Alas, the end is here. Another semester down, and this is actually my final semester of uni. What a journey it’s been.  

I think I can safely speak for most of us from Thinking in Fragments that we have come a long way from week #1 when Hannah asked us to find an online screen production, and majority of us just came up with Youtubers, or people famous on social media. Little did we know how vast and diverse online screen production covers, and beyond.

Project: Time Out

At this stage, I think we have made it clear what our project work is about and what it aims to do, so I won’t dwell on that. I’d like to point out, however, we approached making this project in a relatively experimental way. I feel like the uses of “glitch” in our project has become like a recurring theme even in our Assignment 3. There was no intention of using the glitch from during our pre-production discussions, however, it was only during the post-process that led me to experimenting with such effects to enhance our theme of isolation, hence delivering and cueing the mood and emotion.

I’ve been asked by my fellow peers on how I went about doing the glitch effects on Premiere, as well as changing the screens of the classroom to our own clips for our “Classroom Scenario”, “2nd Perspective”, where the screens glitched out and started playing fragments of our subject’s memory. Therefore, I’ll leave the Youtube tutorials at the end of this post for anyone who might be interested in using them for their future projects. Premiere has proven many times to be a very powerful editing software, and there are certain cheats/tricks you can get away with, without bringing it into After Effects where it may get a little more crazy/complicated.

Taking it one step further, in order to align our poster with our “glitching” theme, I decided to employ a glitching exercise I did for another elective. The process is fairly simple, first opening a jpeg file in TextEdit, and a whole bunch of codes would appear in the TextEdit. This, as specified by Manovich, is the computer language for it to interpret and then translate into pixels that form the actual image that we open in Preview or whatever application (ie. Lightroom, Photoshop…). By deleting, copying, pasting, and more deleting, it slowly creates, adds, subtracts artefacts on the image, hence a glitch. This process might be a little time consuming and aimless, but after a few tries, you slowly get a hang of what you’re deleting and which part of the image are you actually going to glitch.

Media Event

Our media exhibition went well. Though, not quite how a lot of us expected it to be. Personally, I felt that it was a little disorganised, as most of the people started leaving the moment they’ve already experience the first group’s presentation. They would not come back for the next few groups’ presentation, thus not experiencing their project work. That said, I realised that most of the people who do come into our space asked more general questions relating to our studio as a course, rather than our specific project work. Having to think on our feet, we tried answering them with the aid of our project work, but not to the extent of them experiencing the entire intended duration of our project. We did manage to gather a few feedback from those who actually clicked and interacted with our online screen media. I guess we could have done more on our part on planning what we can do during our time slot with the space. And this really made me realise that not everyone has the same attention span, nor do they have the same interests/ideology, or in other words, everyone is different and have their own opinion. This is, after all, our first time exhibiting our project to an opened audience where they could literally just pause, get up, and go, instead of being in a classroom environment. So the one thing I can take away from this is that the content, and  the delivery is still what sells to viewers.

The Course

Thinking in Fragments has really opened my mind to new media, particularly new media and screen production. As I mentioned earlier, my understanding goes as far as opening a Youtube account, and uploading content online. But now I start to breakdown every media text I consume, where it’s embedded, who’s hosting it, what’s the source, what’s the aim of putting it online, and so much more. We also looked into having multiple-narratives, and non-linear narratives. This can be applied to film studies as well, whenever I watch a film and I get bored, I’ll start wondering that maybe the film is not about having a narrative, start, middle, and end, maybe it’s about evoking or prompting something, maybe I’m meant to feel like that by the film. And it goes on to other art forms as well, music, painting, photography, why an artist creates this work, not just to please record labels, or exhibit at art galleries, maybe they’re just trying to express or emote something through their art.

Questions

Some questions posed to us by Hannah on the last lesson in Week #12 that I’d like to address, and maybe leave behind.

–Limitation of online media making?

We definitely struggled with this as a group at the beginning of Assignment 3. We were worried that people would not get what our project is about. And that’s the thing, one of the limitation is, we can’t control what people think, feel, or do. They are very much entitled to their own opinion, mood, and feelings. A keyboard warrior can go on ranting about how much he dislikes the latest Avengers film, doesn’t mean that he is going to be heard, or his opinion would influence the next Marvel film. What we can control is the content we put out, and how we present it to people. Whether it’s boring content, if done in a fun way, can be entertaining. OR vice versa. The real limitation here is ourselves, doubting our capabilities as media practitioners or content producers. What’s really holding us back, be it technical competency or just lack of knowledge. If that’s the case, it’s time we brought ourselves into this new world, maybe branding it, “New People” 2.0

-How do we make engaging online content? 

To me, content is always going to be there, someone somewhere has probably thought of it before, and it might have been done a thousand times by many different people across the world. It’s how we package it together, and delivering it to the user that makes the difference. With technology advancing, Live streaming, VR, AR, 360 cameras, and more, there’s really no limit to what content producers can do with the tools we have.

Youtube Tutorials

ENJOY!