Everyday Media

An everyday blog about media by everyday blogger Louise Alice Wilson.

Tag: Media 1 (page 4 of 5)

Earlids

March 21, 2016 / / 0 Comments

“There are no earlids.”, when I first read this I was like “eww, gross” but then I was like “ohh, that’s actually quite interesting”.

Having no earlids, means that us humans and most species of animals (except crocodiles, meerkats, platypus and some other exceptions) are continually absorbing sound from our environments. Even though we might not be aware of all the sounds within our environment (due to an elaborate filtering process) we still do process all of it. It’s a bit of a shame that we don’t get the RAW audio files, but I guess the JPEG’s are more conservative, in regards to the required attention, perception and memory it would take to process that much RAW information.

Our brains aren’t just conservative in the way they choose to filter information, but they also conservative in the way that they perceive and attend to information, this can be highlighted in the difference between hearing vs. listening. Hearing is the automatic process of perceiving sound whereas listening is the active process of attending to the sounds that we hear.

Deep listening is the act of taking listening one step further, it is the process of being fully present to what we are hearing. It requires the listener to avoid assumptions, judgements, manipulations and controlling the minds perspective of the information being attended to. Deep listening allows us to witness our thoughts and emotions as they arise, to acknowledge them, to understand them, then allow them to pass, in order to  understand our minds from an objective viewpoint. By doing this we can rethink our relationships with ourselves, our friends and our community as well as relationships to power, authority and vanity, rethinking the significance, nature and meaning of our social and relational experiences.

So even though we can’t shut off what we are listening to, via some advance earlid, we can shut off the chatter within our minds that alters our perceptions and understanding of the sounds around us. Thus providing a purer experience of sound and of the world around us, without all the bull.

*Note: I am aware that earlid is not actually word, ‘folds of skin covering the ears’ is a much more apt description, but earlids sound gross and weird, so I’m gonna stick with earlid.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

Premiere Pro Is A…

March 18, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Premiere Pro is a… great editing program? annoying as all hell? brilliantly made? annoyingly formatted?

I think i’ve thought all of these things about Premiere Pro and probably all within the same editing session, but here’s hoping that me and Lynda can make it through. And by Lynda I don’t mean my imaginary friend, but rather a helpful online learning tool that provides video tutorials guiding you through almost any topic you can imagine.

For the last three weeks during the Media 1 workshops we’ve had to use Premiere Pro to work on our current project briefs. Originally this started with me struggling through the download process, but then getting it, then struggling with the first stages of sequencing, then getting it, then struggling with the first stages of editing, then getting it. So hopefully if I continue on with this trajectory I will slowly get everything about Premier Pro even if it’s an arduous process at first.

Currently I’m attempting to delve deeper into colour correction so as to further enhance the visual beauty and balance within my shots for Project Brief 2, I have a rough understanding of it, but could definitely be a whole lot better. It seems like each of the people within my workshop understand a different thing about Premiere Pro, maybe thats means if we all combine we can make one good editor?

Hopefully by the end of this year we’ll make twenty three good editors rather than one?

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

“They aren’t violent until I’ve edited them”

March 16, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Thelma Schoonmaker: the legendary editor who has been behind the success of Martin Scorsese’s films for over fourty years, is a female force to be reckoned with. So I decided to give her the respect she deserves and dedicate a blog post to some of her key quotes that have helped to inspire me as of recently:

  1. When asked how it was that such a nice lady could edit Scorsese’s violent gangster pictures, Thelma replied with a smile: “Ah, but they aren’t violent until I’ve edited them.”
  2. “I think that women have a particular ability to work with strong directors. They can collaborate. Maybe there’s less of an ego battle.”
  3.  “You get to contribute so significantly in the editing room because you shape the movie and the performances”
  4. “I’m not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We’re very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that.”
  5. “You help the director bring all the hard work of those who made the film to fruition. You give their work rhythm and pace and sometimes adjust the structure to make the film work – to make it start to flow up there on the screen. And then it’s very rewarding after a year’s work to see people react to what you’ve done in the theater.”
  6. “I read the script just once and then forget it. I just deal with what I see every day on the screen and whether I believe it and understand it.”
  7. “People expect artists to be too normal, I think. I’ve been around enough of them now to see that they’re very extraordinary human beings who behave differently than ordinary human beings. If they weren’t as sensitive as they are they wouldn’t be great artists. They are not the same as us. People should just learn to accept that.”
  8. “From MTV on, the speed of editing has increased, and that is now entering into narrative editing. People are not relying on good shots to tell the story, and I don’t think you can sustain that kind of cutting for the full length of a film.”
  9. “Everybody hated ‘Casino’. They would say, ‘It’s not ‘Goodfellas’. That’s right. It’s not. It’s Las Vegas. It’s not ‘Goodfellas’. And now everybody loves ‘Casino’. Now it’s a big cult film. ‘Raging Bull’ was a disaster and wasn’t recognized for 10 years. ‘The King of Comedy’ was a disaster, now everybody loves ‘The King of Comedy’. This happened to so many of [Martin Scorsese] our films.”

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

Be A Media Maker

March 16, 2016 / / 0 Comments

David Gauntlett makes a good point in his newest book (Making Media Studies: The Creativity Turn in Media and Communications Studies) and that is that traditional forms of media studies are no longer applicable. Gone are the days of massive institutions and production companies, gone are the traditional audiences and simplistic texts. In, is the new age media companies, the everyday media makers, the consistent consumers and the fantastical mess of The WWW.

While universities are pumping out the same content areas since the 1980’s (e.g. institutions, production, audiences and texts) that are only relevant to a handful of media forms (cinema, television, online broadcasting and publications), the rest of the world is moving on. David Gauntlett so rightly says that creativity in media, should also refer to thinking creatively about the subject. What are the new ways of running media and communication studies? How has the subject itself changed? What approaches and methods can help media and communications studies to become innovative and useful in spheres beyond itself?

David Gauntlett encourages a kind of call to arms, an acquiescence of the incapacities of the old system and a redirected gaze to the future needs of media students and media studies programs. Inspired by Tim Ingold’s book Making, David believes media studies should have making at it’s front and centre. He also believes the ability to do things with media should be embraced over and above the ability to talk about what others do with media, or what media does to us. The notion is that media studies should be hands on, that it should be all about ideas and critical engagement and this should be expressed through actual making.

To borrow three key distinctions from the anthropologist Tim Ingold:

  • It’s about learning WITH media rather than ABOUT media.
  • There is an intent to move FORWARD rather than looking BACKWARDS at how things are.
  • It’s aims are TRANSFORMATIONAL rather than DOCUMENTARY.

When we live in an age of mass media consumerism, where our experience of the physical world is so strongly linked with our experience of the digital world, we need media studies to be exceptional. To move forward media studies must look forward. We need to to emphasise the knowledge of the makers as they are the ones with the power to make a difference. We need to encourage research THROUGH design rather than research INTO or FOR design to ensure our makers are well equipped and we need to see change occurring.

If you want to see the change, be the change. If you want to be the change, be a media maker.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

 

References

Extract from David Gauntlett, 2014, Making Media Studies: The Creativity Turn In Media Studies, Found at http://davidgauntlett.com/making-media-studies/extract-from-new-book/.

 

Media Studies 2.0

March 14, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Since we didn’t have a lectorial this week, due to the Labour Day public holiday, I decided to continue on with Brian Morris’s discussion on Media Studies 2.0. So what exactly is Media Studies 2.0? By all accounts Media Studies 2.0 was first used by William Merrin on the blog he created under the same name back in 2007 and in the same year was also used by David Gauntlett (by coincidence) to reference and describe a new way of approaching  and viewing media studies.

The basic premise of Media Studies 2.0 is that the current model of Media Studies 1.0 is outdated. Media Studies 1.0 focuses on the roles of institutions, production, audiences and texts and these simply just don’t exist in the way that they used to. Media Studies 2.0 seeks to draw focus on the ways in which media is changing and to equip students of media studies with a relevant, up-to-date understanding of the CURRENT media landscape thus allowing them to survive and prosper in the new digital world.

As William Merrin stated in his book Media Studies 2.0, “(media studies) has the potential to be one of the most important subject areas going into the 21st century, at the forefront of digital technologies and their remaking of the world. But equally it has the option of being left behind, it’s focus on  reception and content and broadcast forms and concepts condemning it to an increasing irrelevance for everyone but itself”

The key aims of Media Studies 2.0 as outlined by David Gauntlett are:

  • Expert readings of media texts are replaced by everyday readings of media texts, by diverse everyday audience members.
  • Traditional media, classical texts and specific avant-garde texts are replaced by a focus on independent media projects, like those found on: YouTube, mobiles and other DIY media websites.
  • The focus on primarily Western media is removed to embrace international aspects of media studies such as globalisation and diverse; perspectives, creative attitudes and authors.
  • Acknowledgment that the internet has fundamentally changed how  we engage with all forms of media.
  • Rather than teaching students how to ‘read’ media texts, we should recognise their inherent capacity for interpretation, due to their constant exposure to media and associated expository techniques.
  • Traditional research methods are replaced  by methods which recognise individual creativity, and thus remove outdated notions of viewer,  audiences and producers.
  • Acknowledgement that viewers are not just passive/mindless consumers of messages created  by corporations but rather participate in and create individual meanings and viewpoints from the original message supplied.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

 

Holes, Spaces Between And Gaps

March 14, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Editing is a process of leaving ‘holes, spaces between and gaps’. Jeremy Bowtell suggests that deep engagement comes from the audience having to do the work for themselves, especially in relation to film narrative or key elements of the plot. You can see the effect of this more extremely in works like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive or Inception, where the film gets to live on within online realms for years after its release simply due to clever narrative ambiguity.

Creating meaning is also a key element of the editing process; editors manipulate the content to steer the audience in a particular direction simultaneously encouraging viewers to complete the argument in their head. Eisenstein, a soviet filmmaker of the 1920’s was a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage and juxtaposition. He believed that films should be “a tendentious (argumentative) selection and juxtaposition”, thus influencing the audience in a desired direction. Most films do in fact seek to string the audience along a particular line of reasoning as it’s one of the main facets of narrative film, it’s just that they throw enough confounding material in to make you believe you had to conduce it for yourself.

Edward Dmytryk, a Canadian-born American film director, who is known for his 1940’s film noir’s believed that you should never make a cut without a positive reason. He believed that if unsure about the exact frame to cut on, you should always cut long rather than short. Bowtell states that to cut short is often to obvious and startling to the viewer, thus making longer shots preferential. Dmytryk also believes that filmmakers should prioritise substance over form; think about what you are trying to say, rather than how you are going to say it. It’s easy to get caught up in form, but ultimately form alone won’t make a great film.

Walter Murch, an American film editor and sound designer focuses on three key elements in regards to editing: emotion, story and rhythm.

  • Emotion: Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?
  • Story: Does the cut advance the story?
  • Rhythm: Does the cut occur at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and ‘?right?’?

The three key elements mentioned above can be seen in the scene from Martin Scorsese’s ‘Casino’ edited by Thelma Schoonmaker called ‘When Sam Meets Ginger’. The scene shows the casino manager Sam (Robert De Niro) as he is first introduced to Ginger (Sharon Stone). Within the scene juxtaposition occurs between the chaos of the chips flying and the statuesque Sam and his face as he watches, the chaos caused by the blonde bombshell Ginger.

In terms of emotion: A love story has blossomed by the time De Niro has gotten to the casino floor.

In terms of advancing the story: There is no dialogue, but all of the story is told through Sam and Gingers eye-contact and the timing of these edits; cutting long rather than short.

In terms of rhythm: The scene flows through a series of high intensity, excessively energetic shots with various jazz, blues and 50’s pop soundtracks, to completely still shots comprising no audio at all, leading up to a crescendo as the couple first meet.

This scene alone, was enough to make me fall in love with the film Casino, which is a testament to the power of editing, without great editing a film can fall flat on it’s face. However editors like Thelma Schoonmaker are often the unsung heroes of the film industry, firmly placed behind the scenes, but times they-are-a-changing…

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

Beauty Inherently Lies

March 11, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Haiku’s by nature create art through the fusion of dissimilar themes. I wanted to show that urban spaces do this to. People often see urban spaces as ugly, disparate, concrete spaces. So within my Haiku video I decided to focus on the vivid; colour, beauty and art inherent in urban spaces.

My Haiku video consists of a string of fifteen shots, each lasting for just under two seconds. The transition of each shot is in sync with beat two in the music, which is highlighted sonically by the snare drum. Every time you hear the crash of the snare, the shot transitions to a new image of urban beauty. Each of the shots focusses on a specific element whether that be the interplay of colours, compositional complexity or unintentional art.

The haiku itself is presented through on screen text reading:

Urban sprawl invites us
Colour breathes life into space
Beauty inherently lies

HAIKU from Louise Alice Wilson on Vimeo.

This project was extremely interesting and rewarding as it allowed me to further explore the notion of beauty in the everyday or beauty in the most unassuming places. I now feel slightly more comfortable with Adobe Premiere Pro, however it’s still a bit quirky, so I look forward to using it more in the future. Getting used to the notion of becoming a regular media maker is hard, but also extremely rewarding, I feel that my mind is more on the lookout for possible things to film, or possible new projects, due to this constant engagement with creative activities. So I wonder what my next project will be…

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

Find Your Creative Voice

March 11, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Giving and receiving feedback is always an awkward and sometimes difficult process, especially if it’s negative. Luckily we have people like Edward de Bono, who created the Six Thinking Hats system to guide us through this awkward procedure, and it’s also three decades old, which means it works, right…?

De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a system designed to inform and guide group discussion and individual thinking. The main benefit of this system is that it follows an easy metaphor: hats. Hats are easy to put on and off and therefore the notion of a thinking hat lends itself to spontaneity and reversibility. Each of the six thinking hats is a different colour and each different colour corresponds to a different thinking ingredient. We have the blue hat for process, the white hat for facts, the red hat for feelings, the green hat for creativity, the yellow hat for benefits and the black hat for cautions.

Having a different hat for each thinking ingredient allows for each person’s view to be heard, but to be channeled in effective and directed ways. It also allows for criticisms to be openly aired and heard without the usual defensive reactions.Using the Six Thinking Hats is extremely important within creative fields as these fields often require high amounts of group interactivity as well as continual criticism and reworking. Learning how to use these hats in an efficient way enables the creative individual to not only learn from their mistakes but to find their own voice.

When using the Six Thinking Hats system within our workshop, I noticed that most people found giving complimentary feedback easy, but as soon as it came to giving the denoted negative feedback or ‘what you didn’t like about the piece’ people struggled. This is most likely exaggerated by the fact that we as students have just begun interacting with one another, barely beginning to learn each others names, therefore people are hesitant to be negative or critical straight off the bat. However, I think over time and through continued, forced use of this method, the majority of the class could  learn to openly give opinions, without the usual fear of social repercussions.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

My Lo-fi Self

March 10, 2016 / / 0 Comments

For my creative self portrait, I decided to stick with what I enjoy on the daily, and those things are: art, friends, plants, skateboarding, music, art blogging and finding beauty in the most unlikely places. I believe it is the things that make up our daily lives that best define us.

My 3 Audio Recordings:

  1. Traffic Light Beat

  • I like finding art/beauty in unexpected places. For awhile I’ve noticed that a lot of inanimate objects create cool beats & rhythms. For a long time I’ve wanted to create a soundcloud/blog that creates all of them. I think that musicality inherent in nature is quite impressive, especially in the often chaotic world that we currently live in, it’s nice to come across a moment of random beauty.

2. My Song

  • I often write songs in my spare time and try to record them when I get  a chance. Here is a segment from one of my songs, I guess it shows a lot about my likes & taste in regards to music and how I like to produce my creative work.

3. Chris Practising Bass

  • Having a partner that is a musician is a both a blessing and a curse. It often means I end up listening to a lot of Chris practising , but I do enjoy listening because even practising can be immensely interesting.

My 6 Photos:

  1. My Recording Studio

Recording Studio

  • My recording studio is the place where I spend a lot of my time. It’s also the place were I expend a lot of creative energy. I practise music here, I edit my photos here, I do my uni work here, I blog here, I record my music here, I hang with friends here.
  • It’s probably one of my favourite places to be. It’s beautiful, calm and I can be productive here.

2. My Skateboard

Skateboard

  • My skateboard is often tied to my freedom because it’s literally how I get around but I also use it to escape.
  • My twin brother (when we didn’t live on opposite sides of the country) used to go skateboarding together in the middle of the night. It would be dead quiet, there were no cars on the road, just the two of us hanging, often for hours. It was an exhilarating way to bond and it was a beautiful way to see the city, you’d get to see another side of the city you live in.

3. My Partner

Chris

  • Chris and I spend a lot of time together. We play music together, we hang with friends together, we eat together, we laugh together. Your partner get’s to see a side of you that no one else does.
  • We’re very similar and in a lot of ways were very different, meeting Chris allows you to know me better.

4. My Plants

Plants

  • My mum is a horticulturalist who runs a plant distribution company. Growing up my back garden was an oasis of various different palms, ficus’s and vines, waiting to be distributed to various companies.
  • Plants was a way I could bond and learn from my mother. She taught me how to take care of them, how to care for the earth, how to respect the environment and how to be a balanced person. Through plants, you can learn a lot.

5. My Music

Records

  • I love music and I listen to it a lot. I always love art and album artwork. Records are a wonderful mix of the two. You have great quality audio and you have these beautiful large album covers that display a lot about the individual artist.
  • I listen to a lot of SBTRKT, The Lijadu Sisters, Ladysmith Black Mambazo & Emma Donovan. I love all genres but my favourite are: electronic, r&b, african, blues & soul. My own music is often a mix of electronic, r&b and soul.

6. My Art Blog

Art Blog

  • I love art blogging. I originally started blogging art because in my daily life (work, uni, friends etc) I didn’t feel like I didn’t get to see enough visual beauty/creativity. Creating the blog was a way to feed that desire.
  • I can also pick the art that I like, which is great, I can create a collection of all my favourite things and see them all next to each other. I also get to share unknown art or old art or forgotten art with people and re-contextualise that art.

My 3 Pieces of Video:

  1. Blow Improvising

Blow

  • I love going to gigs and I especially love watching gigs were the musicians jam or improvise with each other. This is a video of some friends of mine Bob (keys) Dixie (flugelhorn), Adrian (trumpet) Ted (drums), Pete (sax) & Gareth (double bass).
  • Impromptu art is both impressive and fascinating. It’s a once in a lifetime moment.

2. Patti Smoking

Patti

  • This is my friend Patti smoking. It’s Patti doing what Patti does best. She’s the nicest person I know and she’s also a total badass , I think this video weirdly encapsulates here quite well.
  • I like people that are interesting and unadulterated.

3. PTV Tram

PTV

  • I’ve literally spent years of my life on public transport. I guess that comes with the poor, uni student territory.
  • PTV can be annoying to no end, but also have a strong admiration and respect for it. I’ve had some of my best ideas on public transport and seen some of the wackiest and most beautiful things. I think this video shows how even a tram can be beautiful or at least interesting, when framed correctly.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

Leos Carax Hurts My Brain

March 9, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Leos Carax hurts my brain. More specifically Leos Carax’s Holy Motors hurts my brain but I think I kinda like it.

I first viewed Holy Motors after stumbling across some beautiful screenshots of the film on my Tumblr dashboard. The screenshots were beautiful enough to entice me to seek out the film, but I was yet to discover how the narrative or lack of it would also add to the film’s magnificence.

My first viewing of the film was alone in a dark room which in the end lent itself to a lot of post viewing googling, such as “meaning behind Leos Carax Holy Motors” or “plot summary of Holy Motors. After coming up with some unsatisfying summaries that stated “Leos Carax is in love with love” or “a journey from life to death” I decided to stop googling. These reviews didn’t just leave me with a head full of burning questions, they also left me with that dissatisfying feeling of disenchantment. It was a similar feeling to the one you get when you show a musical friend your new favourite band and they tear apart their drumming technique or point out how genre conforming the whole album is.

After viewing the film for a second time (surrounded by people in a dark room) the magic of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors was again evident. Hearing the gasps, hearing the laughter, hearing the uncomfortable shifting and the complete transfixion re-ignited that original enchantment and all those burning questions. If your like me and you like it when you brain hurts, I’d advise that you go see this film, surrounded by people in a dark room and don’t google anything after, just talk. Talk to the people around you, revel in your wonder, revel in your discomfort, revel in your brain hurt. Don’t attempt to google the ‘solution’, just revel in this wonderful film, because it is rare these days to come across a film that can produce wonder, pain, laughter and discomfort on a truly genuine level, so you may as well enjoy it.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

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