Monthly Archives: March 2017

week 5 initiative

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While I’m writing this bedridden, I’m reminiscing about Friday’s night out and I only thought to put it for Week 5’s initiative. I visited a bar in Brunswick called ‘Bimbo Deluxe’ for a friend’s birthday and yes, it was my first time at a bar (I’m more of a clubbing person tbh).

I didn’t think much of the interior mainly due to the bar’s dimly lit setting, but one thing actually caught my eye. The disk jockey’s set – more specifically, the images/videos that were projected behind him:

  

I really liked the touch of animation in a setting of a bar. From one of my favourite animation studio, Studio Ghibli, the DJ was projecting the movie, My Neighbour Totoro. This is something I never usually see or expect in an adult-setting (aka a bar), as animations are perceived to be for children, which is obviously an outdated form of thinking, but seeing this nice touch of childhood was refreshing yet nostalgic.

Films like Studio Ghibli are something I hope to a part of, creating extraordinary ideas with unconventional characters – almost human-like. Whoever’s idea it was to project a film like My Neighbour Totoro, you are a genius!

lyreca ✨

 

the long awaited self portrait of mine (just kidding haha)

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I’m finally done with my self-portrait 2.0!!!!!! Let me just start off by saying that this did not feel like an assessment task at all as I was completely stress-free in the making of this video. Generating content and media helped me discover more about myself in terms of work ethics, how I carry myself out and most importantly, gaining more confidence in my own creation.

Let’s start off with the explanation of why I have chosen these certain moments of my life translated through the following media; audio, video and photographs. My self-portrait starts off with a series of the following nicknames I’ve been called:

lyrics 

lycresha

lik 

lyreca 

I structured it in a way that was almost chronological – from my least called nick names to my real name. Just adding in a bit of ~fun fact~ but my most preferred name in that list is ‘Lik’, mainly due to the fact that that was my childhood nickname since birth. However, I ended with my name, emphasising its uniqueness making it largely part of my identity.

Onto the videos! The piece of media that dominated this self-portrait was obviously, videos. The reason being is well, it feels more natural and easier to watch as opposed to photographs (which I found more challenging to place) – perhaps that has something to do with deep and hyper attention? Anyway, you may have noticed that these videos look foreign – and that’s because they weren’t taken in Australia! They were actually taken from a trip I took to the motherland (the Philippines) 4 months ago. The me from four months ago would have never known that I would be using these footage for an assignment. I would definitely call it an extremely early preparation. These footages surely envisioned the sight I had for this self-portrait.

Now an assignment wouldn’t be complete without having a mini mental breakdown. Even though I did say I was stress-free in the making, I did struggle quite a bit when it came to the audio aspect. Finding an audio to match the chosen footage was a real challenge, oh boy. I took at least 23 audio recordings before I could find the perfect 3 to match the footage and images. How did I solve this, you ask? With the help of my lovely family, we decided to cover a song that would match the theme, which was “calmness”. The name of the song covered was specifically a Filipino song because I wanted to include my roots (which was translated too) – Ambon (which means ‘Rain’ or ‘Light Drizzle’) by Migz & Maya. How perfectly fitting does the title sound? More importantly, I’m hoping the mood of the music matches the footage (and imo, it does).

Ending my reflection, I’d like to update my progress with Premiere Pro. I finally got the hang with using this headache of a software and in actuality, it isn’t really a headache at all. I think I was just really being a whiny baby and refused to manually learn its technicalities. I’m not saying I’m a total expert yet, but I’m getting there, slow and steady.

Thanks for the read as always,

Lyreca 🦑

workshop #4

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I WAS FINALLY EARLY FOR TODAY’S CLASS! Earlier, I was lying down in bed, wondering if it was worth it to get up, get ready and actually head to uni. Patting myself in the back for doing doing that. It’s the little things that count in the life of an introvert! 😂

Liam mentioned that Brian kept reiterating on the second reading (hint hint), which was in fact, the comic strip reading, Blood in the Gutter. We re-discussed the meaning and what it does for the audience in what the author was try to convey. Liam asked us, “What does the title actually mean?” Without realising, I actually never have pondered on the meaning. Some say that it means life (or how I understood it to be). Let me break it down:

‘gutter’ – in the world of comics/manga, the gutter was the spaces in between pictures, which can be referred to as the ‘veins’ of the story/comic as mentioned by Liam

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and of course ‘blood’ was the very source that was keeping this gutter/comic/story alive

It’s all very subjective and can be left for different interpretation. This meaning, however, makes absolute sense to me.

We shifted to week 4’s reading and there was a lot of mixed opinions about it. I was surprised to hear that some people actually disliked Newport’s teachings – yes they do agree to his statement to a certain degree, but they might’ve been put off by perhaps his egotistical method of delivering this approach. Nonetheless, I learnt a new piece of learning strategy from him (despite the pompous aura he gives off), but I want to keep following my passion. I’ll take his advice with a grain of salt but also put it into practice and see where it takes me.

That’s week 4 for me! I’m waiting for PB #2 to export as we speak so that should be up here!

Lyreca ☘️

my initiative for this week (week 4)

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(Image Source)

“She‘s a naughty girl with a, bad habit, bad habit, for drugs!” 🎶  

– Mr G 

I finally came around to watching Summer Heights High after watching Ja’mie: Private School Girl and Jonah from Tonga a few years back. Chris Lilley is one hilarious and talented dude – the switch from character to character was just so convincing that if you were watching a random episode for the first time, you’d think it was 3 completely different people. Watching SHH also took me back to my days of primary schooling, rather than high school (I related more to Private School Girl) because the setting, the mis-en-scene, the acting of each and every character was spot-on. The way SHH is filmed gives it a documentary-style, making it more realistic and therefore, relatable to anyone who has attended Australian schooling, really.

The relationship to Media 1? This is just an assumption of mine, but the three characters were probably filmed during different times, but the editing made it seem like Chris immediately changed costumes and switched onto another character in an instant. That probably might not be the case, however, the ‘mockumentary’ style (or rather the editing) gives it a continuous style of filmmaking, giving the audience an impression of one time space, that is, a full day of school.

I definitely recommend this to everyone who’s looking for a laugh!

Lyreca 💫

lectorial + reading #4

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UPDATE: Here’s a photo (I found on Tumblr) to prompt us on this topic/life lesson, haha!

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For this week’s lectorial, we discussed the concept of passion versus your work ethics/discipline. I’ve always been exposed to idea of following something you are “passionate” about, so it was interesting to hear how one should build up a particular skill and THEN develop/build up the passion for that once you have mastered that skill. In my linear way of thinking, I always believed it was the opposite – the teachings, media and education I was exposed to emphasised on the impression of being passionate and then eventually building up your skill to follow that dream.

The reading delved onto the craftsman mindset, arguing that this approach is the foundation for creating your, well, craft. This was truly an inspirational read but I believe that it’s not a mindset that one can easily convert to – as someone who lacks discipline, it’s difficult putting in long and deep hours of work into something that I may have a mediocre interest in (of course, eventually becoming passionate for it). I’m in too deep with the passion mindset –I always feel the need to be extremely passionate about my work in order to create it. However, I definitely see the cons of this thinking, especially when entering the corporate/working world. As mentioned in the reading, our society was built on pragmatism, rather than dealing with your craft/passion in an idealistic approach.

Later on, I also decided to spark a discussion about this topic among my family friend and cousin (one of my very close friends, in fact) and I attempted to explain to them this very concept. I have to admit, I struggled quite a bit when it came to describing the craftsman mindset but eventually they got my drift. My friend, Mary, described that she was in this position before – she had a particularly strong affection towards make-up and the kind of art it could produce. I consider her to be a self-taught make-up extraordinaire, however, she stuck with the passionate path and did not pursue the make-up industry and its difficulties, seeming as it is a competitive industry. Basing it on this example, I can see through the eyes of Newport’s theory and how one must be 100% committed in order to keep up with your field of passion/craft. I feel refreshed hearing different stories and examples from today’s lesson – I definitely see the other side of the story, in comparison to before.

(Left to right: Mary, myself and my cousin)

Best,

Lyreca 🌈

week 3: lectorial and workshop

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I’m finally back from my 4-day hiatus and boy do I have a lot to say about week 3’s madness! I’ll be honest – I found this week to be in the middle of the spectrum in terms of difficulty ever since we were introduced to the software “Premiere Pro CC 2017”. I’m still getting the hang of its technicalities and controls, seeming as I have never encountered a software this difficult before. Honestly, it is such a hard software to deal with and I’m on the verge of slamming my laptop – I’ve been deleting my PP project and restarting all over again because it. is. always. acting. up. 🙃

Nonetheless, I made it through the week without dying. Let’s begin our recap of Week 3:

LECTORIAL: 

As usual, I began the lectorial huffing and puffing because I decided to be athletic and take the stairs from the 5th to the 11th floor. I know. It was also a little different this week with Liam Ward (my tutor) leading the lecture. I definitely saw the relation between his lecture and reading. I had a wrong interpretation about the reading after hearing Liam mention the power of editing. I was viewing the reading from the audience’s perspective rather than the editor’s. Hitchcock’s example of editing also exemplified its power and the ability we have over media as editors:

It also reminded of how almost brain-washed we are as audience – I was recently watching a Filipino reality show and the heavily edited scenes made certain people turn into either the “hero” or a “malicious” character (would you say this is my initiative? 😂). As Liam mentioned continuity editing, it definitely plays a part in modern television, especially when unlinked events suddenly become related, thus, creating an opportunity for editors to make out a story from it (also known as categorising).

Liam had also prepared an activity in order for us to fully realise this concept. From a famous short-story, One of These Days by Gabriel Garcia Marques, we were given a scrambled version of a story and we had to connect two scenes together. This exercise helped me understand editing not just in videos but in all forms of media – the structure of a story truly impacts the effect on the story and what kind of emotional response it should invoke. With this story, we also discussed the power of closure and how you can immediately tell a story is nearly coming to an end. The order of the story can give away the fact that the story is ending – that is how impactful closure can be.

WORKSHOP: 

The workshop was a mixture between a discussion, critiquing someone’s work and essentially, a workshop/tutorial for Premiere Pro. This week, we reviewed some of the girls’ Haiku video and I think we’re finally getting the hang of the “6 hats” style of critiques. In comparison to my Haiku video, they were well thought-out and made really well. I could tell they put in a lot of effort into it. I felt sort of envious about their hard work because I really didn’t put enough heart into it – it was simply my way of learning how to play with the software.

In my opinion, it’s unfair how they immediately dove us straight into using the software instead of holding at least a beginners’s mini class or tutorial for us. I understand why followed through this approach though – they wanted to us to experiment in our own terms and that definitely a type of learning I’m not used to. I’m at a disadvantage because I’m not too knowledgeable when it comes to programs like these.

Straying away from my mini rant, Liam showed us a couple of videos of the students’ previous work and I was amazed! I saw the personalities of these individuals I’ve never seen before in a span of 59 seconds. I’d really like to replicate a polished video like those, but of course in my own version.

Lyreca

Playing around with PP CC 2017

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Here is my Haiku video! I’m not too proud of it and here’s why:

Premiere Pro is quite a difficult software to use and I’m still getting around to using this headache of a software. My only experience with editing softwares were iMovie and Movie Maker so Premiere Pro is completely foreign to me. Nonetheless, I hope this video somewhat interests you for 23 seconds.

I’m hoping to master PP in a short time frame so that I’ll be able to produce quality assignments, but honestly, that’s too overreaching at the moment. In due time, Lyreca, in due time.

As always,

Lik 😝

Week 3’s reading + studio visits!

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For week 3’s reading piece, it was a comic! Honestly, I dread every piece of reading, especially if it’s an extremely long piece of text. Of course, this week’s reading was particularly long but was an easier read because, well, it was a comic!

The intention of the author was to display different styles of storytelling (particularly in comics) and also our preconceived notions of the stories within comics, film, TV shows, etc. What really grabbed my attention was at the beginning of the comic and how the author tackled the concept of “perception of the world through the experience of our senses”. 

(Week 3 Reading: Blood in the Gutter, Scott McCloud) 

My interpretation of this from a media practitioner’s perspective is how we can use this concept to our advantage. As mentioned in the comic, the reader/viewer can use their imagination or sense in order to piece a whole story together. McCloud also dove deeper into this practice and compared the Western and Eastern styles, exemplifying the techniques and the differences between the two influences.

This was quite the interesting read and enjoyed the break from reading massive chunks of text. It also gave a certain perspective that I myself have never thought about before – it is how we dissect media and how it plants a message in our logic.

S t u d i o  v i s i t s : Uses of Photography (This week’s initiative)

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I’ve just gotten out of my studio visit which was a Photography class with our lecturer, Brian Morris. I actually found out it was 3rd year class when one of the girls I sat with told me. I was expecting a more competitive atmosphere when in fact, it was completely relaxed in comparison to my Media 1 workshop.

In terms of the learning and the delivery of the lesson, it was very similar to the tutorials I’ve been attending. I guess there was a misconception in my mind about 3rd year classes. Getting into the content, Brian gave the class an extract of the class’ reading – it consisted of different quotes and anecdotes from several authors, and mostly depicted the history of photography and its uses. There was a discussion of what an image can do and how it projects a certain message. Whether it’d be aesthetically pleasing, a propaganda or a selfie – what can an image present?

Moving on, Brian also showed the different types of softwares used to edit images. I was familiar with some such as Photoshop, Lightshow, Snapseed, VSCO, etc. The different techniques were shown and explained i.e. the saturation, the brightness, etc. I’m glad to see that each and every simple of step of photography was being demonstrated instead of jumping into the hard stuff.

In the future, I’d also like to get more opportunities to explore other studios to get more experience and outlook. All in all, this studio visit has given a better perspective on what to expect for my 2nd and 3rd year of this Media course. Bring it on!

(I only got 3 hours of sleep so I’m sorry if this sounds quite sloppy, I’ll sleep more next time I promise)

Lyreca 👐

the media around you, me and us

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I purposely made a separate post for the group activity during the lectorial because I thought it’d be more important to centralise the idea of “media being everywhere” on one blog post!

Our location was at ‘City Square’, which honestly did not sound too familiar to me, and that is such a big disappointment for being a Melburnian 😅.

(Image from Wikipedia)

My experiences with City Square were almost little to none due to the fact that this isn’t where I frequent whenever I visit the CBD. Anywho, I got to know 4 lovely girls from my group named Sam, Chloe, Lizzie and Jasmine! I also believe the main focus of this task was to know the people and our peers around us in order to collaborate in the future.

What the task required us to do was to look at our surroundings. Look at the media around you – and look in all directions. Up high? On the ground? Mid-ground? Back-ground? Foreground? In our hands? We discussed what was around us and I think the discussion can only be translated into photographs:

If you take a closer look at the photos: you’ll see statues, flags promoting the Moomba festival (1st photo, bottom right corner), information booths, signs attached to the wall about the new and upcoming Citylink. This task has given a realisation of how powerful media can be. It’s  part of our consciousness and subconscious – an influential, flexible form that is used to send and promote a message. Heck, we even used a form of media to take those following images a.k.a. the phone in our hands.

I enjoyed the task that was given to us for Week 2’s tutorial, it was like no other. I got meet 4 lovely girls that I’m able to sit with for our seminars/lectures and most of all it made realise a valuable message – that we may possibly be the manipulator of this paramount form – Media.

(Left to right: Lizzie, Chloe, Jasmine, Samantha and myself!)

Thanks for readin’ my thoughts,

Lyreca

week 2 reflection – reading, lectorial and workshop

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As you can tell by the title, this reflection will be separated into 3 parts: the reading, lectorial and the workshop, all from week 2 madness. There’s nothing I hate more than a lengthy introduction so here it goes!

Reading:

The main focus of week 2’s reading was looking at MEDIA in a different perspective rather than viewing it in a traditional and linear manner. One of these perspectives were:

“We should look at media not as channels for communication messages but for experiences and making things happen”

– David Gauntlett

I somewhat believe this, because in my very humble opinion, media is a channel for communication! While I do agree that it’s also for experiences, it can be used as both in comparison to solely giving it one role. Media is an intersectional body that can be used for several purposes.

Upon writing some notes on the reading, the author emphasised on focusing on the creative aspect, rather than the theoretical part of media. I agree with Gauntlett’s rhetoric to a certain extent – there should be a balance between the two whilst undergoing the study of media/communication. With theory comes practice. Although, it all really depends on the individual and media’s user, hence why media is such a flexible concept that you can mould to your own liking and personality.

Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed the read along with the author’s ideas and attitude towards media – we shared some similar views and beliefs toward the practice and I have certainly been left with a profound quote to ponder about – “We should look at media as trigger for experiences and making things happen”.

Lectorial:

I managed to snag in a seat early unlike week 1 so I was in a comfortable position to be taking down notes and intently listening to Brian. He went through the usual housekeeping stuff, informing us of the basic information regarding the course and its requirements. But getting into the lectorial; he made us write down our opinions of media. Here is what I wrote (on paper) translated into the digital world (or on my own blog lol):

“Media is: 

  • Creativity: thought-provoking 
  • Collaboration/teamwork/interdependence 
  • “Triggers for experience” – conversation 
  • Limitless – growing prevalence, intersectional
  • Emotional – influential, shaping/manipulating, communication, reflects society  

Hearing responses around the room really gave me some good ideas and also made me realise how much I’m living inside a bubble (or perhaps lacking in vocabulary) – media really is an output for unique and individual expression. It tells you a different story about everyone, the complexities of a human being and maybe even the universe itself. I don’t wanna get in too deep but TLDR; there is A LOT of different individuals in the room with different backgrounds. This is totally straying away from the topic of media but that was just a self-revelation I discovered whilst listening to Brian’s lecture. (I hope there is some sort of relevance? 😓)

P.S. I made a separate blog post about the group activity here!

Workshop:

I felt EXTREMELY nervous to be attending week two’s workshop due to the fact the we had to present our work form PB #1. It turns out, it was only someone who was willing to volunteer (I volunteer as tribute!), phew.

I don’t recall her name but I only remember her as the girl from WA who wears glittery eye make-up, LMAO sorry if you’re reading this! We’ll call her, ‘Glittery Girl’ or ‘GG’. Upon looking at her content, I could immediately tell she was a humorous/sarcastic gal and definitely confident enough to be showing their content to a class of at least 25 people. Mind you, her work was going to be critiqued and commented on. I noticed a vast and major difference between the work she produced and mine. She didn’t take the task literally and seriously which is a good thing. Through her approach, she truly displayed her personality – her love for make-up, her sarcasm towards her family and friends and also the almost careless attitude she had to the world. I really admired that about GG and I was almost envious about her confidence. In short, I really enjoyed the fact that I got to know more of her personality through little bits and pieces of the media she showed us!

Of course, after every presentation – a critique is always necessary whether it be from a teacher or from your classmates – in this case, it was the latter.

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Liam (Liam Ward) told us about the “6 coloured hats” for our approach to critiques/criticisms about a particular work. I felt a tense atmosphere during this moment and also felt the hesitation within the room. I can totally understand why Liam wants us to follow this certain approach – it helps us take feedback in a constructive manner and also deepens our understanding about the world of Media, which obviously consists of criticisms about one’s work.

We have finally come through THE END OF THIS REFLECTION, THANK GOD!!!!!!!! If you got through reading 700 words, thank you for spending your time on this blog, because honestly, I wouldn’t even read my own shit (is it appropriate to swear on here lol).

I bid you adieu,

Lyreca 🤓