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