Final Media Project: (Include 4 videos made by me and Kino)
https://www.instagram.com/team_of_wildcherryandkk/channel/
Final Reflection:
During this semester, we’ve learnt how climate change is a pressing topic that increasingly exposes environmental instability, change as always and beyond understanding. Throughout the practices of every week’s concepts beyond our daily lives, we actually have a better understanding on how to use digital media technology to perceive the changing world around us, rather than tell the story. We have the ability to think critically about what we notice, what media technology notices and how we use media to communicate also perceive changing circumstances. In this ‘Seeing the unseen’ course, we created media artefacts that come closer to represent the complexity of the ever-changing word around us. In our final session, I found, as a media practitioner, we could have our way to strengthen people’s awareness to protect the environment through different media platforms.
During the final project creation, I really enjoy it. When we grouped at the first time, I found it could be an interesting way that we can strengthen the young generations’ awareness through this project. As a media practitioner, we have the responsibility to do that. From the education perspective, our group did a lot of research on how we can approach an appropriate way to teach these young generations. We got two styles which created by me and Kino. From Kino’s two videos, he tried to use the voice-over to tell a story about what’s happening right now, explain the situation and how we could do to prevent the bad situation, protect the environment. However, I put several texts in the video to draw attention and raise awareness. I used several contrast between the good and bad phenomena to encourage audiences to create this word in their minds through abstract media.
Throughout this studio also every weeks’ readings, I found all elements in the natural environment are entangled. Every living thing merges with every other living thing at some point in its life, forming an entanglement. Entanglement is one of the most complex and magical relationships in the world, involving symbiosis, coexistence, competition and development between organisms. As Ingold argues, organisms and people are not so much nodes in a network as nodes in a set of nodes, whose constituent chains combine with others to make up the network (Ingold, 2011). In addition, we also learnt the changescape is not a product, they are more like projects or processes, in that they are produced by, through, and for the sake of an ongoing dynamic that is established between themselves and their perceivers (Gibson, 1968). A changescape is more concerned with the system than the structure, while a system is a set of accidental relationships that evolve, change, and also last for a long time (Gibson, 1968). The idea I think is to compare the past environment system to the present. I think changescape will make us to think, to immerse ourselves in the world of change, and makes us feel like we can understand the maintenance of the world and are motivated by its dynamics rather than obsessing over its entropy. So in the series of ‘plastic’, I did a lot with the contrast videos. However, our environment still have the damage part, in our group’s final project, in both of us videos, we all approach the concept of ‘Damage’ which is ‘Staying with the trouble’ which requires learning to truly live in the present, not as a soon-to-disappear fulcrum between a terrible but as a living creature, interwoven in a myriad of unfinished places, times, events and meanings (Haraway, 2016). In all, our video is to encourage these young generations to face this environmental damage and coexist with them to raise awareness better and improve the environment.
Throughout the whole project, I actually learnt a lot of the audiovisual techniques to approach to the audience sensing. For example, we revealed the effects, text on black screen to draw attention in my ‘plastic’ and ‘air pollution’ video, we did a lot of combination of emotive music to command the tone of video. In addition, we did a lot contrast clips such as make comparative with the pollution part and the good environment to emphasis the consequences if we don’t do anything from now. I think the most interesting highlight in our videos is ‘hashtag’. By using these hashtags could help us to reach our target audience as well as make it easier for others to find our message. Throughout these unique tags that will make it easier for social media users to find information such as these young generations, also will make our message stand out to users who find tags valuable, it makes our videos more like a series (Oh,C, 2006). This is a way of associating social media content with specific topics, events, themes, or conversations, also make it easier to find posts on these specific topics, because the hashtag aggregates all social media content with the same hashtag.
In all, we received a lot useful feedback also some interesting points from the others which we were all grateful. In this project, we want to educate more people to protect the environment as a media practitioner. We knew that we might will change opinions of the young generations but difficult for actions, but our aim is to do this ‘education series video’ is to do our best to strengthen these young generations’ awareness to do actions to protect the environment through social media platforms such as the Instagram.
References:
Ingold, T 2011, Being Alive : Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Taylor & Francis Group, London.pp.67-75. viewed 24 May 2021.
Gibson, R., 1968. Changescapes. IDEA JOURNAL, [online] pp.201-204. Available at: <https://ap01-a.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/delivery/61RMIT_INST:RMITU/12270522140001341?lang=en> viewed 24 May 2021.
Haraway, D., 2016. ‘Introduction’, in: Staying with the trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham, pp.1-8. viewed 24 May 2021.
Oh, C., Lee, T., Kim, Y., Park, S., & Suh, B. (2016, May). Understanding participatory hashtag practices on Instagram: A case study of weekend hashtag project. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1280-1287. viewed 24 May 2021.