So, the submission of my final video project for Media 3 Studio, “The Art of Persuasion: Poetics and Politics in Documentary requires the accompanying reflection portfolio of blog posts. With everything that’s been happening in my personal life outside of study I’ve not found a lot of time to regularly update my blog, but the brief is pretty vague on details so hopefully this component doesn’t account for a great deal of marks.

After Stage Managing at Progress 2015 (an amazing event featuring Lee Lin Chin and Edward Snowden on the same stage – really how could you top that?!), after many days kicking about various ideas and even conducting additional interviews pursuing those ideas including the ideas of my previous rant of a blog post, I settled on an idea for the final short experimental doco to comply with the parameters of the Media 3 brief, (being to produce something that complies with 3 of 4 restrictions: non-photorealistic, doesn’t use narration, doesn’t use interviews, is found footage only) fortunately these were explained to be somewhat elastic.

So exploring the topic of Metadata Collection was something that I have been interested in deeply within a wider interest in Internet Governance battles, and particularly I liked the idea of discussing the pervasive effect of mass, largely secretive, government surveillance and internet control on freedom and democracy, it’s nothing new with the U.S. having this kind of debate since the Manning and Snowden leaks, but Australia has recently passed a number of laws that require the retention of metadata by internet and phone providers for use by Government should they request it. This is concerning for human rights activists, journalists and lawyers, and all those that stand to speak truth to power and act, in the public interest, as a adversary to government. (I’ve just written an essay about the rhetorics of this debate which I hopefully will post as a separate blog post in the coming days)

It’s probably a good point to place a link to the piece I produced before breaking it down below:

I’ve used a combination of audio recorded from the the Progress 2015 Google Talk Hangout session with Edward Snowden, super exciting to work on that event it’s weeks later and I’m still giddy, as well as audio from Tony Abbott’s address to Parliament in relation to passing the amended ASIO Act and associated security legislation, that now enshrined in law will be (if the USA and UK are anything to go by) incredibly hard to repeal or even roll back, and in fact the metadata access granted under those acts has already expanded less than a month later under Border Security Act reforms which is of particular concern for human rights activists working on the issues of Refugees and Asylum Seekers.

I’ve combined these two vocal tracks with two other tracks I’ve been working on; an experimental digital soundscape and a traditionally inspired orchestral soundtrack featuring Maghreb region Arabic vocals by a Moroccan vocalist performing a prayer like chant recorded and provided by Ben Sound. This combination provides both a cinematic undertone and a clash between both a traditional past element and a modern present with a technologic future, and also drawing on Muslim elements and placing them against Western commentary. Islam being a theme often associated closely in contemporary Western politics with security issues.

The brief required that the final piece adhere to a number of constraints including that it attempt to be predominantly non-photorealistic, and thus the footage consists of a number of animations I attempted, these are some of my first attempts at 2D animating outside of Flash and Toonboom using AfterEffects puppet tool and keyframing and are somewhat rudimentary due to the time frame for the entire production being only a couple of days, I did secure an extension of a few days but the process of tweaking some minor imperfections would require a tedious process going right back to Photoshop, then into AfterEffects, then into PremierePro again. This footage is intercut with some footage I have shot myself and some royalty free stock footage also. The purpose was to explore the form of documentary outside of conventional tactics and in a poetic way.

I hope that in the way I have ordered the footage there is additional meaning created with a transition and progression of technology in the images reflecting the transition from freedom to security in the audio, while using key elements from Snowden’s approx 90 minutes of audio framed by historical quotes which extend the debate in time, to hopefully stir questions of the opposing narrative offered in Abbott’s audio.