michael, media work

The Mind Distorts Memories Over Time, Photos are Just a Means of External Backup

For activity C I decided to create gifs out of the images edited through the HEX plugin on ‘HxD’, this method of glitching I found was a lot faster than using Audacity as messing with straight lines of code at random doesn’t require a whole lot of finesse. Because of this, the HEX method is fairly straight forward for making gifs in photoshop after messing with the image over and over to make it progressively more cooked. However I found that in Audacity, while the process was a little longer, it made for more clean looking images with more intricate glitch effects (logically as Audacity has a load of effects to apply to the converted raw data).

At first I downloaded ‘Notepad ++’ for the process of glitching through text edit, but found quickly that ‘HxD’ ran a lot smoother and was quicker to use for this purpose as Notepad would crash when I tried to cut and paste code as well as making me change the file type from “.txt” every time I wanted to save a variation of a photo.

No idea exactly what I was doing but working with whole lines of code at once seemed to create more aesthetically pleasing results than just going ham and chopping up whole chunks of code at random.

Compared to glitching apps that just do it all for you, doing it manually like this involves a lot more experimenting and trial and error. When you do however get something back that looks nice, it feels more rewarding than just running something from your camera roll through an app. Needles to say too that doing it in this way allows for so much more variation and possibility while an app is limited to the effects programmed (and a lot of them will make you pay for the more wild effects too).

My general inspiration and theme for this collection of images would be memories and the way that even the really important stuff gets warped and distorted over time. These photos are all from old holiday memories from house parties to trips to the beach with my ex or to the forest with friends. Interestingly enough I think the nights or days that you make the most memories and recall vividly are almost more likely to get twisted and warped as you remember them over and over, in the same way that running an image through a scanner over and over starts to cook it as you can’t re-create a perfect replica of the image and the changes that start occurring get more and more pronounced with each copy like a positive feedback loop (also a bit like mutations in evolution). But so be it, If the universe didn’t cook it a bit from time to time we’d still be bacteria and glitch art wouldn’t even exist.

I really like the way this photo I have of an RWB Porsche in Tokyo in particular turned out after using Audacity (first image below) I used a combination of “Auto Duck” cutting and pasting sections of data, pitch and tempo changes as well as reverb and chirp from memory. It kind of reminds me of ASAP Rocky’s LSD music video which is just amazing to look at the whole way through.

Just because I’m a messy person too and I have way too much smack to talk I’m going to post part 2 of this activity once I go use a scanner to cook up more photos and maybe make a few more gifs too…

Since my last post I’ve created a new animated logo, this time around I was able to knock over this process faster with similar results as I animated the text in one colour and created the same 3D effect by using multiple copies layered on-top of each other instead of drawing the same drip pattern three times in three different colours.

The great thing about Premier Pro is that you can adjust the speed of the gif once it’s in a sequence as well as distorting the image using “turbulent displace” to make the text look more twisted and Gothic.

 

I’ve also edited more of the footage I have from the party to make the overall video longer and sent this updated version to Limendra to see what he thinks. At this point I think I’d need more footage to play with if he wants the video to be longer.

Watch Here

Recently I was contacted by an old friend who wanted me to go and film one of his DJ sets and make a promotional video. Like most things in my life I was extremely unorganized and late to his gig, I also had to borrow my housemate’s old Falcon to get to the party he was playing at which was out in Lockwood South.

What he didn’t tell me was that in this instance it was actually a girl’s 18th too (although the man has other gigs coming up in Melbourne). So after rocking up, walking around awkwardly for a bit, explaining to some guy who I was and why I was walking around a random girl’s 18th with a camera (fair enough too) and then getting coerced into taking a few group photos by some drunk 16-year-olds, I finally got up behind the decks as Limendra pumped out his set.

The challenge here for me was to try and get shots I thought would stand out and be editable into something more or less not shit on my part. Between filming a bunch of drunk teenagers dancing and filming Limendra himself and the decks and then occasionally mixing it up with combining both elements into the shot, I really didn’t have much of an idea what I was doing and my Olympus EM10 isn’t the best camera for low-light environments. However I got what I could before driving onwards to Bendigo to meet up with another friend later in the night.

In the process of editing now, between shots of the crowd and Limendra himself it’s hard to keep the video going without it becoming stale and repetitive. I’ve relied on a simple animated logo (which I’ll have to now change and update on request) and some sound effects at the start to draw people in. And as I edit the rest of this I plan on using colour grading and other effects to make the content more interesting. Although I plan to go and film at least one other of his gigs in Melbourne in order to get more footage and variation to work with.

Watch the beginning of the first edit here

 

 

The sketch from our writer’s room portfolio I will be writing about is ‘Walk of Shame With the Boys’, my initial inspiration for writing this sketch was an old college humor skit I had watched a year or two ago simply titled ‘March of Shame’ ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MM3KkF5urY ) . This sketch is presented as a nature documentary of sorts but following a pack of girls the day after a college party, the initial draft of my sketch in particular was largely similar in content and also set on a stereotypical American college campus. However the main difference of course was the flipped reality wherein the boys were the ones making the journey instead of the girls.

After writing the initial draft, within the group we made subtle changes to certain characters and dialogue focusing moreso on creating a dynamic combining the flipped reality with exaggeration of the typical tropes of American college students where this sort of situation is projected onto a group of males being in the more vulnerable position. Using references and characters that reflect the college culture of trying to hook up with as many people as possible for bragging rights and a fabricated sense of manliness and superiority. However the only character active within the script displaying this sort of attitude is Cassie, she became a scapegoat of sorts for all of the overly sexual and cringe inducing behaviors associated with the typical college lad who sleeps around a lot.  Within the context of the script she is both female and lesbian, (and in the first draft also Asian)  in reality the furthest thing you could probably get from a straight white college jock. This was intended both to make the exaggerated behavior both acceptable for the audience as well as humorous. While Casie is undoubtedly the straight line character, I had intended her comic  perspective within the sketch to be such that it excuses her cringy and obnoxious lines to make the audience more comfortable with the subject matter especially the more rapey joke at the end (which has been removed in the later draft.) While she’s “just as bad as them” Casie’s also against the hyper-hetero bragging culture of the frat girls, as Vorhaus (1994, p. 38) states ‘what you really want is a kind of synergy between flaws and perspective so that some flaws conflict with the perspective while others reinforce it’. Casie’s main saving grace within the context of the script is simply that she’s not trying to sleep with or hit on the two main male characters in earnest.

After our writer’s room feedback session with Cal Wilson I realised there was a lot of room for improvement and having collected a bunch of constructive criticism on the script I made some major changes to the characters, dialogue and setting of the sketch. As a group we sat down and discussed the points of feedback given and made the decision to re-write in an Australian setting with my two other group members giving me their own feedback on my new ideas for the second draft, we came to an agreement about cutting the length and unnecessary dialogue from the draft as well as removing another joke about a didgeridoo I’d written that was a bit out of a blue and crass. So the location was changed from an American college to an Australian one (within The University of Melbourne) with the aim to make the characters and jokes more relatable and appealing to a potential Australian audience. We made some references to footy, VB, magpies etc. Certain characters who didn’t contribute anything of actual importance  were cut from the script too, with the decision to  focus on Mark, Frank and Casie as the three mains. Aside from removing this dead weight, the most important point of feedback we received from the writer’s room session was the need to stretch out the female tropes in the male characters in the context of the role reversal in order to make their position clearer and make the jokes more acceptable to the audience as well as emphasising the main point of humor within the sketch (of course being the role reversal).

The particular subject matter relating to feminism or treatment of women as a broader sphere I chose to focus on was the kind of hook-up culture prominent within most colleges (within the western world at least.) ‘finding intimacy and actual affection in this modern world of hookups is near impossible and damaging when it often encourages people to treat a sexual encounter as just another exploit to brag about’ Cassidy O’Lear stated in her blog post giving an overview of a 2018 documentary about hook-up culture in the United States, titled ‘Liberated: The New Sexual Revolution’ (posted on Feb 23 2018 at 12PM) https://www.hercampus.com/school/u-conn/documentary-about-reality-college-hookup-culture. I wanted to reflect these sorts of exploits for bragging rights and the damaging effect it has on girls in particular, often putting them in a vulnerable position and encouraging a sort of mob mentality among young males. Of course within the sketch the genders are flipped and it’s this role reversal that is the main source of humor within the sketch combined with Casie’s exaggerated personality traits. As stated earlier too, I intended the role reversal to allow the audience to actually find the scenario humorous and acceptable while also acknowledging the more serious themes within the scenario. For the potential male audience also I further intend the role reversal  to inspire the question “how would I feel if I was in her position?” As with any other sketch or awareness video produced, using the same context of a man walking in a women’s shoes forced to face gender specific adversity, it comes more naturally for guys to empathise when it’s a male on-screen being cat-called or worried about walking back to their car after a night out for example.

 

The last point of humor right at the end of the sketch will probably fly under the radar for most who may just  recognise mainstream 2000s Subarus as being classic stoner cars. But the Forester and Outback in particular which is referenced (as Casie’s forgotten where she parked her Forester) had actually been the choice cars of lesbians for years particularly in the US, with a whole marketing campaign created to subtly tap into that specific market. While it’s not integral to the sketch, I thought it might be a cheeky reference that a select few in the know may appreciate, and it seemed to be the ideal car to reference in the script to fit Casie’s character. http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/01/02/lesbians_and_subarus_why_do_lesbians_love_outbacks_and_foresters.html 

 

Please find sketch drafts attached here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HNVVtu3omhAITZOpdcABFjB7jCe_QCAo – 1st draft

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sfXyw6ZgxZeM9RC8BLYipaJgpirvj3IE – 2nd draft

 

Reference list:

1. Vorhaus, J. (1994). The comic toolbox. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, p.38.
2. O’Lear, C. (2019). A Documentary About the Reality of College Hookup Culture. [online] Her Campus. Available at: https://www.hercampus.com/school/u-conn/documentary-about-reality-college-hookup-culture [Accessed 4 May 2019].
3. Rode, I. (2019). Slate’s Use of Your Data. [online] Slate Magazine. Available at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/01/02/lesbians_and_subarus_why_do_lesbians_love_outbacks_and_foresters.html [Accessed 5 May 2019].

 

 

 

 

Week 9 Rhetoric of Choice – Alfa Romeo marketing campaign

https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/7699617/alfa-romeo-mocks-audi-bmw-mercedes-viral-ads/

These ads that openly mock the likes of BMW, Audi & Mercedes (makes that dominate the luxury saloon market) heavily employs the rhetoric of choice to consumers by comparing the Alfa Gulia to it’s German counterparts making a clear distinction between the drab business saloons in shades of grey or white to the sexy and exciting Italian equivalent shown in bright red. Moreso viewers are indirectly asked what sort of image or lifestyle they want to be associated with (the Alfa of course representing the more desirable option within the ads)

“The Fundamental Principles of Business Culture” (first paragraph)

https://en.portal.santandertrade.com/establish-overseas/australia/business-practices

Within the opening sentences, this article uses the notion of ‘nation’ speaking on Australian values and work ethic. The discussion of business culture employs the sense of a new hip and cool visions of modern business as Frank discusses the shift in how business has portrayed itself.

This final project brief for semester one came in the form of an audio discussion or podcast style presentation to be done in a group as a collaborative work and could focus on any given area or discipline of media and how we as audiences consume and interact with this particular medium. Ours in particular was focused on large movie and TV franchises and what made then so successful as well as researching the roots and origins of the stories and characters within these films. On the whole I think we worked well as a group. First of all we all get along really well which is always going to be an important thing when working with others. We had good communication too, using a group chat we were all able to discuss meeting times as well as what each member’s roll within the overall task would be (eg. who’s got a laptop with Audition and can edit the audio, who want’s to handle the disclaimer, who wants to discuss which aspect of large franchises etc). As a group too I don’t think that we’re all particularly organised or fully reliable people in these situations but we all had good communication between us so if someone was going to be late to a recording say or still working on something to add in we all knew what was going on. To get deep and to help fill out my word-count here it was the acceptance of each other as fellow flawed humans that got us through this task even down to Oscar listening to a version of the project I sent him and realizing that I’d fixed literally none of the stumbles we recorded while reading our segments and pointing It out so I could fix it up ASAP. What didn’t work so well in this project on a more personal note was me not reading over the brief enough and getting confused about the nature of what had to be written and about the inclusion of a lovely annotated bibliography. This was a problematic feature for old Mickle when I he realized that he’d just spoken off the top of his head and written a piece that had quoted literally NOTHING. So I’m a bit of a spud for that. I think timing too is something I could have managed a whole lot better here as I’m writing this the evening that it has to be submitted.

I think when it came to the final edited version of the project, something we could have done a lot better is to have had more of an input from everyone in the group when it came to the way the recordings were put together. Due to lack of time mostly I edited and uploaded the project myself hoping that everyone else would be pleased with the work. Luckily they were (after I’d fixed my terrible initial version). The topic we chose on the other hand was a strong point I feel, as we all had reasonable knowledge of these franchises to begin with and could write about them a lot more easily from the point of view of consumers than other mediums since we’d all grown up on films like Star Wars and Pirates Of The Caribbean. The process of writing my bit on how these franchises build fandoms and followings as well as editing in Adobe Audition actually didn’t take much time at all, the actual hard parts of the project were definitely more self organisation and time management i’d say. My actual written section and how I delivered my dialogue while recording could have been improved too in retrospect as I spoke more casually and more like I was answering a question within a discussion rather than formally reading from a written script. This, while not being a large issue overall, still means that within the project the tone of my section may not be so consistent with the sections everyone else delivered. One other thing I noticed while listening to the final version is that there is a shift in recording quality as well as loudness between some of the sections or people had been a lot closer to the mic than others while recording too. I did what I could to generally balance out these changes but with my limited experience with Audition it’s definitely still noticeable. In future I think with an audio or filming project such as this, it’d be beneficial to the final product to organize for all members of the group to record together at the same time. By this I mean we could all make sure we record with the same settings on the mic for example or we could more easily ensure everyone stands the same distance from the mic. Overall however I think we all worked effectively as a group and while we weren’t the most time effective or organised we could be, we all still made sure we got the job done!

In week 10 the focus was on sound within media as well as sound based mediums and projects such as radio and podcasts. I’ve really had limited experience working with sound in the past so I found this topic fresh and interesting to learn about. I’d also never used Adobe Audition in my life and had no idea what I was doing with the task of recording with a group and mixing an audio clip about social media and phone use. I did actually get the hang of Audition fairly quickly though as it’s work-space and layout is  very similar to Premier, this didn’t stop my end product from being super messy and embarrassing to listen to due to terrible mixing and balancing of the levels of individual recordings within the audio segment. Filmers such as John Hicks often stress the importance of good sound quality in videos also and recommend external shotgun mics highly when filming with DSLR cameras, up to this point almost everything I’d ever made had music in it, so I’ve never really worried about recording sound much at all, but after using the provided cameras with proper external mics and Tascam recorders I realized how much of a difference half decent audio can make. So in future I think I may aim to find a second hand shotgun mic to use and maybe speak to my friend who is experienced with mastering in order to make the most of audio aspects of media.

We went over the importance of good collaboration practices when it comes to working with others on shared projects as opposed to solo assessments. Good communication of course was a key aspect of successful group work and important when it comes to everyone being clear on what their responsibilities are within the task to avoid confusion and group members not pulling their weight. Another useful thing learnt in week 9 was, if you’re going to have a bitch about someone… make sure you turn any microphones you may have on your person off before you do it. I guess these sorts of  personal skills and teamwork experiences such as filming and recording material around campus in groups like we did in a couple of the workshops will be useful in real workplaces, whether it involves creating media or any other task. Collaborative contracts were also explained to us as an agreement of all members of a given group to work towards the set goal effectively. Signing these collaborative contracts in theory minimizes cases of people doing absolutely nothing or not communicating with the group at all as it goes against an agreement on a document which they’ve signed.

A few weeks ago I went out with a bunch of people I’d only just met to film some street BMX, starting at Riverside and heading into the city from there we stopped at multiple spots along the way.  I love filming this sort of thing in general but I definitely learnt some things that night. You’ve always got to be ready to whip your camera out at any given second and can’t afford to spend ages stuffing around with lenses and setting up. In packed areas riders may only be able to get a trick once or twice before security comes to move you all along, or there may be too many people around meaning you may find yourself waiting for a run at a spot for ages with only small gaps in crowds moving across the area. I’ve now kinda made it a routine to go to the night sessions on Friday nights when it’s not raining since I guess it’s the best way to get involved and meet people in the BMX scene here in Melbourne as well as sharpening my filming and photography skills. Another aspect of filming clips for other riders (who actually go and get clips out here 🤣) Is getting the footage to them. Uploading gigs on gigs of stuff to Google Drive for hours just for the audio not to work on their end before doing the same thing on Onedrive which I (inherently distrust) and making a bunch of zip folders that somehow take just as long to upload is all part of it apparently when you don’t know what you’re doing.  Like anything I guess communication is important here too even if it’s just over whatsapp, no rider wants to work with a filmer who leaves them in the dark afterwards. I think definitely this is something I want to persist with as it’s just fun as hell and I’ve already managed to meet a good bunch of riders just from kicking around Riverside and the Northcote bowl.