds before and after the footage”

Drawing upon inspiration from Scott McCloud’s 1993 “Blood in the Gutter”, I could concentrate on various cuts that smoothly transition from scene to scene to convey a story that is goal oriented, or incorporate rapid cuts for pacing and concentrate on the journey itself rather than reaching a specific goal.

I enjoyed this week’s reading for having demonstrated “The Invisible Art” that is camouflaged within comics. An invisible art that carefully distinguishes the reader from its writer in order to provide escapism throughout its pages, something I hope to achieve by the end of this course.

Using static footage to relate to a poem of seventeen syllables wasn’t as easy as I thought. Most of the haiku poems didn’t seem to relate to the footage I filmed, so I had to resort to other captured footage. After clicking a few links here and there, I came across this:

Black & White Haiku

Life in us is a

mix of black and white moments

sun shines for us all

Courtesy of: https://memyselfandela.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/black-white-haiku/

Since the point of the exercise was to play around with Adobe Premiere Pro, I decided to focus on the aspect of colour, thus black and white.
Interestingly enough as I was going through the uploaded videos, I came across three videos that captured two different perspectives of the same scenario that was able to reflect the “moments” that the haiku suggests. Moreover, three different angles captured the State Library ceiling, so I decided to incorporate transitions to give the illusion that it they were all shot in one set of footage.

In order review each of our Project Brief 1: Self portraits (and scavenge for a cable for our audio), we were each assigned a hat that represented how we were to critique each PB1.

Yellow was positive, green was new ideas, red was gut reaction and black was something that doesn’t work.

Throughout the entire exercise I was wearing the black hat, a role I was willing to fulfil. As it was an assignment that involved overlooking the lo-fi production and focusing the quality of the work, it became difficult becoming a “b**ch”. After all, the only criticisms I was able to find were tedious and easy fixes.

Initially, it worked well in trying to ease us into that sort of critiquing mentality, but overtime the activity itself became time consuming for us as we ended up commending and evaluating each other’s self portraits through the red hat (our gut reactions) rather than our specific hats.
From this activity, (thanks to the people on my table) I was able to evaluate and reflect on my own work; to add more “texture” to my audio recordings and to take out the blurriness and focus on the videos.

One of the twenty-first century’s most complex definitions: Media.

Media can be interpreted in different ways:

POWER
It can be power through regulation, censorship and public opinion. We used to perceive media through an outdated linear model where the sender’s message transmits through a medium and then would eventually be received by a passive audience. However, due to a multitude of factors such as modernisation and globalisation, audiences are active where the message can be relayed back and forth from receiver to sender.
This can be seen through the importance of public opinion. For instance, a television show’s creators rely on ratings and feedback to whether they find what the people are viewing is “entertaining” or “informative”.
Although, there’s an apparent shift in this power, there are still regulations and censorship that are still enforced for television, video games, cinema and literature in order to protect vulnerable audiences such as children and the elderly. However, the relevance of regulation and censorship are further debated, since the internet itself is beyond anyone’s control.

TECHNOLOGY
We’re now at an age of innovation and convergence. Remember the times when we’d access the internet, communication with a person, music, games, photos and documents from numerous devices? Nowadays, we can do all of the above from just a smartphone. Almost anyone with a smartphone can be a filmmaker, photographer, editor, journalist, advocate with the help of apps and social media.
Since the introduction of social media, we’ve been able to connect from people from different ends of the world. As simple as one tweet can attract a following and possibly someone you idolise. It’s a small world after all!

ENTERTAINMENT
Who knew there’d come to a time where cat videos, face swapping apps, people falling over, creating avatars of ourselves, social experiments, every reality show, reaction videos, colours of things, hashtags, doge and being rick roll’d would be such entertainment? The content that has become viral are the weirdest and straightforward, yet most relatable (most of the time) finds in the World Wide Web.

FACT VS. FICTION
The internet is infamous for blurring the fact from the fiction. For instance, you can create a virtual identity of yourself. I can find out a stranger’s favourite music and their hobbies by skimming through their timeline, but yet again, that could just be a way for them to be perceived as “interesting” and what not. Even television shows and movies present viewers with stereotypes and stigmatisations that we can sometimes accept as reality.
The news can even provide us with a particular framing of events, a subtly biased script and feature a number of stories that we often accept as the entire truth.

In order to grasp a reality of how media is consuming us, we split into groups of 5 and hit the Melbourne town to audit the media we observe.
Location: State Library

Advertisement on Trams, people listening to their music and on their phone; texting, calling.

A handout on being distracted on your phones (ironically I was crossing the road while I was busily taking photos of media around us).

                                 A notice at the entrance of State Library about an upcoming event.

Look up! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nah, it’s Superman and Batman on a building for their upcoming movie.

A passer-by would be looking down on their phone and then encounter a vibrant advertisement (and his striking looks) plastered on the grey, concrete floor.

“Now a motion picture”, an awesome film by the way.

Throughout my life I’ve been bombarded with the mantra of “the dream job” from school to everyday conversations with loved ones. Find a job that where you love what you do and are passionate about, that’s why they call it a “dream”. I’ve always wanted to be one of those people on Getaway where you get paid to travel and talk about it.

But if you really get down to the nitty and gritty of it all, a dream job is a potentially dangerous concoction of passion and employment. A job is employment to help us financially live while passion is a barely controllable emotion and desire that essentially identifies with us. To many, it’s become an illusion where people search for a job that they can enjoy every second of it. However, some people become dissatisfied and unfulfilled once the search for this concoction is over.

Some people get so caught up with high expectations and the dream aspect that they forget that at the end of the day, a job is a job where it involves its hours, its politics and the money. People who love their careers, found their happiness from their attitude and how they choose to be happy.

I’ve realised that I could get paid to travel the world and talk about it but may never consider the consequences such as homesickness, the long hours and the reality of what a job consists of. I can travel without the job aspect of it, but if I can dedicate myself to prioritise my self-worth rather than letting the job define my happiness, then why not?