Posted on May 20, 2017
Week 11 Workshop
“Are You Paying Attention?” – A short audio piece created from Week 11’s Workshop activity to learn how to use Adobe Audition
This is my first ever audio piece edited using Adobe Audition. To my surprise, I got the hang of the general tools and such for the basics of audio editing, I mostly just allocated some time on this program to just explore and experiment what tools will help me manipulate the audio to my liking. For this activity with the prompt “Can I have your attention please?”, Sophia and I decided to take on a very abstract form to our audio piece in contrast to our rather documentary/narration styled Project Brief 4 audio pieces. We discussed with each other the idea that the new generations nowadays have lesser attention spans whilst also have the ability to multitask and take note of our wider surroundings. Relating way back to our first ever reading in regards to deep and hyper attention, this audio piece definitely focuses on the concept of hyper attention and the idea of taking in the motions of our surroundings. Hence, through this audio piece, I attempted to create a rather immersive soundscape for the listener to imagine themselves listening to someone talking and then falling into other attentions of their surroundings such as trains, other people talking, buskers, music. As I fiddled with the tools of Adobe Audition, I played around with fades and dissolves in between each audio pieces, as well as having the audio move from left to right channel and vice versa. For the ending, I hoped that the girl’s words “Are you even paying attention?” over a silent background really stands out in contrast to the build of background music that becomes very messy and blurry as the listener’s attention is flooded by all these different focuses. Thus, when the listener is finished with the piece, I hope that they can relate or at least understand the situation of feeling your attention slip away from a single focus and just falling into submission to the surroundings around us.
Posted on May 18, 2017
Guest Speaker, Ramon Lobato’s lecture
In Week 11, Ramon Lobato came in to discuss, as his title suggests, “Television, streaming and audience fragmentation.”
Lobato began with some surprising statistics of TV hours in Australia. With an average of 2.7 hours of broadcast TV viewing a day, 0.5 hours of online video viewing and only 25% of households subscribed to Netflix, it was very hard to believe these statistics when my eyes are quite practically glued to a screen 24/7. Especially after our past few weekly readings discussing teenagers’ attachment to social media, with the amount of videos on these social media platforms, surely it would be more than 0.5 hours. However, I guess that if there’s a percentage of Australians such as the millennials and post millennials who constantly watch videos online, in order to have that low average, there must also be a similar percentage of Australians of a different demographic who do not.
Further on into his lecture, Lobato then proceeds to talk about the ecology of television:
- Catch-Up (eg. SBS iview, Plus 7)
- Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD), (eg. Netflix, Stan., hulu)
- Transaction VOD, (eg. iTunes, Google play)
- Pay TV (eg. fetch TV)
- Advertising VOD (eg. Facebook, Twitter
- Informal (eg. PopcornTime, uTorrent)
Lobato raises the ambiguity of YouTube as it’s mostly of an AVOD ecology, however as YouTube has began a subscription option for “YouTube RED” it therefore, has become a sort of hybrid under SVOD too.
YouTube has become such a powerful social media company over the past few years, it truly is taking advantage of whatever it can to earn more money. Despite using it almost everyday, I have my own issues with YouTube’s evolution into becoming this money-making, advertisements shoved-in-your-face site, however, it seems to be working for its wide demographic of media sheep. Recently, YouTube has implemented a “10 minute revenue”, meaning if a video is longer than 10 minutes, this marks one of the algorithms to be pushed further in the search results, thus allowing more views on the video for the content creator, and more views for the ads. All of this results into a higher profit, therefore, many YouTubers make an effort to create videos atleast 10 minutes. However, I have definitely seen some videos that are only 5 minutes long, but leave a black screen to last an extra 5 minutes just so that they can fit the 10 minute mark. Many YouTube audiences have noticed this and create diluted, nonsensical content for 10 minutes just so that they can earn more money. Like most issues with the media nowadays, as soon as money becomes the main motivation, the quality of content begins to dissolve away. Thus, often videos that match the algorithm and create lots of money for YouTube keep becoming popular and keep getting pushed for views under recommendations, while the little guys on YouTube who may have more genuinely good quality videos are being pushed further out of the spotlight.
In the lecture, Lobato quotes from The Long Tail, written by Chris Anderson that states that “Netflix recommendations level the playing field, offering free marketing for films that can’t otherwise afford it, and thus spreading demand more evenly between hits and niches.” However, as this is such a complex issue to solve, the recommendation algorithm has its faults and dangers too.
“More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch you click”
Quoted from “The Filter Bubble”, written by Eli Pariser, Lobato raises the consequences of this recommendation system and its nature of reading, analysing and catergorising their audience. From a past reading, we’re already aware of how Google takes our information to categorize each of us through our web searches, emails, etc. And from this information, they can target specific advertisements and products to individuals for the purpose of money. Hence, although this recommendation algorithm on Netflix may offer support for the “little guy”, they could still exploit this system for other companies and industries that will offer them more money.
Posted on May 14, 2017
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Weirdness
Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is an experience described as a tingling, pins and needles sensation on the skin that most explain to begin on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. ASMR videos have become extremely popular across social media, especially YouTube, where even KFC created an ASMR ad with George Hamilton portraying Colonel Sanders.
The first time I heard of ASMR was when a friend described a specific ASMR video example of a ‘hair salon’ simulation. She explained that you just have to sit back with headphones, close your eyes, and listen to the hair dresser whisper very close to your ears and pretend to cut your hair. Severely creeped out, but highly intrigued, I went home and began to investigate this exponentially growing popular trend. I found many videos that were just interesting sounds like popping candle wicks, playing with slime sounds and even an ‘ear-cleaning’ sounding ASMR. There were also a lot of ‘roleplay’ ASMR videos similar to the hair dresser one, which seem to be the most popular type of ASMR videos. After just a few videos, I was able to point out the common characteristics that most of the popular ASMR videos had. These characteristics included microphones put to the maximum sensitivity to pick up the slightest crackle and lip smacking, and also microphones that isolated the left and right channels seemed to be favoured greatly. I personally found most of these ASMR videos quite disturbing as the whispering and ear violation was much too confronting for my taste, but some people seemed to be very responsive to these videos. Probably the most disturbing one I had come across was a video of a woman roleplaying a robbery, and she actually whispers blackmail and threats as she cocks a gun.
Watch at your own risk
Least to say, like most popular trends, things often escalate to the extreme and go way too out of hand. But, despite being someone who doesn’t find comfort in ASMR videos, I still understand the appeal, especially to the roleplay videos. Much like what we’ve been learning this week about the power of audio pieces, ASMR is another style of audio that audiences can use to escape from reality. As I mention in my Workshop Week 10 post, purely audio pieces allow the audience to utilise their own imagination to pull themselves into another world (much like reading novels) that video mediums cannot provide. There are a lot of video simulations where you follow a film through the point of view of somebody, but I don’t believe it’s as immersive as closing your eyes and allowing the audio to simply guide your imagination. Hence, as ASMR videos are so sensitive to enveloping the audience into their world, I can definitely understand why people would enjoy the pull out of reality.
In saying that, I’m going to finish this post with another video that’s from CollegeHumour, whom I believe are on the same page as my thoughts on ASMR.
Posted on May 12, 2017
Week 10 Workshop
Listening to the audio documentary, “My Lobotomy”: Howard Dully’s Journey
In Week 10’s workshop, I laid down on the classroom carpet and listened to the first twenty minutes or so of an incredibly compelling audio documentary of a 56 year old bus driver set out “on a journey to learn everything … about [his] lobotomy.” On his journey, he interviews the relatives and loved ones of those who had been subjected to the procedure, but also discusses his personal experience of undergoing the same procedure at just 12 years of age. He talks about how no one could tell he has had a lobotomy, only the fact that he is “tall and weighs 350 pounds”, but then his voice lowers and you can easily hear the emptiness and pain in his heart as he expresses how he feels that something is “missing from [his] soul” ever since his lobotomy. Switching between documentary-style narration and interviews, the audio piece has a sense of raw emotion from Dully’s narrated inner thoughts and the spoken words of those also affected by the consequences of lobotomies. As Dully expresses this unexplainable lodge in his soul that his lobotomy caused, he further talks about his regret for not confronting his parents as to why they subjected him to such a cruel procedure. So, when the audio piece transitions to Dully finally talking to his father about his lobotomy, as a listener, I held my breath as I felt so present in the moment of an emotionally personal atmosphere.
It was very interesting to listen to an audio piece that was predominantly voice. The other audio pieces I often listen to would mix things up and create soundscapes with music and sound effects, but “My Lobotomy”‘‘s use of narration and spoken word kept a very even pace through Dully’s journey of understanding the unfortunate event that has reshaped his life completely. I believe the content and context of the documentary’s subject was full of jewels and treasure, it didn’t need the extra garnish of fancy music and supporting sound effects. Hence, with the raw emotion behind such a sensitive topic to Dully and the other victims and families of the lobotomy procedure, this audio piece was definitely an eye opener to a different approach to audio documentaries.
Posted on May 11, 2017
Kyla Brettle’s Lecture
I am so glad to now have access to Brettle’s document on tips to putting an audio piece together. Looking through it, her advice seems mostly like common sense, but I never would have considered it without seeing the words in front of me. There are obvious things like using different kinds of music to emphasise a certain story element, or not being too obvious and cliche with sound effects such as using a passing train sound over someone’s narration of a train. However, what she calls the ‘Kyle Brettle’ method of laying out your full audio recording, listening to its entirety, and then cutting out the ‘juicy’ parts is definitely an editing process I will implement into my future audio works.
It truly was an awesome experience to hear from Kyla Brettle this week. Having little to no knowledge of the world of radio, she talked of her career with such experience and knowledge like it was air to breathe and this truly motivated me to delve deeper into the potential of radio. Similar to reading a book, audio pieces leave the audience much more room for imagination than content of a visual medium. I didn’t realise this before, but after listening to the various audio pieces during the lecture, I had a sudden understanding of the appeal to books and audio pieces; it is the lack of a human sense or senses that leave the audience room to make up for that absence with their own imagination. And a true genius at these mediums will use that to their advantage to create really amazing, mind-blowing pieces of work. We can have stunning visuals and CGI of magical words in feature films, but I believe that when they are laid out before our eyes, us as greedy human beings often don’t find that enough. This may sound very cheesy and cliche, but I believe this is because our imagination is infinite; we can dream worlds and come close to recreating them with our hands, but we won’t quite ever completely print our imagination onto tangible paper. Thus, when we as audiences are given an audio piece to listen to, we naturally close our eyes and let the audio simply guide our imagination into creating our own individual worlds. And I think that truly is a special moment all media practitioners should strive to contribute to our audiences.
Posted on May 6, 2017
The Networked Teens
Danah Boyd’s It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
Going through the reading, Boyd references her novel, It’s Complicated, and so I decided to look it up and have a little more read of the chapters we haven’t explored in this course yet. Almost immediately, Chapter 3 “Addiction: What Makes Teens Addicted to Social Media?” pulled me right in, ironically because it talks about social media pulling in users (Boyd mentions this is a psychological type of addiction called “flow”). This chapter basically discusses how much social media has taken over the lives of teens and have concerned many parents and guardians about the unhealthy addiction teens have with their glowing screens. However, like most cases of concern, there are complex arguments to the issue. I was one of those kids who had a very concerned mother who would lecture me every time she caught me staring at any screen for too long. “You’re wasting your time!” “Go do something productive!” “You’re like a zombie on that thing!” were just few of many exclamations she’d make in her feelings of concern for my wellbeing and social life. I told her many times that I wasn’t being unproductive, I was making plans with my friends and often using the internet for my homework. However, as she didn’t understand the potential of social media, she didn’t understand its benefits for me as a millennial. As Boyd discusses in this chapter, the negative reactions to social media are similar to the negative reactions of the rise of television and many other trends that the older generation did not understand. And like most of these scenarios, once the older generation begins to appreciate the new technology, only then do they start to lay off a little on the nagging. Now, my mum’s phone will not stop ringing with notifications from Whatsapp, and she often spends our lunch dates on her phone with me telling her to get off her phone. This isn’t to say that social media does not have the potential for harmful addiction, like most things, there is the bad and the good, it just depends how us as individuals can have that self control to use it for its benefits.
Posted on May 5, 2017
Workshop Week 9
Our discussion on our strengths and weaknesses
I’m really excited to work in a group with Joey and Ben. Unfortunately, as Ben is away, Joey and I did our best to brainstorm ideas that were more broad and general so that when we do catch up with Ben, we can all be on the same page. As I mention in this post, I think it’s quintessential that each group member has an equal say in the creation of our final product and has full understanding of the task and their job.
Just to document some of my discussions with Joey, we talked about what we thought our strengths and weaknesses were in this subject and wrote down a few goals that we hope to achieve by the end of Project Brief 4.
Joey and I were both able to get along well and easily understand our own individual ideas. We were mostly on the same page as we brainstormed ideas and it wasn’t difficult to combine our ideas and interests together to vaguely create a plan. We both agreed that our weaknesses were our lack of experience with audio recording and editing and our tendencies to procrastinate. Thus, in order to combat that, we have set goals throughout the next couple weeks in order to make sure we don’t leave everything last minute. Furthermore, we established a goal that we want our final product to sound as professional as any other well known radio show. Lucky to have access to good audio editing softwares, a mic and good advice from our tutors, we were confident and up to the challenge to create a clear, professional-sounding audio piece.
Whilst brainstorming, we decided that we wanted our project to explore the different types of relationships between media and its audiences. Joey suggested he’d start researching the theory behind current trends and memes and how that has impacted society today, whilst I decided to contrast with his research and explore the early theories of media influence such as propaganda and newspapers used during the World Wars. During our brainstorm, I told Joey how I enjoy making my media projects as creative as possible, but found it difficult to maintain a creative level whilst needing to express our research. Thus, after a bit of thought, I remembered Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, where he pranked his listeners as a halloween bit, but resulted in a nation wide mass hysteria. I remember from my early studies of media that this moment in media history has been studied with many theories applied to it in order to understand the power the media has over audience. So, Joey and I figured we could open with our own “university student” version of Orson Welles’ prank and use this as a spring board into our research.
Posted on May 5, 2017
We’re All In This Together
A few of my thoughts on collaborations
Don’t treat people like mushrooms… in the dark and in the poo
A quote from Week 9’s guest lecturer, Dr Rachel Wilson
Collaborations and group projects have always been a love/hate work type for me. Having chosen an artistic, creative type of work such as the media and arts, it’s very common for projects in school to be in groups. And without a doubt, to take media as a career, it is adamant to work in groups for productions and content creation. In my experience with working in groups, I live for those moments when there’s a gap in my ideas, and my friends come in like a saving grace and help tie everything together wholeheartedly, and vice versa. I know for certain that I’m not a genius creator, I’m more of an individual with a few okay to good ideas. Thus, when I can find someone who I can work on an evenly creative level, bouncing ideas off each other is like playing throw and catch without ever dropping the ball.
Though, as I am happy to say I have had many good experiences working in groups, I have most definitely also experienced bad cooperation in group projects. Most of the time, any dispute and conflict that happen is usually due to one person or another not being respectful and open-minded, which I believe are the key aspects each group member must have to ensure a positive and successful work group. Firstly, respect for each group member, yourself and the integrity of the project is key to having a successful collaboration, in my experience. In any group project situation, it is a guarantee that ideas will differ and other individuals will prefer to lead the team while others will like to sit back and follow along. Situations like these can turn ugly, but if each individual holds respect for each other and keeps an open, accepting mind for each other’s opinion, the group will be able to overcome any hurdles detriment to completing successful collaboration works. Just like Wilson’s quote, “Don’t treat people like mushrooms, in the dark and in the poo,” we need to understand that each of our group members are human beings too and deserve their own rights of opinion and a chance to be apart of the team.
Nonetheless, often the most amazing works are created from collaborations, from individuals with their own experience and ideas that combine to make a mass of extraordinary works that no single individual could make. Take for example the film trilogy, Lord of the Rings, that have become one of the defining universes of fantasy and magic in the 21st Century. The director, Peter Jackson, has proven his talent in bringing to life the universe of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels. By the third film, “Return of the King”, his co-producer and film editor, Jamie Selkirk received an Academy Award for Best Film Editing among the other 10 awards they were nominated for, including Best Director for Peter Jackson and Best Picture. Of course, it is clearly evident that each member of the crew of the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King were chosen for their high talent in their fields of work, and it is the collaboration of each of these talented individuals that has created this multiple award winning film.
As this is my first major group project at university with many other students I’m not so familiar with, I have my fears for the worst in this group project. But despite this, seeing all these amazing content in the media from films, music, novels, even the occasional youtube video, I really am encouraged to be part of something bigger and find like-minded individuals to make and create content to challenge and show off our individual talents.
Posted on May 1, 2017
reflection on PB3
I was much happier with Project Brief 3 than I was for Project Brief 2. Though, with that being said, there are still many things I wish to improve on.
The first improvement I need to make is the act of approaching people to ask them to be in my films. At first, I actually wanted to interview a 90 year old Slovenian lady who lives across my street. We’ve had tea together many times, but when I phoned her asking if I could interview her, she responded with a ‘no thanks’ and hung up on me. I don’t think she recognised me, so that could be a reason, but I just wish I handled the situation much better. Now I know for future documentaries, I need to clearly introduce myself and be very articulate with my purpose for the interview. In the end, I was very grateful to have found Aunty May to interview instead, and as we get along very well, the filming and recording process was quite a breeze.
On the same note of pre-production, I believe I need to have a more clear structure before I begin filming. It was a little difficult with Aunty May and her husband as they are not professional actors and most scenes were improvised (especially the B Roll), but there were many moments during editing where I wished I had filmed more of a particular scene or asked Aunty May to talk more about certain subjects. Having relied heavily on the editing to perfect my past projects, even with my photography projects, I definitely hope to improve my skills in trying to be more accurate during production and strive to make things more perfect at the beginning rather than just post.
Another really important aspect on my list of improvements is audio recording. The first time I shot the interview was a nightmare with the recording. I used a shotgun mic mounted on my DSLR and although the shotgun mic worked fine with the week 5 activity, the dialogue this time was way too soft and was almost indistinguishable with traffic sounds and static noise. Even when I tried to reduce the white noise through Audacity, it distorted everything and that’s when I knew that this audio was beyond repair. Luckily, I was able to reshoot the interview and for the second round of filming, I was advised to try using the lapel mic. As it was my first time, I wasn’t too sure how to use it, however, fortunately it worked like a charm and the audio turned out so much better than the before. I most definitely intend to use lapel mics for future documentaries. Furthermore, I understand that some people are concerned about the authenticity of interviewees’ answers when recording the second time, but with Aunty May, I noticed that she found it much easier to respond to my questions and was able to narrow down to those really good “golden moment” answers rather than waffling onto something else.
Overall, as this is my first experience making a documentary, my biggest goal was to be able to reflect Aunty May’s life in its purest form through this project. Before we began, Aunty May was very accommodating by asking how I would like to direct her and the shots, but I told her that all I want from her is to be comfortable and as natural as she could be. Even when I was filming the B Roll with her husband at the gardens, I told them to pretend I wasn’t there and just go on their date like they would on any other day. With this directing, I hoped I would capture the most genuine side of Aunty May and her husband’s life. So, I really do hope I was successful in that sense.
Posted on May 1, 2017
感恩 | Appreciation
感恩 | Appreciation from Tessa Chung on Vimeo.
May Lau talks of her life and the few hurdles she has overcome, including the most unexpected one: her husband’s heart transplant. She discusses the fear of losing him, but the overall gratefulness she feels of their second chance and how this experience has opened her eyes to appreciate life even more.