Posted on November 17, 2017
SBTRKT || Wildfire MV
SBTRKT’s Wildfire music video, a feverish drug-induced visual trip, explores themes of substance use, love and sex and the horrors that come from the amalgamation of this trio.
Looking at the budget of this music video production, one would assume that it was made from quite a cheap budget. With only one location of a bedroom – perhaps another room used to experiment with the water effects – as well as naturalistic lighting from windows and lamps, these aspects could definitely have come free. Props include the SBTRKT trade mark mask, fans, blow dryers, water, maybe milk and for the darker looking liquids: water with black food dye or diluted black paint. Just like the location and lighting, all of these could have been found around people’s houses, costing the production team practically nothing. The prop that they probably needed to spend some money on was dry ice that was hooked up to the water tap to create the final scene effect.
To get an idea of the other works the director, Sam Piling, has done, I found another music video he did for SBTRKT called “Hold On”. It was a big contrast to “Wildfire” as “Hold On” has a more realistic, natural appearance and presents a more understandable storyline. “Wildfire”, on the other hand, has very surreal imagery and its storyline is portrayed through allusions and interpretive imagery and symbols. “Wildfire” implements a lot of tight framing and close ups which create those surreal shapes, further complemented with the unnatural movement of water floating upwards. Hence, whilst “Hold On” takes on a more naturalistic and realist approach, Wildfire is more abstract and experimental in its art style.
As SBTRKT’s music is seen to cross the border of Dubstep music, I was reminded of a lot of Skrillex music videos and how the visuals and editing support the mood and tempo of the music. “Wildfire” has a very feverish, uneasy tone, which I believe the visuals Sam Piling implemented strongly reflects and emphasises this atmosphere. As mentioned in our reading “Telling Not Telling” by Varnallis, there is no obvious narrative, and the storyline is presented more as a chance for various interpretation by different audiences. Furthermore, there are allusions to Japanese and Korean horror legends, such as the female character’s resemblance to the Grudge, or Samara from the Ring, and people have seen connections of “Wildfire”’s visuals to the Korean superstition known as “Fan Death”. In this urban legend, people say that if you sleep in a room with closed doors and windows with the ceiling fan on, it will suck the air out of you and suffocate you to death. SBTRKT has expressed that he was pleased with this dark turn of visuals as he “sees the darker side of music” and was glad Sam Piling was able to reflect this from his music and lyrics of drugs, sex and the ideas of addiction and its crippling effect on life.
After showing this video to my group mates, we were definitely inspired to play around with water effects and what shapes we can create out of it. Furthermore, we aim to utilise the contrast of happy and dark visuals so that we can create more depth and layers to the meaning of our music videos the way Piling has done to SBTRKT’s Wildfire music video.
Posted on November 13, 2017
A looped silhouette shot
After our first lesson playing around with the concept of silhouettes, I took my friend to my local primary school to experiment around with the effects of light and shadows. Initially, the shot was rather desaturated and you could still see outlines of my friend’s face, but with a little tweaking on the Lumetri effects settings… I crunched the blacks, upped the saturation to emphasize the shadows and the sunset background. I was pretty satisfied with the final product, especially with the little time and effort it took to make. Due to the lack of detail on the subject, there’s so much room to play around with shapes that I’m very keen to manipulate and utilize in any upcoming projects.
Image of footage before colour correction
Posted on November 10, 2017
Brainstorming
Ideas for a music video for Calavera’s A Swing and a Miss
NOTE: Still not set on a particular song, but I’ve decided to brainstorm ideas and materials I have or are needed to create a music video for this particular song
- Stop motion animation – bird’s eye view of people on the ground to recreate Mario or other game boy games
- Colour palette – bright, saturated
- 8-bit plush toys – from EB games and Zing!
- Skatepark location – GoPro/wide angle shots
- Cosplayers – anime characters/game characters
- Night time – bright LED lights – find out how to create effect of streaking glow sticks
- Flour and colour lights effect
- Narrative idea: character finds themselves wanting to live in gameboy world – discovers it’s a corrupt world, gets trapped inside
Posted on November 10, 2017
Telling Not Telling
A reflection on Week 1’s reading
It was a pleasant surprise to discover many similarities of this week’s reading with my past courses in cinema studies. Just having recently completed a “Popular Cinema” course, I recognized a few names like Bordwell and Thompson and understood the discussion on the “criteria” of narrative structure. Looking at the music video for Aerosmith’s “Crazy”, I definitely agree with the Varnallis’ (author of the reading?) analysis that “Crazy” only presents what appears to be a narrative rather than delivering one. In that case, music videos like “Crazy” remind me more of the experimental genre of film and also the style of European Art Cinema. Characteristics including lack of a driving narrative, dialogue, etc. where the audience of the films, or in this case, the music videos, are given the freedom to have their own interpretations of the story and meaning.
Due to the short timed nature of music videos, they lack the chance to explore settings, the past, present and future, protagonists and antagonists, etc., however, I believe that a good music video director utilizes an audiences’ preconception of narrative structure to create these “faux” narratives that exist in 4-5 minute music videos.
Looking at Ed Sheeran’s “Give Me Love” music video, the opening presents a few shots that establish a loose storyline for the audience to make sense of. There’s the angel with an arrow in her chest, a lingering tracking shot of a handsome policeman and then a cut to the same angel but this time alive, hence suggesting that the music video will reveal how she ended up dead with the arrow in her chest. Similiar to “Crazy”, there is no spoken dialogue between the characters and each shot are like broken fragments like memories of the past.
The awesome thing about music videos and their experimental art nature is that they pay more attention to creating compositionally strong images, much like photographs. That’s not to say that feature films don’t do so either, but from what I’ve seen, where music videos lack in narrative, they make up for artistically.
Posted on November 10, 2017
Dear Rohan Sprong,
As my first official post for this summer studio, I thought it’d be quite fitting to write to you in the form of a letter/email/whatever to explain what the hell I’m doing here and how the hell did I get here.
So, just about a year ago I would’ve just completed my final VCE exam (appropriately a media exam), and now in the present, I’ve completed my first two semesters of my Bachelors of Media and Communications degree. Should I be taking a break? Probably yes, but ever since I completed high school, I’ve been itching to just keep making and creating, as a response to the restrictive nature of my 6 years of private high school. Initially, for about the first 4 years of high school, I aspired to become a musician. I dedicated many hours to practicing jazz contemporary piano and preparing for many concerts and exams, I thought this was to be my future. However, as I began my high school media subjects, got my first Nikon D7100 and just began filming and taking photos, I kinda felt that this was more of my calling. So… I guess it’s pretty obvious to say that when I found out about this Music Video studio, I was immediately on board. This studio came with way too many perks I could not ignore; more credits to make up for when I’m studying overseas, a chance to build up my portfolio, and something to keep my creativity busy through the holidays. Also, my really awesome, talented friends, San and Sophia were enrolling so how could I say no to a chance to create dope music videos with them.
As it’s the end of our first week, just from the two classes we’ve had, I am bubbling over the edge with excitement. I’m ready to learn more about the process and intricacies of the art of music videos, and I’m so extremely itchy to start filming and creating. I’m sure you, Rohan, understand the feeling, it’s kinda like a drug you can’t stop. (Am I allowed to say that here?)
Anyway, hope this short post gives you a good insight into myself, and I’m really looking forward to getting to know you and to learning and creating rad videos
Kindest regards,
Tessa-May Chung
Posted on June 2, 2017
PB4 Reflection
The successes, challenges and what I learnt from Project Brief 4
As this is my first time creating a purely audio work, I was nervous about how to approach this project and how the final audio piece would turn out. I believe the opening soundscape of our audio piece was quite convincing; where the listener can close their eyes and feel themselves running with the characters away from the violent student rally and feel immersed in the uproar of the whole made-up scenario. Furthermore, as our audio piece moves into the studio where we discuss our research, I was really happy with how professional we sounded and the good quality the recording turned out to be. Earlier in my blog posts, I mention that one of my main goals was to achieve a very professional sounding audio piece as if we really were experts working at a radio station. So, thanks to Jon’s feedback in Week 11, compressing our audio as well as me and my group’s quick pick up on learning the Zoom H2n’s functions has allowed us to achieve this goal.
Problematic aspects of this project would include our time management and the final assembly of each of our sections. As Ben had a lot going on in his personal life, Joey and I knew that we had to figure out a way to avoid a complicated production process, but also have intriguing subjects to discuss in our audio piece. As I misunderstood the task and thought we had to include our research in our audio piece rather than creatively adapt our research instead, we decided to give each other about 2-3 minutes to have a documentary styled narration of our individual research focuses on media attention. I reckon we all did well in our research regarding media attention. Although contrasting, this just proves how complex the relationship is between media and audiences. However, looking at our final piece, it does feel a little disjointed and rushed because we tried so hard to fit everything under the time limit. Opening with my section of the modern, university-lifestyle take on the Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, I decided to discuss my research on the early theories of media attention and how these have been applied to said radio broadcast, as well as the nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew. As these early media content raised a lot of discussion on the powerful influence the media has over audiences, I chose to discuss these theories and use this as a warning from my character’s radio personality to her audience. Transitioning to Joey’s segment about trending memes and how the media effects audiences in the contemporary era, his research acts as a contrast with my research that applies media attention to the early 20th century. Furthermore, ending with an interview with Ben who takes on the persona of an online content creator, Ben’s research coincides with Joey’s research on how the media has become such an ever present force and has such a huge potential to be exploited and used to affect individual lives.
From this project, including the other audio piece I created and the multiple audio pieces I’ve listened to in this study section’s lectures and workshops, I have been opened up to the huge creative potential of what audio-based media can offer. As I mention in a previous blog post, audio-based media acts as a stimulant to audience’s imagination, thus allowing a lot of room for very creative interpretations of storytelling. When creating our opening section of the fake student rally, I spent a lot of time fiddling and playing around with how different effects, placements and fades between each sound effects and atmospheres can create different storylines. Furthermore, unlike visual editing, audio has so much more potential for layering that I really enjoyed playing around with when creating our audio piece’s opening soundscape. Furthermore, this is quite a small thing, but more specifically in my segment of the audio piece, I had my examples fade through my spoken research that I hoped added more colour to my messages. Especially when I quote from The Eternal Jew, just as the narrator begins to talk, I really hoped for that stylistic decision to have a strong impact on listeners to be able to visualise in their own way how this propaganda film affected its audience during its time.
As this project is my first collaborative project, excluding my cinema studies group project, it was a huge learning experience and contrast to group projects in high school where we have lots of opportunities to see each other. For PB4, where we could only see each other once or twice a week, we really needed to trust each other and be very clear about what our goals are and what each of our delegated responsibilities are for this project. Definitely through the learning experience of this collaboration, each member needed to be aware of their weaknesses so that others’ strengths will be able to step in and help out. Thus, as I expect future collaborations will be more like PB4 than high school group projects, I definitely have a better idea of how to approach meetings and work as a part of a creative team.
Posted on May 31, 2017
My Future Plans
A little end of semester post on my big hopes for my future
I guess I’ll open with an honest cliché: this semester went by so fast and I have learned so much. My high school teachers’ warnings of University came true, such as, the new independence as a student and my responsibility to figure out things without a teacher holding my hand. I definitely felt like I was fumbling around in the dark a lot, but I think I am much more lucky than a lot of other university courses to have tutors who will help me out as much as they can whenever I ask. Now that my first semester of studying media is over, I am happy to say that I have gotten a better look at the world of media and I am even more excited for my future in this industry. In saying that, I really look forward to the studios and more subjects offered in Media 2 through to 6, however I really do hope to get the chance to further my studies internationally during this course. As media is an internationally utilised medium, I believe that it is a necessity for my to study overseas and experience media’s cultural differences in order to truly challenge and expand myself as a media practitioner. As I am exposed in a Australian/western culture of the media, RMIT is definitely nurturing my studies in the media world. Hence, if I broaden my studies in eastern countries, the different culture let alone the very experience or studying abroad will benefit me prosperously. Unfortunately, as I am just a first year, my application to study at the Hong Kong City University for second year first semester has been rejected, but I am still going to do my very best to be accepted for at least second semester next year. Initially, I was hoping to carry on my studies in Japan as I have studied Japanese culture and have high interest in their creative culture of film, art and photography. However, RMIT does not have many partnerships with Japanese Universities that offer similar courses to media, thus I’ll have to keep looking. Though, I remember back in Week 4’s reading of “The Clarity of the Craftsmen,” by Cal Newport, taking steps in between our goals is just as important as reaching them. Thus, after a lot of thought and considering, getting the chance to study at Hong Kong is already an amazing opportunity to strive for and I also have hopes that my time in Hong Kong will provide me even more networks and connections that may quite likely discover an opportunity to study in Japan.
These are definitely more longterm plans, so for my plans in just this mid year break, my friend and I are hoping to just go on a massive “creative binge” and write, direct, film and create all sorts of materials that we believe will strengthen our practical and conceptual skills so that we’re ahead and ready for the next semesters to come. So, hopefully I’ll be able to keep those projects updated on this blog too. I was already excited to step out of the baby cot of high school and into university, now that my first semester is done, I am feeling even more and excited and just anxious to keep exploring my potential in what I love doing; creating.
Posted on May 26, 2017
Week 12 Workshop
Feedback from Jon during Week 12’s Workshop class
In this week’s workshop, we decided to present the opening 1-2 minutes of my group’s audio piece which is a fake recording of a violent student rally which transitions into Joey and me interviewing a student leader recounting the action at the rally. We explained to Jon that our idea was a modern university-life take on the Orson Welles’ radio show “War of the Worlds”. We also further explained that after the recording, the audio piece takes set on a university student radio where Joey, Ben and I will explain our research on the ideas of attention and the relationships between the media and audiences.
Jon seemed quite happy with what we showed him, he explained that we used appropriated conventions for the horror/thriller genre of the fake recording, and that it clearly established what the section is about. He suggested compressing the audio of Joey’s and my voice in the studio as it will give a more professional sound of a radio broadcast. He explained that compressing audio normalises the sound, meaning the softs become louder and the louds become softer. It sounded really complicated at first but we looked around the settings and effects and it literally took 2 seconds to apply a ‘broadcast’ compression to our audio that immediately made it sound so much more like a professional live radio show. Jon also advised for us to play around with the timing of the opening soundscape so that it can feel natural. He understood that we created it from combing multiple different sound effects and atmosphere sounds, so he suggested that we have to be careful with the placement and overlapping of each audio as to avoid making it sound rehearsed and cliche. There’s a fine line to achieve a natural authentic soundscape and Jon explained that we basically just have to fiddle with it, listen, then fiddle some more to achieve a genuine-sounding soundscape.
Posted on May 26, 2017
Final Week
I believe that overall, this whole semester has been such a valuable experience, especially just the contrasting work environment and different types of people I meet compared to the sheltered life of high school. I really had to take an extra step into my own independent studies, and my personal initiation and responsibilities have definitely been challenged and exercised. More specifically, the structure behind readings and the blog posts is a style of learning that I haven’t really done before. Mostly in high school, it would be read a passage in a textbook and then answer a couple questions. It was a little daunting at first to have so much readings and these weekly blogposts, but ultimately, much like how high school was sheltered, only learning from a single textbook was trapping me inside a bubble. With these readings from multiple sources and different people who have experienced different things, it was definitely such a valuable experience to have all these various insights of the world of media through other people’s lenses. Thus, thinking of ways to apply all these diverse ideas of the media to my own creative content definitely challenged, but in the end, sculpted my works with more insight and depth because of these different perspectives and knowledge of the media world.
The most challenging part of this course was definitely the final assignment, Project Brief 4. Audio editing was definitely my weakest skill when coming into the course as I have had little to no experience of it, thus, I really had to push myself to learn the ways around the Zoom mics and Adobe Audition. Fortunately, thanks to the workshop activities, by just fiddling and experimenting around with Audition, I was able to quickly figure out the basics that has helped me with making the assignment’s audio piece. Another component that was challenging from this course, especially from PB4 was the collaboration component, hence the slight dip in my “Ways of Working” line on the graph. My group and I generally worked together very well, however, as we all had our own individual lives, finding ways to bring ourselves together and support each other’s weaknesses with each other’s strengths turned out quite messy. As much as I wanted to keep our workload equal, I felt that sometimes I needed to push another member for work, but I didn’t want to become authoritative and bossy. In the end, I tried to do my best on what I was capable of doing within the group, and I really do hope that the other members feel the same way that they did the best they could’ve done as well. With the limited time and hurdles in life that have gotten in our way, I believe that we did what we could do for this final assignment.
Overall, I am so glad that I made the decision to attend RMIT and study this very course. As someone who is more hands on with my work, this course definitely allowed me to exercise this passion of mine and really test my creative thinking in order to create my works for the projects. As the first couple of projects were ‘documentary’ style, I definitely felt my creativity tested, because I wanted to really have a unique individual style of work whilst maintaining the truth of the portraits. Definitely for PB3 where we had to create a portrait of somebody else, I begged for my tutor to allow me to take on a fictional storyline whilst maintaining a elements and conventions of a documentary. This idea was unfortunately revoked, but I was still very happy and proud of what I was able to create with my interview of my Aunt May. Having only created fictional short films before, I was able to exercise a different type of creative mind for this portrait short film, such as taking our conversations between Aunt May and I and then reflecting the same raw emotions of her stories into my film. I didn’t think that I would’ve enjoyed doing a documentary styled short film, but after the many positive feedback for my short film, I will most definitely endeavour to create similar works where I can creatively adapt people’s lives onto screen.
Posted on May 21, 2017
The Future of Advertising
Community, A TV series and Yahoo web series created by Dan Harmon, is comedy that takes a lot of satirical jabs of current society and its trends.
One of the main characters, Britta Perry, is strong-headed character who focuses her passions on sheltered animals, the homeless and starting protests to support the minorities in society. Throughout the seasons of Community, this character always expresses her hate for the government and their suppressions of human rights. Thus, in an episode in season 3, when she meets a man named “Subway” who was basically a corpo-humanoid that is meant to live as an embodiment of the franchise, she is immediately against the idea of submitting a human being for pure advertising. However, the two then begin an unlikely romance with each other which eventually leads to Subway losing his job. I understand this story plot sounds ridiculous, much like the rest of the TV series, however just as the storylines are nonsensical, they also have deeper messages that challenge and criticise the society of our culture. I am yet to hear of a person using their identity as a platform of advertising, but as mentioned in this week’s reading about a school allowing advertising to support their finances, who is to say that we, as a society, are not far off from creating our very own corpo-humanoids.
People are growing much more aware of advertisers and their intentions. I rarely hear of millennials feeling persuaded to purchase what they see on billboards and posters out in the streets, we almost always anticipate the ‘skip’ buttons on Youtube ads, and we are so dedicated to saving money, we are willing to put up with ads on Spotify instead of paying for Spotify premium. Living in the era of technology and ever-present media, we are learning to identify sponsorships and ads and ignore their messages. Advertisers are finding it harder and harder to pull an audience into buying their products, thus they are always trying to come up with new inventive methods to spark our attentions. Hence, the character “Subway” is presented as a hyperbolic warning of the potential path advertising may come to.