In the Workshop, we watched the videos that we handed in for project brief 3. This was the first video that I uploaded via vimeo, which takes a good 45 minutes to do. Thankfully, it was viewable. People seemed to like it, judging by the clapping, but there were no Q&A sessions between videos like last time, so everyone clapped for everyone.
Much like with the last project brief, the significant majority of people had very deep and depressing pieces focusing on friends and relatives with serious issues. They were very well done, but after so many depressing videos I felt incredibly numbed by the end. A few funny (or at least non-depressing) videos were there, but I was still completely numbed.
We then split into groups of 4 to discuss each others videos. Alana said that she liked the found footage of cartoon animals to represent her work in the RSPCA. Georgia really liked the footage of the maps and Sonika’s journey, and enjoyed the ambiguity of not seeing her face in close-ups. Samantha liked how the voice-overs were incorporated with the found footage and the original footage because it made it seem more natural, its her, creating a nice ambiance. Mr. Rowlands would have preferred more footage of Sonika, and he didn’t like the found footage of an older India. Other than that, he liked it.
We were then randomly sent into other groups of two (I was placed with Rose Ng) so that we can work on our final project of the semester. project Brief 4 is a collaborative video project. Each group is focusing on specific “media idea”, which for us is audiences. Our objective in this assignment is to creatively engage with the debates and theories that have informed Media as an academic discipline. We are not to provide a summary of our “media idea”, but instead we have to communicated a researched, informed, and creative response. A provocative “intervention” in to those debates and ways of thinking about media. This assignment sounds especially challenging as it also requires a lot of information and minutes of meetings with Rose and drafts and annotated bibliographies.
In the lectorial, we were given a lecture about what a “text” is by Brian Morris.He said that text isn’t just in writing, but also in terms of film and radio, communications, images, policy documents, social practices, and even institutions. Textual Analysis tradition comes from two concerns; “effects” tradition in communication studies, and post WW2/mid 20th century turn against a particular idea of culture.
Media can influence what people do (ie the Bobo dolls experiment, where children were shown videos of people hitting dolls with a bat, then put into a room with a bobo doll and a bat, to which most hit the dolls with the bat). There are different audiences, so media can be interpreted/influence different people in different ways.
Morris went on to say that texts are the material traces that are left of the practice of the sense-making – the only empirical evidence we have of how other people make sense of the world. Textual analysis is an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of a text.
A “sign” can be visual, linguistic, aural, combination, etc. They have two parts, the signifier (e.g. the word and sound of “Dog”), and the signified (e.g. the mental perceptions of the dog, the mental concept, an image of a dog, the sounds we think of, etc.).
A lot of what Morris said was based on this weeks reading by Alan McKee, cited in Branston and Stafford.
We were then handed a worksheet for a class exercise. We looked at photographs and answered media-related questions. It got very deep and very confusing as Brian Morris seemed to see things that we didn’t see in the “signs”.
We were then spoken to by a different person, and she talked about media having different capabilities and the affordances of them from people reading the texts. Different modes allow to you to do different things. She also said that sound has a lot of influence, as it is pretty much everywhere and is difficult to self-regulate (at least with sight we can just close our eyes). Sound is pervasive, multi-directional, complexly layered, and prioritized by the ear. Some early 20th-century artists loved working with lots of different sounds.
Sound is also very intimate. A film can use sound to surround us and immerse us and feel close to us as our own thoughts.
Aural semiotics
- semiotic codes of sound place the listener in a mediated/imagined relationship with the subject of representation
- two crucial codes – perspective and social perspective
“The only difference between perspective and social distance is the that social distance applies to single sounds while perspective applies to simultaneous sounds” – Theo Van Leeuwen’s “Perspective”
Sound scape – it is a representation of a place or environment that can be heard rather than what can be seen.
She then showed us a picture of a village in Vietnam being destroyed by agent orange and napalm and people running away from it. We were to jot down what we thought we might hear, such as screams, soldiers, explosions, footsteps, wind, and piano music (if it were in a documentary).
Afterwards we were given an audio file of a girls music audition, to which we were to think about the focus of the story (the girl, Sophie, who talks the most, and her instructor), and the sound itself can provide a lot of intimacy to the audiences. We could hear the distance them, as well as the music.