Monthly Archives: May 2017

the final workshop #12

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The workshop began with its usual formalities and such, however I sat with my group members this time around – Alice and Izzi! The purpose of this workshop (well, for me) was to work on our rough cuts so the ~REAL~ audio people could come in and critique our work. I managed to get a minute’s worth of work done in the 50 minutes of time we were, which I’d say is pretty good progress:

And finally, these two lovely radio people finally came in to listen to our audios. We had to set up this cool audio thingamabob where we could listen to the audio all at once. The first piece of audio was about ‘Social Media and its Unreliability’. Okay, that’s not the exact title but that’s what I got off of it whilst I was listening to this beautifully edited piece of work. It was conversational, engaging and interesting – this group made sure if wasn’t just the three of them simply talking – they took their time to piece every bit of section together. It honestly made me kind of nervous considering our group has done NADA in terms of putting everything together.

It was our turn to present our audio – we started off with Izzi as she researched the information of hip hop’s history. Next was myself, discussing hip hop’s distortion of its messages and finally, Alice asking the question of “where did women in hip hop go?“. Of course I wasn’t expecting praises because honestly, our work was very segmented and didn’t sound too-put-together just yet. Otherwise here are the dot points of the feedback:

  • Clear sections in the segments – changes of pace and have a break in between to give the listener a break
  • Topic change/section change – it’s an opportunity to change the beat, cut the beat, etc
  • Equalise the volume throughout the three different audios (of course, once we have pieced all of them together)

The feedback from a professional was very helpful and educational about the process of editing an audio – I will definitely put these pieces of advice into my work! Before it was time to go, we asked Liam for some final ~*words of wisdom*~

“Great job, guys”

Thanks Liam 😂

lyreca

the final initiative for media 1

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(Source)

It’s always so bittersweet to end a subject each semester; you’ve bonded with the people around you, gotten to know the tutor a bit but at the same time, you get a sweet six-week break so woooohoooo! I can’t say I won’t be missing much because that would be a lie – over these past 12 weeks, Media 1 has been jam-packed with so many activities and lessons to learn from. You’re probably wondering why I’ve put Homer looking at the stars in the desert right? Well in relation to the conclusion of this subject, Homer in this scene depicts just that.

(Image Sources)

This is during the episode Mother Simpson – after his farewell with Mona Simpson, he reflects on the stars. We don’t exclusively know what he reflects about but he stares at the sky all morning. I think there’s just something profound about it, with the way the creators have executed this scene. Through a cartoon that is usually comedic and doesn’t take itself too seriously, The Simpsons present to us this scene that captures something I can’t quite describe but maybe it’s about life? Who knows though, this is up for an open interpretation with anybody. With that last sentence, that is something that I have come to learn studying Media 1 – your work can be praised or judged by anyone, a reality that comes to working in an industry that thrives on feedback. I really like how I chose this as my final initiative for Media 1. This scene from The Simpsons is a nice close up to my first learning steps as a media practitioner.

Lyreca 🌌

lectorial 11

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Week 11 – one more week til freedom! Jokes. Who am I kidding? I’ve got at least 3 weeks until my freedom. A guest lecturer came in today, with the title and name of Dr Ramon Lobato and we both had something in common – we’ve step foot in Swinburne University, hah! Asides from jokes, he had a really interesting lecture about the form of entertainment Australians used, and that ranged from traditional TV to our computers (Netflix and Youtube for example). Here is a picture of the notes I took:

(Courtesy of Lyreca Corloncito aka ME)

What I got from the lecture and lecturer was facts and information about how fast society has changed to adapt to the advancement of technology. From the early cable TV to Netflix where you can pretty much watch anywhere around the world, we have come so far as media community to truly cater and even become more advance in the upciming future. Who knows what we’ll have in the next 10 years, heck, even in the next 5 years!

A very short post but there’s nothing more for me to say – I think the photo says it all with what went down with the Wednesday lecture.

lyreca

 

two readings in week 11 with an initiative

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Introduction 

The reading begins with how this particular school is struggling financially, hence it reaches out for advertisement as a resort to save the school. Now for my initiative within the reading, it reminded to me of companies using people online, particularly “influencers” to advertise their products through them.

              

(Kylie Jenner Source and Bretman Rock Source)

The reading was more on the negative side of this method, maybe because of this saturated industry of shallow advertisements and commercials? Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

From the perspective of a media practitioner, we can all agree with this statement to a certain extent but in order for marketing and commerce to be effective, advertising like the above must be necessary for businesses to profit and continue in their line of work.

Epilogue 

As for this part of the reading, it continued to discuss the marketing and advertisements within all forms of media that we consume. The reading points out a question of how business should intermingle with the media also with the question of when and where. I love that in this dense piece of reading, there was immediately a word that caught my attention and it was ‘clickbait’. I think the moment I had perfectly encapsulates what the reading was trying to demonstrate – how advertisers manipulate us with attention, with even as simple as the word clickbait. Well that’s my interpretation anyway.

(Source)

Youtube is a prime example of how our attention is being grabbed by exciting titles and engaging cover photos on the videos. The over-saturation of clickbait and essentially advertisements are facilitated by the advertisers that look for ways to profit off of creators. The concept of “killing two birds with one stone” may have been a good idea at the start, but it has slowly hindered the way people create quality content. That’s just my take on the reading.

lyreca

workshop number ten

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It started off with us listening to a 20-minute piece of audio called “My Lobotomy”, which honestly didn’t feel that long because it was so interesting and engaging. Now that I’ve Google searched it for the image, I’m actually wondering if what we listened to was just an excerpt from the actual memoir. Nonetheless, I believe I got the gist of the actual story from that piece of audio.

(Source)

This piece of audio had the full package of what you would usually imagine when reading a very detailed experience of what undergoing a lobotomy would be like and its aftereffects. When I say the “package”, this includes the sound effects, spot sounds and music. From what I observed whilst the audio was playing, I hear a lot of background noise that established the setting of the scene of the interviewee. Rather than a studio-based interview, it was mostly an on-location interview. Here is a more condensed observation of the audio and is also some notes I took during the class discussion:

Story Elements

  • Focus/Theme: Lobotomy – “The ramifications of a 1940s procedure…”
  • Hook: Why should you sell it to someone – what makes it interesting”
  • Plot: His personal journey – looking for whatever he lost.
  • Setting: Mostly in people’s living space (nursing homes, their own homes)
  • Conflict/Tensions/Obstacles: Villains in the story – the doctor and the step-mum

Sonic Elements

  • Narration: Just Howard (the MC), mostly.
  • Studio Interviews: Nope. Most of the interviewees are old, lobotomised and adds more element/emotion.
  • In-field/Location Interviews: Yes – similar to the previous point, it adds more realness to the situation and somewhat shows their vulnerability.
  • Music (Ambient/Diegetic/Non-diegetic): Piano/classical music, peaceful/sad/old/reflective music
  • SFX: Not much sfx – it would only trivialise the matter and add an almost “cheap” sort of effect
  • Location/Amos: Sound of the environment

I’ve pretty much reflected on the piece in my introduction so I believe there is no need for further conclusions I presume?

lyreca

lectorial week 10

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I decided to do something very different today and take notes via this platform (aka on this very post itself). So the following you are about to read is a very raw and a real-time approach for Week Ten’s lecture:

Space

  • creating space – they way we are addressed e.g. in radio studies, it is discussed as if the radio is talking to you
  • the listener is always in the center of the piece; modes of address is how to position the reader within the space

The Spoken Word

  • fantastic on media – very real and raw, perhaps it even encapsulates the essence of the person, their story, their voice
  • there many inflections of the VOICE… you can manipulate it in many ways, play around it, etc
  • it can cut through so much, including emotions, feelings, etc

Music

  • too much music in your piece can ruin your message
  • but music has strong cultural associations and can assist your project
  • compositional techniques of music is powerful
  • cultural baggage of music – how do we perceive music???

ACTIVITY: TYPE OF TEXTURES IN THE AUDIO

Example #1: Babies of Colour

Human voices – ‘reading’ voice,
improvisation in the studio,
establishment of the setting (background noise),
fly-on observational,
location interview – location narration

Example #2: Not entirely sure about the title but it relates to War/Enlistment…etc

Narrator – read voice + scripted
Music: Pre-recorded
Archival sound/atmospheric sound/SFX

It was interesting and definitely a privilege to get insight from Ms Brettle’s experience with radio and being a specialist in audio! There were new terms I’ve learned including archival sound, atmospheric sound and so much more. Other than that, all I can say about Week Ten’s lectorial was that it was uncomfortably stuffy and hot in that lecture room. That’s all.

lyreca

initiative and reading combined #weekten

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Can you believe it’s already Week 10? It feels as if I have just entered the Media lectorial for the first time, keen on taking on new knowledge and experiences. Yet here I am, writing about Week Ten’s initiative and reading, all in one post! Let’s get started.

In terms of the reading, it dived into the different types of perspectives that we may or may not be aware of. For example, it talked about the MEDIUM, LONG, CLOSE shots that have been previously discussed before (well in my Cinema class). These different types of shot produce a different type of reaction towards the audience – a close shot means intimacy and closeness whilst a long a shot portrays people as if they fall outside the viewer’s social orbit. Not only did the reading provide perspective in images but also sound. I think that is probably the most relevant in terms of project #4 mainly because we will be dealing with sound.

This reading was a perfect for my week ten initiative because! I want to discuss the movie ‘Do the Right Thing’ as my initiative for this week. I’m pretty sure I will stray away from sound perspectives but I’ll try my best to link the two completely different subject together. Whilst I was on the hunt for the analysis of this film, I came upon one where it discussed the different viewpoints of black and white people who viewed the film. Let’s use the character ‘Sal’ as an example –

(Source)

An Italian-American who owns a pizzeria in a black neighbourhood, there are arguments whether Sal was a racist or not – and relating to the perspective, it was between the perspective of the black and white people in America. To put it in a historical context, America was built on the foundations of African slavery, and some of the values continue to live in society overall.

Black people see Sal as someone who is ambiguous in terms of being racial sensitive, essentially seeing him as a racist.

To the eyes of the white people, Sal provided for this neighbourhood and offered his generosity and services to them.

These perspectives differ because of the different upbringing and childhood the viewers’ have experienced. If I were to relate it to the perspective of African Americans, they would usually see Sal from a public perspective, where his character falls outside from their social orbit, maybe because of their higher/lower social status. And as for the white audience, they would have a different perspective otherwise.

lyreca

the workshop for this week #9

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Everyone entered the room with a somewhat anxious gut feeling, mainly because it was time to pick out the groups. I’ll be honest but I zoned out during the discussion so I don’t even remember what Liam and the class was talking about in detail. However, I’d still like to list down my vague recollections of week nine’s workshop:

  • the collaborative contract template
  • the project brief for assignment #4
  • what an annotated bibliography is
  • what is a SWOT analysis? personal experience: i did business in like year 10 and psychology in VCE lmao so I do have a fair knowledge of how to use a swot analysis
  • and how to use a zoom hand recorder H2N

What I actually want to focus on this blog post is the group aspect of the workshop: meeting our group members. We decided with the old-fashioned “picking out from the hat” method. I low-key preferred this method rather than choosing our own group members because it enables us to expand our horizons and let’s us get to know new people! And it actually worked quite well in my case because I got paired up with the people all the way on the other side of the room – people I’ve never had a social interaction with.

Now, the beginning of our collaboration was getting to know the H2N recorder. It’s so complicated for a mic recorder and I’m actually not sure why it has to be? In comparison to the Sony MC50, this microphone was hard to get around I was fortunate enough to be paired with someone who has had experience with it (shoutout to Izzy!). We went out to the hustle and bustle of Swanston St and recorded all sorts of things for the activity – from trams to interviews, we wanted to encapsulate our experience at RMIT! I’d say overall that it was a good teamwork as a starter despite the absence of our other group mate.

lyreca 🐹

the lectorial for this week #9

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I was actually planning to merge the reading and lectorial post together but i realised that the topics discussed were so vastly different. Let’s talk collaboration. We had a guest speaker this week and I’d like to deeply apologising for forgetting her name but she is definitely a familiar face. Here are some notes I wrote down and took to very serious consideration:

  • Employers are looking for people who “like working collaboratively and enjoy working as part of a team” This is very true for ALL industries. You’re bound to work with other people no matter what job you undertake – two heads are better than one after all and one person can’t single-handedly operate a whole organisation.
  • Careers in media mainly consist of collaborative jobs – it is a BASELINE skill set. This should already be a preconceived notion if you are in any way interested in entering the field of Media. Massive productions require people of different abilities and talents in order to produce whatever is needed to be produced. This does not only apply to movie productions but also as radio stations, publications, etc.

(Source)

Here is a lame stock image of what “TEAMWORK” looks like!.In a perfect world, all teamwork would look like this – smiles and mutual agreement with one another. But in a REAL world, everything has its pros and cons:

PROS

Having a good leader, feedback – making ideas better, spreading the workload, teaching each other things

CONS

Having a ‘dictator’ in the group, creative differences, lazy team members, conflict, project lacks unity or eventually dies because of no ownership

No matter what group you may be placed in, whether it’s with your friends or not, everyone is going to encounter situations mentioned above. As a part-time perfectionist, I try my best to stick with the pros of teamwork but alas, not everyone is a perfectionist. What you can only do to manage and cope with collaboration is having experience. I guess that’s why universities are big on teamwork, huh? That’s really all I can say and reflect about teamwork. Inside and outside of education, we are constantly interacting with different people of different walks of life and to me, that is what collaboration is about.

lyreca, 2017

👩‍👦‍👦  <– a team!

the reading for this week #9

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For those who were too lazy to read the reading (TL;DR lmao) it was basically about the failure of MEDIA LITERACY doing its job. And what is its job, you ask?

It’s

  • critically asking who is publishing the content
  • whether the venue is respectable
  • and biases the author may have

One example I’d like to talk about is one of the most recent event – the United Airlines “incident” involving a POC (Person of Colour) and the police. For those who have been keeping up with the recent news over the past five years, racial issues have rose significantly in several media outlets with headlines of police brutality and their abuse of power. The combination of a POC getting harmed by the police was enough to spark several news outlets reporting about it. Some sympathise for the victim whilst others decided to demonise the victim (maybe because he was Asian? there could be many reasons for that but I believe it was because he was a POC).

VS

Now you see where I’m heading with this, right? News outlets have the power to expose the stakeholders but it is out job as an audience to detect the favouritism of media, I suppose. Otherwise, I can’t say too much about news agencies because I don’t know what goes beyond their mindset and motives.

lyreca