Due to the borrowing of the Sony MC50 for Project Brief 3, it is only necessary to get a tripod as well because, let’s face it, we just can’t stand still enough to prevent any shakiness on camera. Therefore, I decided to use the tripod as well for my own DSLR and decided to play around with its video functions. I recorded a simple time lapse video of the sunset (or whatever’s left of it) from my apartment video. Please excuse the jerky movement midway through, I left the auto focus on and realise it was affecting the image later on.

Hope I’ll have more opportunities using the tripod to take not just time lapse videos, but dive into photography that requires a tripod, as there is so much you can do with a tripod that you can’t achieve if you were just shooting straight off from your hands.

Enjoy.

This week’s lectorial talks about Textual Analysis, to be quite honest, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Even now when I think back, it was such a blur being in the lectorial. Having chosen Cinema Studies for my contextual studies, I should have a good understanding on how to analyse texts, be it, audio, video, written or image. But no, I still find it a struggle to unpack and breakdown whatever’s presented in front of me. Some times I might wonder if I’m thinking or trying to hard when what I’m suppose to get is actually right in front of me.

Then again it might be the short Easter break we had that lasted for a week or so that got my brain a little mushy and lazy. Might take a couple more days for it to get fired up and getting its motors running at optimal level again. I was just breaking into a rhythmic pattern and routine for my day to day activities, attending classes, having lunch, heading to the library to finish up on weekly assignments and not forgetting the graded assessments, and then BAM, a short break and a slice of heaven. Back to lazy old habits of waking up in the afternoon, lazing around and getting nothing done, but minimal cooking and the dishes to get me through the day. Having said that, I did, however, spent the mid-semester break traveling around and Melbourne and to the Great Ocean Road, which I’ll leave it for another post.

No, I’m not complaining or going against the idea of having a mid-semester break, in fact, I love it! I just find it hard to have a start-stop, start again, kind of notion. Being thrown back into the bucket of work and daily routines again. Just have to adjust till I find myself comfortable and almost second nature. But by the time that happens, the winter break might just be around the corner. I definitely have to get used to having this start-stop thing otherwise, I’ll have a struggle throughout my duration of the programme.

Anyway, I digress. So far the only thing I took away from the lectorial for Textual Analysis is, there may be more than meets the eye in terms of information and messages that is being conveyed to the audience. For example, we were given a picture from Brooks Brother advertisement of a man in blue shots and what appears to be a boy in mid air almost landing into a pool of water, and we were asked to analyse it to see what kind of message is the ad trying to convey. At first glanced, it seemed like it was almost contradicting to see how happy the older man seemed like he tossed the young boy into the water with smiles on both of their faces. Something just didn’t connect right there in my head, but due to the text available on the side, it states something like, “You can feel the difference”, and that gives more context to the image. From what I gathered, it’s trying to say that you have confidence to jump into the pool with your clothes on because of how comfortable the cotton from Brooks Brothers delivers, therefore you wouldn’t have the barrier of jumping into the pool with your clothes on.

Another point I gathered was the amount of blue used throughout the image. I would assume blue is the corporate colour for Brooks Brothers from their logo and insignia. Not only the subjects in the image were in blue themed clothing, but the awnings and pool umbrellas took on blue and white stripes too. And not forgetting the blue of the swimming pool, which is more of a given than anything else, whether it was edited in post to make it even more blue is a different question.

I realised that I am able to pull all these out from the image, but I’m not sure what to do with it, or make a main conclusion or even write an analysis out of it. I guess I would have to go back to the reading and lectorial notes and just get at it until the light bulb above my head glows bright. But for now, I might have other things on going that might hold a higher priority such as Project Brief 3, and other assignments from other courses.

This week’s workshop we were assigned to run out with a Zoom H2N, a handheld recording device with a built-in microphone that has different stereo miking positions, which I thought was pretty neat. It was my first time using a Zoom microphone, but it was user friendly, almost like second nature.

We went out in pairs to record ourselves interviewing one another on different topics and I decided to talk about the RMIT library where I frequent a lot if I’m not in class or at home. Part of the exercise was to record ambient sounds as well, so my buddy and I went to a balcony on the third floor of building 80 and just hit the record button, hoping it’ll pickup the sounds of the Melbourne CBD. Then we came back to class to transfer the sound files to our laptops and started editing on a digital audio workstation (DAW). It was recommended that we used Adobe Audition, but I was more comfortable working on Logic Pro X, hence decided to go along with that. Would like to log on to Lynda.com to find out how to use Adobe Audition in future though.

Anyways, after spending a good hour or so editing the waveforms and adjusting the levels, here it is. I decided to cut it down to under a minute as I found it quite cringe worthy towards the end. Challenges I faced was cutting out parts where I may have cursed due to running out of things to talk about. Overall, was a good exercise refreshing my mind on how to use Logic and was great fun being an interviewer and an interviewee.

This playlist consists of songs that I have composed over a period of time and figured that it would be appropriate to use for this particular assignment, as I believe that they best represent me.

I figured that this 6 pictures would pretty sum up almost everything that I enjoy doing during my free time. 6 pictures isn’t a lot, but I guess this is a good indication of my interests and maybe just a bit of my personality.

Although some might be pretty straight forward, others might be a little hard to guess. However, I believe that you shouldn’t let someone know a little too much about yourself before you actually get to know that individual with the aid of time.

During this week’s practical we were asked to run down to the streets of Melbourne to capture what we would think best describes or signifies a “Melbourne Moment”. 10 minutes were all that we were given to leave the room, get out of the building, hunt for a significant moment, snap a picture, and head on back to class. At the end of it all, we had to email the picture to our tutor and she would make a collage or a photo gallery of it on her blog.

Just as I was leaving the room and into the lift, my mind started brainstorming ideas of what best represents Melbourne. Being such a diverse and metropolitan city, so many things can signify that special “Melbourne Moment”, but would it be unique to Melbourne? A few thoughts that came to mind were the trams in the city, bicycles and the dedicated cycling lanes, people just relaxing on the grass patch just outside the state library, or even (being the tennis fan that I am) capturing Melbourne Park, the home of Rod Laver Arena where many great tennis matches were held and also many more great live events took place.

In the end, I decided to go with the bicycles for simple reasons. One being how many cyclists I see on the road everyday. People cycling for various reasons, cross training, commuting, exercising, or just for the fun of it. Being an avid cyclist myself back home, most people either fall in separate categories, either you cycle or you don’t. However here, people do it to get to work, to go to school, to train for their next cycling event. Adding to that, the roads, weather and maybe people, makes it so conducive for doing so. I simply admire just the vast number of people choosing cycling as their mode of transport daily. Just makes me feel like getting on a bike to join them.

As the saying goes “A picture paints a thousand words”, however for this instance, unfortunately the picture I took on my phone, does not justify how much cyclists and their bicycles has been so intricately woven into being that “Melbourne Moment”.