We were properly introduced to the task of Project Brief #3 in this lectorial, which involves the marriage of both original recorded material and archival footage with the common goal of presenting a portrait of someone that we know. Given the past practical in which we were encouraged to explore the use of found footage, I am pretty nervous as that didn’t come together particularly well. Nevertheless, it sounds like an interesting task and the use of archival footage cooperatively with original material could make for a really interesting and layered portrait.

Given the chance to brainstorm our briefs, I particularly honed in on the obvious choice – good ol’ Mum, and immediately some plans came to mind as to how I could go about representing her. I feel that Mum is someone I know pretty darn well and could, more than anything, capture her essence well rather than her step-by-step history, which I feel is much more relevant with respect to the task.

The remainder of the lectorial was focused on the “practical” and “successful” ways to approach the reading of academic publications, with mention of techniques such as writing notes and highlighting as you read, skimming as a legitimate part of doing it ‘properly’ and the consideration of structure, which I found useful and suppose although it seemed fairly obvious I’d not really thought about as clearly before, so hopefully I can take some of these techniques and go and smash out some truly scholarly reading.

Today we were to present our second project briefs to the class. In presenting mine, as I found with the previous project brief, I was clearly able to identify what aspects I was proud of and what I was not – that is, what I had put enough time into and what I clearly hadn’t. People seemed to accept and enjoy the experimental nature of mine which was comforting as I wasn’t really sure how people would receive it.

There was a lot of variety in the class and different ways that people approached the expression of their identities which was really interesting to see. It gave me a bunch of new perspectives surrounding how identity can be represented and as a result of this eclectic series of presentations I think I found the real value in the task, which for me is understanding that we have a separate individual identity to the identity that others apply to them, that is, we perceive ourselves differently to how others perceive us, and thus given the opportunity to creatively explore ourselves, we are given the opportunity to create something absolutely unique.

While it wasn’t perfect I am still proud of what I produced for this Project Brief and hope to continue to produce even better material as the course continues.

“I went insect hunting
Lobotomised my sister’s new boyfriend
I became $10,000 in debt
I sold a mortar and pestle full of toenails to a geriatric Jew
I told my sister I loved her.”

The reading for this week, Blood in the Gutter – a really insightful comic by Scott McCloud that explores the human ability to synthesise fragmented elements of the world into cohesive wholes, was given more relevance with the discussion of editing in the lectorial today. While comic strips exist as a series of separated images, we are accustomed to stringing them together in a fluid narrative, which very much lends itself to the way in which we naturally accept editing in film and other forms of media.

Liam Ward described the process of editing not as fixing things but as deliberately breaking them – using the example that a sequence of two 30 second shots from a 24 hour reel of security footage would beg the question as to why those particular moments had been selected to be put together, which encourages the creation and discussion of meaning.

Ward also touched on the Kuleshov Effect, which I have now looked at in every class I have at uni so it really is pretty important. Originally Kuleshov pieced together various different snippets of footage with the same brief shot of a man somewhat neutrally facing the camera, and as people for the time (early 20th century) were unfamiliar with editing techniques, audiences insisted that the man was reacting differently to each image that preceded him. In this case, the act of editing itself is creating the performance, not the actor. Ward applied this effect in his presentation, cutting between an image of Game of Thrones’ Joffrey and Education Minister Christopher Pyne, where we can draw association in that both figures are generally quite unfavourably viewed.

The 5 line piece that I have included at the top of this post is the result of an exercise that allowed us to explore these ideas. Each line was separately written on different post-it notes, with no cohesion in mind, and the task was to simply rearrange these post-it notes into different orders and construct some sort of meaning. The result was a fairly disturbing narrative that, indeed, has me questioning the nature of my imagination.

In class today we found ourselves with the task of piecing together an edit out of public domain archival footage in the form of a short video to convey a certain idea/theme. I was given ‘movement’ for the exercise, and so began trawling through the masses of freakishly obscure footage in attempt to find an abstract way to represent movement.

I considered making the video a representation of the progression into the modern use and reliance on technology for movement, beginning with people walking and slowly moving into footage of the use of locomotives and automobiles with the intention that I could link them via graphic consistency. I found it difficult in the time however to find appropriate footage so I wasn’t ultimately able to piece together anything I feel is worth posting.

I did enjoy this class as I haven’t found any prior to be as hands on as this one was, and it gave me a chance to experiment with iMovie which I probably wouldn’t have done in my free time. If I can organise myself properly hopefully I can navigate Adobe Premiere for the third project brief and will be able to appropriately manipulate found footage to enhance the project.

Touching on copyright in the lectorial reminded me of past struggles – namely an ignorant 11-year-old Tim trying to upload an original animation to YouTube that ingeniously included ‘Happy Together’ made famous by The Turtles and consequentially being confronted with blaring notices of copyright infringement and denial to the upload.

This frustrated me at the time because, firstly, this animation was part of a series and there was demand within my primary school friendship group for this instalment to be uploaded, and secondly, ‘Happy Together’ was the perfect audio for this particular moment, and in no way did I think I would be able to find a suitable replacement. It was problems like this however that, along with my growing obsession with playing and producing music, prompted my progression into soundtrack work, which later enabled me to avoid this problem with short films I produced.

Although this did allow me to evade issues of breaching copyright, it instigated the necessity to look into and acquire copyright protection on my own material. Now when some ambitious little 11-year-old decides to shit all over the blood, sweat and tears that I’ve put into my precious work by including it in their E-grade animations I can have YouTube get nasty on them and hit them with the biggest infringement notices they’ve got.

In presenting my lo-fi media self-portrait I was able to understand what I was somewhat proud of and what I hadn’t put enough effort into by what I preceded each artefact with – whether I merely presented it for what it was and explained the intention behind it or whether I talked it down to lower everyone’s expectations. This helped me decide that I need to present my artefacts to someone before I go ahead and submit it to ensure that I am proud of them and don’t dread presenting them.

As I did present the aspects that I was proud of I noticed a theme of nostalgia surrounding them that I hadn’t consciously included. This seemed to be something that I naturally worked with well and have a connection with so it’s looking like it’ll be the main theme I run with for my second project brief.

We also began looking at editing and producing simple edits, reminding me that I need to acquire an editing platform with more capabilities than iMovie.

Without consciously attempting to incorporate ‘noticing’ the media around me into my weekly pursuits following the lectorial, it seeped its way into my mind fairly often. Looking through my own clothes I noticed that an enormous amount of my t-shirts are endorsing a product or some description, and probably about 95% of these shirts that I’ve purchased I have consciously chosen the pictured endorsement out of enjoyment of the design or for the novelty factor. I’ve also noticed that it’s bizarre how much a brand name dictates the cost of the shirt along with how fashionable it is – many plain white tees with a small print on one side of the chest will force you to fork out at least $30 more than the plain Target equivalent.

I’ve always acknowledged how crucial making use of the media is in promoting my band (Elk and Mammoth by the way, look us up on facebook and like and share xox), though I didn’t really properly acknowledge that social media is essentially the ONLY medium we need to really push promotion on. We run all of our merchandising and gig/recording/general information efforts across our various social media accounts along with the physical recordings themselves – even the organisation of gigs and events is done via social networking and email.

It’s amazing to see the level of dependency I place on the access to, and manipulation of, media – particularly social media – and even more amazing to realise how easily this can be overlooked.

This week’s prominent discussion revolved around the concept of ‘noticing’, with particular emphasis on the media’s intangibility and ubiquitous presence around us. As a result, we were shuffled off to Melbourne Central in groups to notice the instances of media occurring around us and list them, which to me seemed fairly pointless but a decent opportunity to meet some new people.

As the group of us sat at Melbourne Central we rapidly listed the examples around us; the sounding of mobile notifications, the brand names upon the chests of the hurried masses. We quickly discovered that this was an extremely simple task – which made it all the more interesting. The fact that we were so easily able to identify such a large quantity of instances of media occurring around us indicated the dependency of modern societal function on the use and presence of media. While this isn’t a difficult concept to grasp, it’s quite astounding to really think about and recognise. Well, at least for me.

And hey, actually met some people, so certainly can’t complain about the task.

This week, while particularly heavy on introductory information and basics, had me thinking about the nature of blogging and its potential as a means of connecting people. I’m completely new to blogging and have never been particularly been obsessed with any blogs (still yet to submit to the wonders of tumblr), nor have I previously acknowledged why they may be so easy to obsess over. The idea of collective masses honing in on someone’s life simply to keep updated on their day-to-day activities always seemed to be fairly bizarre to me.

But maybe that’s the charm of it all. It takes some pretty impressive networking and social skills to be able to accumulate a mass interest in content that would generally be mundane to most. People are drawn to things that they can relate to; seeing things they can recognise through a different scope. Blogs, I feel, are one of the most personalised and humanised forms of media, as they tend to be without agenda and simply cater to whoever is genuinely interested or entertained. They’re not monitored by media moguls or conglomerates, they’re created by people, for people.

Hopefully through creating and maintaining this blog I will be inspired to follow a number of blogs that catch my interest and consider creating more of my own to connect with more likeminded people.

This week we were given three separate presentations from guest speakers, the first being Anne Lennox who spoke to us about copyright. This was quite thorough and insightful, touching on many different areas of the topic such as fair dealings and rights of ownership, and it was relevant information for us to be considering as budding media industry professionals. It switched me on to the thought that perhaps it is worth pursuing copyright for some of my musical material.

Next up Kyla Brettle, who interestingly works with sounds, served a hot dish of wisdom or two – one gem I found to be of particular note was that we aim to “become one” with the technology that we use rather than to simply manipulate it, forcing us to engage more with what we’re doing in order to reach new worlds.

Finally, Paul Ritchard gave us the rundown of what’s expected of us within the course, largely focusing on the essentiality of organisation in media practice, which is absolutely something I need to work on. While I tend to conduct myself well on set and during production, it’s the pre-planning stages that I often suffer with so that’s something I hope to exercise and develop throughout the course.