Monthly Archives: March 2016

The power of sound

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Photo Credit: Nico Clemente via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: Nico Clemente via Compfight cc

The violin is my favourite instrument, hence the opening graphic.

Visuals can be stunningly beautiful. From the natural landscapes of the world, to the precisely planned mise-en-scene of a film. What you see can alter your perception of particular things in life, whether it’s a movie or something you’ve encountered in everyday life. Seeing a flower flutter in the wind can cause a sense of serenity and peacefulness, while seeing a person defeat a sworn enemy in battle can feel empowering and motivating. Visuals can make a viewer feel a wide range of different feelings and emotions – to an extent. While visually seeing a battle unfold right in front of you can cause a strong sense of power, the addition of sound can help; and even enhance the emotions felt through a particular scene within a movie.

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The magic of microphones

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Photo Credit: jac malloy via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: jac malloy via Compfight cc

The lectorial for week four centred around audio. We discussed things relating to how audio affects its listeners, how its recorded and with what equipment. Rachel Wilson – who did the bulk of the talking for the lectorial, stated that the things we were learning only scratched the surface of what audio encompasses, and that some courses allow students to study audio for a total of three years or more. If that doesn’t explain how difficult and complex audio is, then I don’t know what will. Now interestingly enough, the thing that interested me most about the lectorial; wasn’t even in the lectorial.

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The importance of audio

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In this weeks workshop, we covered a number of things. First of all, we all showed our finished self-portraits, and it was very interesting to see everyone else’s idea of ‘identity’. I was fascinated about how everyone approached this task. Some were abstract, some were quite simple, and others were just weird (like mine!). One thing I did notice was that a lot of people used a birds-eye view of themselves walking. Another common shot was a close-up of tea/coffee being poured.

Photo Credit: alideniese via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: alideniese via Compfight cc

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What is identity? (Project brief two)

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Dog-person

If you haven’t recalled, project brief one gave us media students the task of collecting multiple ‘media artefacts’ that represented our identities in some way or form. Here’s a link to that project, if you haven’t already seen it. Why am I mentioning this project? Well, project brief two required us to – again, recreate our identity using media. Only this time, we had to edit all the media artefacts as one cohesive piece using Adobe Premiere Pro.

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The Godfather (Part one) – A movie opinion

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The_Godfather_Logo

So before I begin, let me explain what this post is. As most media students will know, we are all required to post a minimum of four posts a week. One post also has to be dedicated to the following topics:

  1. Lectorial and readings
  2. Workshop/seminar
  3. Initiation post (linking of ideas to media we have encountered)

But what about the fourth post?
Well that’s were my ‘A movie opinion’ idea comes from. Bit of a side note – I used to never watch movies. Which is odd, seeing how I’m in a media course, while also in a cinema studies class for my contextual stream. So I thought an idea like this would be perfect for me! So each week, I’m going to post my opinion on movies I have recently watched. I’ll talk about what I liked, what I didn’t like and so on and so forth. And if you want to share your own opinion about the movie, or would like to recommend something for an up-and-coming movie buff, then go ahead and shoot me a comment! And one more thing. THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. This is more of a discussion than a review of the movie. So if you haven’t watched it yet, skip this post! You get the idea? Awesome! Now the first movie I’m going to talk about is ‘The Godfather’, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

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An initiation post?

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Photo Credit: gleb.gonchar via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: gleb.gonchar via Compfight cc

Without a doubt in my mind, the initiation posts have been the hardest posts to write. For broad topics such as creativity in media studies, it’s difficult to come up with ways to link it to things that haven’t already been discussed in class. So for the past few days I’ve been thinking, “What the heck can I write about that hasn’t been talked about yet?”. Now this might be pushing it, but I think I managed to squeeze out an idea.

Blogging.

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The peaks of social media

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Photo Credit: canonsnapper via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: canonsnapper via Compfight cc

In this weeks workshop, we talked about the readings by David Gauntlett regarding creativity and digital media – talking about a change in the way we think about media studies. Dubbed “media studies 2.0”, this new form of media studies encourages creativity and making, rather than the old model where theoretical studies is more prevalent. My previous post talks a bit about this change, so go ahead and read up on it if you haven’t already (it’s freee~).

So what kind of affects will this shift impose? How will it change your day-to-day life? Well, as our class discussed in huge detail, we are already in the process of this shift, and it’s called social media. First of all, let me get this straight. You don’t need to be a media practitioner to create media. Almost every single one of us create media in some way or form. Posting a Facebook status, uploading on Snapchat, or even posting a new photo on Instagram are all forms of media creation.

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Creativity in the media industry

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Photo Credit: lumineimaginis via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: lumineimaginis via Compfight cc

As a result of the Labour day, this week lectorial was cancelled (Yay!). As a result, I’ll only be speaking about this weeks readings. This weeks set of readings by David Gauntlett, all followed a pretty central theme. Gauntlett proposes a possible shift in the way we think of media from an industry perspective, and how a change can benefit the industry in the future. At least, I think that’s what he was saying – let me explain.

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‘Blood in the Gutter’ and manga

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Before I begin, let me preface this by saying that this post is a post relating to the reading of week two, while also being an initiative post; where I relate an idea to media that I have encountered.

To summarise, the reading for week two was a comic about comics. And it was by far one of my favourite readings I’ve encountered so far. Let me explain. The reading explained the importance between the spaces of the frames within a comic. It discussed how we – as an audience, have an active role to play while reading a comic, as we commit closure to make a link between the frames within a comic. Closure is described as “observing the parts but perceiving the whole”.

Credit - Scott McCloud "Blood in the Gutter"

Credit – Scott McCloud “Blood in the Gutter”

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Coloured hats and a haiku

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Photo Credit: dennoir via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: dennoir via Compfight cc

The workshop for week two had quite a few interesting things in store for me. If you haven’t seen my previous post, I showcased my final ‘creative self-portrait’ with all the components of each medium. In this weeks workshop, we had to present it – but in an unorthodox way. Instead of presenting to the entire class, we split-off into small groups. Within each group, every person would take turns presenting their work.

The listeners of the group would then have to provide their feedback to the presenter, so that they could better evaluate their work. But this is where it became ‘unorthodox’. Instead of each person saying what they really thought about the work presented to them, each person represented a ‘hat’ from the ‘six thinking hat’ system. If you aren’t familiar with this system – simply put, it’s a tool used for group discussions that help to give feedback from multiple perspectives. Each hat represented a different perspective. We used four out of the six hats, which goes as follows:

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