A candid chat about where to get a bite to eat/drink and a place to sit/bird shit.

Riah and I started our recordings on the Zoom in a podcast style, we just decided to have a candid chat and share a few stories and ideas about food. We chose the empty classroom as our quiet recording space. The only letdown about this is the fact that we couldn’t leave the room to record some foley and background noise. So we had to make do with my pigeon impression.

I think that some sound effects would make the podcast more engaging and distract from my weird voice.

I used Audacity to edit my audio. I tried to chuck a noise reducer on there and I fiddled with the frequency to cut out the sound of the air conditioner but it didn’t really effect much without lowering the volume of our voices.

I made a little 8bit intro for the chat to mirror my favourite podcast: The Minutes with Mel and Patience. I used an online beat maker called BeepBox.

This is my final video for Project Brief 2. It is also my third attempt! There is nothing worse to hinder creativity than to compare yourself to your classmates! Either way I got there in the end.

This little film is about a motto my friend posted to Facebook that I have taken as some serious life advice. It’s about doing things for yourself, and breaking out of the norm. I also managed to base it around my love of gardening, as the video stars Handsome Man; an avocado tree I grew from a seed who sits by my bed. Its pretty much a video about me spending the day outdoors, riding my bike, hanging g out with nature which are things I like to do.

Some critiques I had with my editing, is there is a part where I zoom in on the seed and there is a sound of applause. I reworked it again and again but it just felt off. I’m really running out of time and I didn’t want to risk anything more, so I showed it to my peers who said they didn’t notice. I settled with what I had.

Enjoy!

Music: Sweet Ukulele – ChatBlanc Music https://soundcloud.com/chatblanc/sweet-ukulele
licensed under creative commons cc

smash ur own avo from rosie pavlovic on Vimeo.

I found the concept of the sound of silence to be a stand out in this week’s lecture. The sound we create to fill uncomfortable silence. Physically we can create the steady drum of our own heartbeat, the sound of blood pumping through our ears and our slow breathing. Mentally we create a distant sound, a rhythmic beat, a song in our head or mishearing a voice. These are the things I notice in an empty room, or a silent cinema.

However, in a physical sense, our bodies do not turn the radio of our bodily functions on at will. Our hearts no not start beating in order to dull an uncomfortable silence, It’s always beating, and our blood is always pumping. This soundtrack never stops. It’s the act of listening that lets us tune into this. It’s our conscientious effort of deep listening that lets us notice the sounds of our the own bodies.

The mental song we create is equally fascinating. I noticed a mental song I created last week when watching experimental film in cinema studies. It was when I was watching The Dante Quartet; a series of handprinted film stills cut together to create a mix of colours in a swirling and moving fashion. The film is totally silent, and so was the cinema we were watching it within.I began to feel a sound in my mind that wasn’t a specific instrument, but it felt like a frantic piano. Then it was a beat, and then strings. This continued to grow “louder” or more apparent until the film ended.

It reminded me of this Shel Silverstein comic about the sound we can create in our minds.

I have been struggling to source new material, as I am trying to avoid using the images and videos from my media self portrait. I want to push myself to create as many original ideas as possible, without refusing material. This has proven to be more difficult than I thought, and the vagueness and abstraction of the inspiration material has left me inn a rut, where everything I make feels so cliche.

Classic creative problems though, am I right? I’ve been in this sitch (situation) before and I can pull myself out of it.

I woke up at 8.00 today and started filming based on this note i left on my phone at 3.45am. Wish me luck.

This week’s reading discussed David Gauntlet’s twin peaks of media studies. The two main areas of study that media students need to discuss, one positive and one negative . This included peak 1; the surveillance and capitalist profits being made from modern media. This means privacy policies, unwarranted filming such as drones or street surveillance, social media as a means of gaining metatags to capitalise on advertising and so on.

However, these negatives are counterbalanced by the optimistic notion that this generation of media makers are given the means to create in a way never seen before. To defy the capitalist drive to turn art into revenue, we must put our minds to create altruistically, for the sake of sharing in it’s more purest form. The pre-Zuckerberg form of sharing; where we collectively create something to give to the world, and the world receives. Facebook sharing is rather one-sided in this sense, giving with no return.

I tried to model my Haiku off the music video for Step by Vampire Weekend. Once I had heard the piano piece that was selected as the royalty free soundtrack in the brief I tried to think of something that incorporated cloudy city shots with a piano song, and immediately thought of the video for Step. Not only did that make sense, but the opening line from the song was pretty much a Haiku:

Not only is Ezra Koenig my hero for such appropriate seasonal quotes:

But the art direction for Vampire Weekend’s videos is impeccable. It’s the exact creative and aesthetic direction I would love to work towards. These are some of the parallels I tried to create between the videos.

Victorian State Library

New York Public Library

\

Baller Boyz in like… central park

Baller Boyz behind building 80

hardly workin

working hard

State Library with text

manhattan with text

You can watch my original video below. I used footage from the shared folder on google drive, and I thank all the classmates who’s original footage is shown below.

Music credit to Circus Marcus – ‘Rumbo De Grises’ https://soundcloud.com/circusmarcus/rumbo-de-grises This Work is licensed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

I was assigned to find different types of media around Melbourne Central. Media has such a broad and vague meaning but ultimately my understanding is that media is a way of communication. Whether it’s through storytelling in a visual or auditory sense, or if its simply to display for aesthetics, or the overwhelming advertising in Melbourne Central I consider to be legitimate forms of media. These are some examples I found.

I think this is the most obvious form of media we came across. A giant suspended screen showing todays headlines not only communicates us with broadcast media, but shows graphic advertisings.

Melbourne Central advertising their own social media platforms, encouraging visitors to tag, like and subscribe to their accounts. This gives an outlet for photo sharing, online feedback and sharing experiences within the destination.

Here’s a poster promoting MS MR’s upcoming Australian Tour, which has no direct correlation to Melbourne Central however we see band posters plastering columns. Either this is for the aesthetic quality, or it might be advertising space, which I suspect because I once got yelled at for taking a First Aid Kit poster from here.

I was the last to present my project in my group, and seeing everyone’s assignments made me a bit nervous. People had well choreographed and co-ordinated their images and videos. My work was made in the spur of the moment with my iPhone 5, which we know has it’s issues.

However the feedback I received was positive and well critiqued. The spur of the moment approach to my work was well received and seemed to be unique. It made my work more “Lo-Fi” so to speak. Some criticisms I was given noted that I had forgotten to include the “text” aspect. I didn’t even realise we had to do a text aspect, and even though I reread the brief many times to understand it. The piece of feedback I will take away from this; carefully read the assignment brief.

I have chosen for the images for my Media Self Portrait pictures that have been taken of me this week by my friends. I tried not to orchestrate the images, or pose for them, I just wanted pictures of me through-out my week. So that’s why there are snapchats in there, pictures of me out and about, videos of me and my girlfriend riding our bikes, or on the train home at night. I wish however that the pictures weren’t of me specifically, my physical form, my earthly vessel etc.

PHOTOS

Me, the neighbours cat, frida kahlo what the water gave me

This is me trying to impersonate a picture by Cindy Sherman, with my neighbours cat.

Untitled film stills – Cindy Sherman

My friends who helped me shoot some of these pictures, shooting a picture of me! We are at the Brunswick Baths off Sydney Road.

My friend is a photographer and he had some film developed this week. This is a photo he took of me on the weekend. His is very talented. See his work in the clickthrough link on the photo.

My partner and I having a boogie to a song I can’t remember. I think it could be some Florence, or some Charli xcx, but deep down… I know its ABBA

I am really hungover here, and I have gone back to the town I was raised in (St Andrews). This is me on a very rare Saturday where I am not working.

VIDEOS

um bike ride 1 from rosie pavlovic on Vimeo.

This is me riding my bike at night which is a favourite pastime of mine. A man comes by and asks me what I’m doing and I have to tell him it’s a media project. This has been a big part of my life for my last 2 years studying media; explaining what the hell i’m doing.

train safe from rosie pavlovic on Vimeo.

This is just an ambience video.My girlfriend and I are coming home from a talk by Carrie Brownstein at the town hall. Most days, between work and Uni, we might not see each other during the day, unless it’s on public transport. So I filmed our feet together on the train, which kinda mirrored a part in You, Me, and Everyone We Know by Miranda July.

AUDIO

Please forgive me for poor audio quality. My phone microphone is broken and I can only take calls on Loudspeaker which makes me look very rude on the train. The first Audio clip I have is in a video, because thats the only way I can record sound. It’s me and my friend singing to Violent Soho on Triple J while looking for some takeaway food.

viceroy from rosie pavlovic on Vimeo.

We made pancakes on sunday and listened to Francoise Hardy

TEXT

• My darling
• How are you?
• How have you been lately?
• I only seem to speak to you of superficial things
• Creator, you destroy me
• You know my hunger well
• And yet you starve me
• Until I’m begging on my knees

Angel Olsen is my gf.

I can only assume this week’s guest talk on editing will lead to editing our media profiles in the tutorial. I have slightly struggled with this weeks assignment to gather a “media profile ” of 6 pictures, 2 audio clips and 3 videos. I feel a little narcissistic compiling photos of myself, so in the videos and a few pictures, i’m trying to show things i enjoy, rather than me enjoying them.

Back to editing however, it’s a part of media I shy away from, especially in cinema. Or rather, I rarely notice it.
Working on my last short film, I was pretty much useless in the editing suite. I don’t know how to use any of the technology we were using, But that didn’t mean I don’t have an eye for editing. I can totally pick up on when a shot felt “wrong” or when cuts are too fast or slow. There were a few in the last Hunger Games movie, but then again they were using footage of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I would say my favourite editing is in the film Whiplash, but I watched it after knowing it won awards for the editing so I actively noticed it, making that statement a little biased.

Yet nothing passes this as my favourite editing sequence. Truly Iconic.