I went into the city today to borrow the mic from tech to do my interview (yes, I am aware I’m very behind and I am very STRESSED about it). Again I caught myself noticing media around me, mostly because I don’t usually come in on Friday’s and so there wasn’t anyone to talk to, to and from campus. In the Melbourne Central underground there’s these huge Plasma TV type things along the wall of the train tracks and they kept playing different ads while I waited for my train home. It was so distracting, but I found it funny that the sound was muted every time an announcement was made, only to be put back on straight after. As if anyone’s actually listening – or watching for that matter! That’s how I feel about a lot of the media (advertising kind) that is up around the city. Everyone’s too busy going places and doing errands to notice that some corporation has paid $$ to have their billboard hand painted along a building wall (although I notice that every time, there’s a new painted movie poster every few weeks, it’s insane!)
Monthly Archives: April 2016
Survival Guide
Guess whose trying to desperately catch up on work she’s behind in because she got sick for 3 days in a row!?!?! Yep! It’s me!!! A few weeks back we were given the exercise in the workshop to interview each other and create a clip that was a ‘survival guide to your first six weeks of University’. So much time was spent trying to figure out the mics and the camera (Song MC50 video camera, which I’ve never seen or used in my life) that by the time it came to actually filming, we were very short on time. Not only that, but we (myself and Samantha) were short 1 team member – who was away sick. We needed to have a bunch of different shots; things like establishing, action shot, cutaways, etc. We tried our best, but with limited time and only the 2 of us (while other groups had up to 4 members) it was a struggle! Other difficulties were finding a place that was quiet enough to film. Lots of people kept walking past us during shooting – not only were we shy about talking in front of the camera when others could see, but it was just plain disruptive for everyone involved. We did achieve a good shot for the interview itself – a plain white wall that was well lit and easy to colour correct in post-production.
Anyway, without further ado…
How To Survive The First 6 Weeks of University from Lucy Wadelton on Vimeo.
Do you need conflict?
As a follow up from the blog post I made about narrative, I wanted to think about conflict within a story. Does it give the story its drive? Is it crucial to making a good story? I’m going to go with yes, in most cases, if not all. When I try to think of films without some kind of climax, I not only find it hard to think of any, but the ones I can imagine are ones I hated. These are films like Sofia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ which, to my recollection was boring and had no story whatsoever.
Even shows and movies that are particularly low-key, or appear that nothing really has changed from the start to the end, have some sort of subtle 3 act structure. I’m thinking of shows like The Office – overall, what happens? Not a lot. It’s just about boring every day work life. But each episode has a theme and within that theme there’s some kind story that has a conflict and resolution.
Narrative
Brian talked a little bit about narrative today, specifically about what narrative is and why it matters. I’m just going to summarize the information I jotted down during the talk for starters. In it’s simplest explanation, narrative is a story. It’s a way of structuring meaning to form a – you guessed it – narrative.
Key elements of a story include controlling idea, character, conflict, structure and character change/growth. In a typical 3 Act structure a character will experience a conflict and resolution, to which they have learned or grown as a person by the end credits. This type of narrative formula is most common in Hollywood films – browse a Video Ezy (do those even exist anymore?) and pretty much everything you find will follow this example. It’s only the indie and more alternative films that shy away from this – of course that’s a generalisation, but you get the idea.
Personally, I’m a fan of the predictable formula – not in the sense that I necessarily need a Happily Ever After or cliché tropes to be overused in every film I see (if anything, please god no I don’t want that). Just in the way that I find this to be the best way of creating a good story that is engaging all the way through. As was explained by Brian, narrative codes such as this can generate or control the flow of suspense, provide setting and engage viewers attention to reveal character or further the plot. It is, ‘a creative demonstration of the truth’. The truth being of course – that people experience ups and downs and people grow.
Are We Being Brainwashed?
I have been doing a bit of ‘noticing’ media since it was first brought up in a lectorial a few weeks back. It’s an interesting concept and once you start, it becomes hard to stop. When I was thinking about ‘media’, I narrowed in more on advertising in every day life. Things like billboards and posters.
Rachel mentioned today in the lectorial that it’d be smart to talk a bit about media overseas. I’ve travelled to quite a few countries and it’s interesting comparing Melbourne’s media displays in places like the CBD versus those across the world. Compared to something like Times Square (which is, overwhelming to say the least), Melbourne is pretty minimalistic with its media. There’s the occasional digital billboard, but that’s sort of a big deal here. In NYC though – it’s pretty much on every corner – one big colourful advertisement after another. So you can imagine, after wondering around Bourke Street during the lectorial activity, and finding so many little and big things to pick up on – just how widespread that would be in Times Square.
More recently I went to England and found that the Piccadilly Circus area is similar. Wrapped around the buildings there are giant neon billboards with ads playing for things like Coca Cola. Several classic red double decker buses will drive past with advertisement slapped along the body. Different shop radio can be heard from just about every direction – and don’t even get me started on the tube.
Thinking about this also reminded me of a film I really loved as a kid, ‘Josie and the Pussycats’ which integrated a world record amount of advertising and brand dropping into the film – it’s pretty much in every scene – as a kind of irony to the plotline about media monopoly and brainwashing. Take a look at this clip I found from the film.
Step up your game
In today’s Lectorial we got a little bit of a pep talk about blogging from Rachel. Although it was a little confronting to hear we weren’t putting in enough work or effort to impress our tuts – a lot of us (myself included) are barely making the minimum.
I was actually struggling with this, trying to figure out how to make 4 posts let alone more! So the lecture slides were helpful to give me ideas and I guess, inspire me. For starters, I need to remember these posts don’t have to be essays. Also, we’re totally allowed to split to different ideas into 2 posts about the same topic – which would have given me more posts in the past, that’s for sure.
I also made the mistake of forgetting I am a Media student after all (or as Rachel put it, ‘for crying out loud’) and the use of videos, photos and other elements along with text (or instead of!) is entirely optional.
Some of the ideas she gave us were things you’ll be seeing a lot more of on my blog starting now. Things like ‘noticing’ media, lectorial and reading reflections, workshops and even discussing my personal media consumption.
Is there a right or wrong way to interpret media?
The reading written by Alan McKee, along with the latest Lectorial, was one big year 12 throwback. Even though I’ve been finding it pretty hard to read the texts online rather than having a physical copy, I managed with McKee’s work because it wasn’t totally new information for me. He basically was talking about how we analyse the texts that we read and make bias interpretations of them based on our own experiences and past. This also goes along with the notion that no two people will interpret a text the same – and that there truly is no right or wrong way to do so either.
We did study this sort of thinking in year 12 with the media influence theories – things like semiotic constructivist theory, the bullet theory and so on – any other year 12 Media students know what I’m talking about I’m sure. These theories also suggested ways in which people are influenced, from mass media to family and friends. In a way, this is what McKee is talking about – that our own belief systems and morals will help us decide whether we think a text is accurate and if it represents our perception of reality.
the Zodiac
Thursday’s Cinema Studies seminar was a little denser than in the past. Usually the routine goes a little like this; we have a little class discussion at the start, dive into re-watching scenes from the movie watched the week previous and then analyse together. Certainly, we did all of those things. But not only did we discuss the Life Aquatic, but also the Zodiac. I’m personally quite a fan of the Zodiac – I went into the screening without any pre-conceived notions, except that I knew the film was going to be long. I didn’t know anything about the Zodiac killer (aside from the occasional online meme – like the theory that Ted Cruz is in fact, the infamous murderer).
We ended up talking about Mise En Scene and Aspects of the shot with both these films. Last week I already did a little analysis on the Life Aquatic from home when sick, so I’m going to spend this post devoted to the Zodiac.
In order to discuss the aspect of the shot, we re-watched the entire opening scene of the Zodiac. Arguable the most comforting of the whole film, in which we following a couple on their journey from Darlene picking her boyfriend up, all the way to their brutal murders in Lover’s Lane. One of the very early shots, which is from the POV within the car looking out the side window, is cinematically very beautiful. It’s also affective in triggering that unease within the viewer – I know that when the boy ran up to the car I thought the killer would be in the driver’s seat because of how ominous and ambiguous the perspective of the car had seemed leading up to that point.
The ‘god shot’ when the couple first drive into Lover’s lane is used to show just how deserted the area is and the lighting of the car headlights with the blackness all around creates a kind of entrapped feeling. Fincher also used close, tight shots from within the car to make you feel apart of the constriction, almost trapped with them. This ‘god’ perspective is not used the entire confrontation, until after the gunman is returning back from his car to ‘finish’ them off when he could see movement still.
Workshop Survival Guide
I’ve been a little slow with updating my blog this past week, but we all have a lazy week here and there! I’m back on track now though. Last Thursday we had a workshop as per usual. I thought I was running late, after having a near fainting experience the morning before, I was a little nervous on the train over. But I seemed to get there 10 minutes early, and the class was virtually empty.
We had a discussion about Project 3, which was very helpful. I got to hear other peoples ideas and who they were planning to interview, and I got to jot down some notes for my own piece. I tried to be silent, same as I will here, because I don’t really want to give much away before I’ve even started. But I am going to interview my dad, whose an artist!
Seth made a really good point about collecting ‘atmos’ (atmosphere) recordings for this project too, which I would never have thought of. Audio has never been my strong point, so it’ll be interesting trying to figure out the mic and stuff – especially since we have to borrow equipment from the uni.
Toward the end of the class we were told to get into groups of three to do a little recording task. Unfortunately one of my friends was sick, which meant myself and my other friend had to stay in a pair while some people were in 4’s. That made it a little difficult for us to complete the task, but we tried our best. We were given a camera and mic and asked to create a simple ‘how to survive the first 6 weeks of uni’ guide. Both of us were awkward and unhappy to be in front of the camera, which I think is funny – considering we’re all trying to get into the media industry. We are big fans of being BEHIND the camera…
Semiotics
Today’s lectorial got me a little more excited for our upcoming project – which is to make a short interview/documentary style clip that’s due in week 7. The topic of this week was ‘text analysis’ and we even had 2 different guest speakers (one virtual, one in person) to tell us a little more about the production process. It was interesting to learn some of the restrictions there would be for future filmmaking in the course – things like for heaven’s sake don’t use props like fake guns unless you want the SWAT team to appear… We also discussed where and how you can film on public and private property. Even places like national parks have a higher power who decides whether you can film there, which sounds exhausting, if I’m honest. But it’s good to know all this stuff now, before I get myself fined by the Vice Chancellor something equally terrible.
But we also discussed semiotics, which is a concept pretty familiar with me (shout out to year 12 media!). The whole idea is basically that there are codes that can be denoted within media that mean something to the audience. The example Brian used was the romantic connotations of red roses.
We did a little exercise sheet too, analysing a picture and decoding it in terms of semiotics as well as general analysis.