Today my group (Sandy, Tim) and I filmed our news report style artefact for Project Brief 4. We had booked 3 cameras and 3 tripods to create a more professional look, editing the different angles to make the show run smoothly as though in one take. This technique of different angles had a few issues; fire extinguisher in view of one shot, blurring when the camera is too close to the subject, etc. However, with three people it was easy to figure out solutions.

The space we chose was good (lighting, props) except it was not a private space and people were regularly walking past (out of shot). They did not come into view of the shot, and hopefully the sound interruptions will not be heard, or another piece of film can be used.

We did all of our filming today and plan on editing and working on the dossier in the next two weeks.

Institutions

• – terms from sociology
• – concern with organizing structures of society
• – social, cultural, political, economic relations
• – principles, values, rules that underlie these
• e.g. ‘marriage’ is an institution: why??
• Historical continuities
• industry
• Expectations –> values (monogamy)
• Rituals, symbolic
• Legal framework/regulatory
• Reproduces social relations/expectations
• Meta-institutional frame
• Romantic love- cultural narratives
• Widely accepted/practice
• Cultural ‘rules’
• Community/social recognition

I found this whole discussion very interesting, with everyone having a different upbringing, morals, opinions, thoughts, experiences, etc., also the concept of marriage being an institution; this is not something you may immediately link with the generally romance drenched word ‘marry’. Giving it the connotation of being an institution creates an ugly, industrial feel to a wedding, as though you are joining a club, a cult, a foundation. This is likely how a lot of people already feel about marriage, not a new concept or thought at all, maybe the reason I am the child of an unmarried once-couple.

Today we did another little group activity involving a big piece of paper and lots coloured pens (still my favourite kind). The discussion was about the characteristics of Facebook , what makes it a business, how it communicates, the role of it in society and lots of much better worded questions that i cannot remember because I decided to take a picture of the cat instead of the brainstorming.

In last weeks tutorial we were given a loaned audio recorder, the Zoom H2/N recorder, and were sent off in pairs with a sheet of paper and a mission to awkwardly record sounds in public. My pairing and I had some good ideas; we captured a strangers phone call, birds in a tree, a lot of silence from the library. However, we failed to set the MIC gain and instead adjusted the recording level, meaning almost all of our sound was inaudible. Should we have read the instructions more carefully? Listened more absorbedly to Rachael? One thing we should have done is to have listened back to the sounds after the first couple of recordings, instead of after an hours worth of red button pressing. So you could say this was a successful activity, successful in teaching us a lesson and giving us something to reflect on. This did help me when I used the recorder for my project brief, as I was aware of how much of a failure my audio would be if I didn’t set the MIC gain to something that wasn’t 0. So, thank you unsuccessful activity for helping me.

Consciously listening to one particular sound (including music, speech and sounds) is something usually done in two instances. In public nowadays you see numerous people walking around with headphones plugged into their ears, and 3 out of 5 people sitting on the train will be listening to something on their devices (80% chance this information is inaccurate). These people are actively choosing to block out the outside noises of people talking, cars driving past, the train as it thuds along the tracks; noises in general which most people will not pay specific attention to, and would prefer to listen to something of their choice; music, audio books, radio etc..

But when you actively listen to these sounds that our ears are subjected to everyday, it can be overwhelming. Right now, in my room, I can hear the cars driving past outside, my room mate’s TV show, the train boom gate’s warning sound, a bird outside my window, the keyboard as I type. It seems like too much noise to be able to concentrate in, too many types of sound to process and reject as my brain decides what to write. However, I m choosing to inactively listen to these sounds while I type, and to not concentrate on them and instead concentrate on my blog post.

When asked to recall past group projects and how they had worked and not worked and whatever else, the first thing that came to mind was a renewable energy project I did in primary school where we created some kind of hydroelectricity. One person in the group, however, decided that bringing some Barbies as the test dummies was enough of a contribution. Maybe this can be used as some kind of analogy; contribution does not include merely turning up on the day with something you already had, with no extra effort whatsoever. Of course, there is not always going to be that one ‘Barbie bringer’ in the group, and the pros of group work outweighs the cons.

Good

• diverse ideas
• inspiration
• rigour
• support
• speed
• sharing the workload
• ability to tackle bigger projects

Bad

• inability to listen to others
• imbalance of work and credit
• let down by people
• discomfort of opinion
• no compromise