Tag Archives: media 1

Narrative Structure

Okay so I may or may not have been chronically ill Thursday morning during my Workshop, but I was told about this exercise by my friends so here I am. We were supposed to do this so that we might ‘consider and analyse the narrative structure of your PB3 portrait piece’. It’s just a few questions I’ve answered about my project. I skipped one or two just because they didn’t apply to my particular piece, but it was good activity to really get me thinking about it regardless.

  1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ of your portrait? My portrait focuses on the artistic career of my interviewee, David Wadelton. He is a painter but I focused specifically on his photography for this project. I wanted to focus on his photography because of his unique style. I suppose you could say the ‘controlling idea’ is to do with capturing a moment in history or noticing elements of our environment that you would usually take for granted – because this is what he does in his photography.
  1.  How is your portrait film structured? Though still a working process, I’m primarily using face-to-face recorded interview for my project. This is the base narrative, so that I can experiment with cutaways, display his photography and also use found footage to help enhance the conversation while my interviewee narrates it.
  1. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee? I think the thing I want them to get away from it is how much the world and our environment can change just through our life time. My interviewee talks about documenting Melbourne in the 70’s and how in many ways it has completely transformed since then.
  1. How is your portrait being narrated? It’s being narrated by the interviewee, so that the focus is entirely on him and his work. I chose this method because it is the most self contained, all footage is of him and recordings as well. But it also means focus won’t be detracted from the interviewee if you heard my voice or another person narrating.
  1. What role will the ‘found footage’ play in your portrait? The role of the found footage is actually pretty crucial, I’d say. Without giving too much away, I gained permission to use stock footage of Melbourne in the 60’s and 70’s to overlay while my interviewee discusses his photographic archive of the same era. It works really well to help enhance what he’s talking about, I think.
  1. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point? No.
  1. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum? It’s hard to say when it isn’t completed, but I think the use of cutaways and a few different angles helps to keep it interesting and maintain a flow that is engaging to the audience. I hope to use audio as a good momentum, having little to no silence but a steady flow so that it isn’t too much in one go.

 

Screen Shot 2016-04-17 at 4.56.32 PM

It’s Recording!

In a workshop a few weeks back we were told to get into pairs and practice recording interview style with borrowed equipment. Although I didn’t end up using the H2N Zoom in my PB3, it was helpful to test out the overall process.

I did this project with my friend Amber and we went into the RMIT Library and surrounds to ask each other questions. This was the result. We encountered a few problems right off the bat – firstly that the class had spent so much time trying to figure out the mic that we had about 10-15 minutes to complete the actual thing. It was also difficult finding an area to record that was both quiet, and that we wouldn’t be disrupting people by talking in. We hid in a corner of the library, but even then we must have frustrated everyone near us (hence the whispering in some parts). It was also kind of difficult to avoid making additional noise, like cluttering and movement etc., especially when we kept accidentally recording things. There’s a lot of ‘it’s been recording the whole time!’ and shuffling around.

Going through all the audio tracks was interesting for that, many conversations that I’m sure we didn’t even know we being recorded and a lot of 3 second snort laughter. Overall though, that activity was a lot of fun in my opinion. You can probably sense the humor in our voices, we weren’t really taking it seriously and it was hard to just make things up on the spot knowing you were being recorded.

 

Ignoring Media

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!)

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.

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…