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Wk 11 Reading | Mediums & Technologies

  By Matthew Duong • May 30, 2016

Mediums in our day and age has expanded upon the static theatre mode of media. The technology that has evolved through recent times has given birth to many mediums. Especially with the internet, almost everything is readily available from your laptop, computer, tablet or anywhere with an internet connection. This has given birth to new mediums or to be given the availability of new mediums, such as foreign movies or TV shows, webisodes, web series etc.

Technologies has given birth to things like Netflix and has made a massive library of movies readily available at the click of a button at any time. There are many other programs like this with a subscription method that has access to a library of movies or TV shows such as Crunchyroll, Stan or Presto etc. The internet is the sole reason for this.

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Rough Cuts | PB4

  By Matthew Duong • May 27, 2016

This week we finalised our rough cut of our audio, we recorded an introduction and conclusion for out audio essay and did final ‘clean up’ recordings for the final audio essay. We rewrote some of our lines and got to recording in the studios. It was my first time down in the studios and it feels really cool and professional about it. Not ‘cool’ just because I had no other words to describe it, but ‘cool’ as in this is a profession and this is where we’re going to be spending our time when the going gets tough. Everyone in there is friendly, approachable and is there to get their work done. It is a professional environment in which  I feel very comfortable being in. Anyway we finished off doing all the major recordings for our audio essay and all we have to do is edit it down and add in some B-Roll.

Then we got started on our video rough cut, which we just all basically recorded half of our points and we would leave that to expanding and re-recording properly the week after. For now we have the rough skeleton of our video essay. We hope by Monday and/or Tuesday next week we are able to have our work done so we can get down to our reflection.

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Wrap Up, Reflecting and What’s to Come| Lectorial

  By Matthew Duong • May 23, 2016

2nd year, 1st semester. Although I’m a first year technically. I remember, this time last year I was in Engineering and my morale was very low during this time, projects were due and exams were looming. I did not enjoy the program at all and it ultimately led me to drop out of Engineering (as most people did). Now it is a new beginning, I decided to chase what I loved doing which was media. Quite a bit anxious what was to come before starting this semester, now after 11 weeks I feel comfortable being here.

I’ve learned a lot over this semester, learnt how to shoot, edit videos, how to record, how to think differently about media or learning in general. I’ve opened my mind to my thinking and to what I can accomplish and this course has accomplished that for me.

So what is to come? Studios, getting to the grit of things in a sense. This semester was all about introductory and learning the theory of being media practicians, next semester onwards it would be about putting this theory into practice. This is exciting and turning over this new leaf this semester has opened up new opportunities and way of thinking in terms of learning and in life.

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PB4 | Getting things done

  By Matthew Duong • May 19, 2016

This week my group got work done, in that we as a group had the goal by the end of our weekly meeting to finish the rough cut. So before that each of us wrote up our part or expertise in the field and had a brainstorming session on how we are going to structure the essay. We went to the library where we found one of the study rooms in which we did the brainstorm and recording. So each of us took turns to record and we brainstormed on what was required and what form we would do the essay in. We decided for now to have a rough cut of the audio of each of our parts and brush it up later or to re-record segments with different voices or tones. Also adding in B-roll after Friday’s class.

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Mediums & Technologies | Week 11

  By Matthew Duong • May 16, 2016

Different technologies has enabled different mediums. As such media has undergone a drastic evolution in recent years. Brian talked about this today in our lecture where there was a conception when TV was introduced, it was thought that media would always be the same, something that wouldn’t evolve because it is something you just watch. However now, it has evolved into something much much more. Now there are so many mediums and technologies that covers so many different audiences and each medium has a different way to view it or investment attached to it. Even the notion of waiting every week to watch the latest TV episode has only come into popularity recently and as a medium, institutions invest heavily into this.

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Work Attachment | Week 11

  By Matthew Duong • May 16, 2016

Providing the beginnings of a professional network, that is what we’re expected/provided to do by the end of this course. Paul Ritchard came to talk to us about this, it was intriguing to hear him talk about what a ‘work attachment’ actually is. In a way it is an internship, work experience or an attachment, or even a combination of those, but also none of those. Paul basically defined it as work as you being supervised by a media professional.

I am excited but also scared to pursue my own work attachment, I am anxious about what I am going to go into and starting to broaden my own network of people for my career. It is going to be a fresh experience as I take on this task in the next two and a half years which makes me have this unique feel towards it.

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Refining Ideas | PB4

  By Matthew Duong • May 14, 2016 ,

Today we refined our ideas for our video and audio essay. A common theme with our research was the conceptualisation of ‘The Audience’ and we had a lot of ideas to convey and we had to find a common topic to draw them all together for the essays. However we had to keep in mind that we couldn’t overlap much of our content for both essays.

With our discussion with Rachel and between ourselves we had to find a topic that we could talk about a certain aspect/topic about the audience but broad enough that we could use our research. We went on the basis we would base our audio essay on audio based mediums and video essay on TV or Cinema. For our video we came to the argument that ‘there is no such thing as a passive audience’ and we would use different points backed up with different case studies to show this. This way it doesn’t limit our content in terms of the research we have already done. For our audio we came up with the argument that ‘audio based mediums have not diminished over time but in fact increased in volume and thus their audience base has increased’. This was on the basis that audio mediums such as radio and music has branched off onto other things like podcasts, audiobooks, radio dramas etc. and thus has created more mediums for different kinds of audiences. We would talk about the different mediums and their audiences.

Here is a couple of pictures from the notes I took during our discussions

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PB4 Research | Audiences way of thinking

  By Matthew Duong • May 12, 2016 ,

O’Shaughnessy M, Stadler J, 2012, Media and Society, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, Vic. pp. 96-104

This chapter had an overview of how a general audience consumes media and interprets it. It went into detail how generally the media has to make assumptions or ‘generalisations’ about ideas and sometimes it narrows down the possibility of production. Then it went on about the theory of how an audience could interpret media, it discussed the hypodermic needle theory, the reinforcement model, the cultivation, the desensitisation, the oberservational learning and cognitive scripts and the uses and gratifications of mediums.

The text is quite reliable as it is published by Oxford University Press and within the chapter it uses different texts to reference their ideas and points. It also has various diagrams and examples in use to make things easier to understand.

This may be relevant to our topic as it covers the different theories behind the consumption of media in regards to how an audience digests it.

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Institutions and Social Media Interplay

  By Matthew Duong • May 9, 2016

The interplay between institutions and social media has never been more relevant today than it ever was. Now with platforms such as Facebook, Twitter & YouTube there is a constant stream of social media based on institutions or the work of institutions. Take Game Of Thrones for example. For the past 6 years at around April to about July the entire social media world is engulfed in the TV phenomenon that is Game Of Thrones. Every week the world waits anxiously for the next episode. As the episode airs, the tweets are tweeting, discussions are posted everywhere, videos are created for fan theories and discussion and this endless stream of media flows on and on. This is the power of institutions today, to be able to basically control the lives of others, to make people think about the product of institutions. There are hashtags for everything for institutions and more often than not it is used as a marketing technique such as #GameOfThrones, #BeMoreBulldog, #TVLogies etc.

The social media scene has only taken shape over the past few years, with most of the discussion to be between friends on Facebook as the episode airs, discussions on Reddit for the next week about it, YouTube videos created after the episode airs. This provides some much appreciated publicity for Institutions as they produce their content, it provides feedback they can go on and advertises their product and/or institution.

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What the audience is & was.

  By Matthew Duong • May 9, 2016 ,

The Audience has changed dramatically over the last 100 years with the age of digitalisation. The readings and our workshop this week we had a discussion on this topic of ‘The Audience’.

We discussed on ‘What the audience used to be’ and it is interesting we see the progression of what is thought to be the audience over history. For the entire time probably before the digital age or more precisely the invention of the press the audience was thought to be this ‘passive thing’. Where the media they were exposed to would only affect them, nowadays it is more the other way around. The audience would go to the theatre to watch the play, watch a show etc. Then came the invention of the press where there were tabloids, which was basically mobile versions of telegrams people were sending around and anyone that would be able to access these tabloids would become the audience.

Then more and more interaction between the institutions, mediums and the audience has increased with the digital age, with things like cinema, TV and internet. Now the audience have the ability to affect the media produced, due to reviews, social media, ratings and viewership they can affect how the institutions go about making their media. The audience has more and more become more active in their influence within the media world, as the producers create content for the audience and if the client isn’t happy they will change their approach. Where as before the digital age the audience will only view the media and it will affect how the audience goes about their lives.