Author Archives: Alec Wilson

Declutter of my blog

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Quick note not everything at this time is in their right categories and there might be double ups

Today i decided to take a few steps towards the future of my blog. In the workshops each week, we usually talk about the usability of our own blogs. For example adding tag Clouds to our blogs, or even the positioning of widgets. Up until now my blog was to represent the lo-fi qualities of our projects. Now that there is a heightened emphasis on the visual qualities of our projects, my Blogs visual qualites must change.

This was a procrastination changing the theme of my blog dont get me wrong (it took an hour, much longer actually), but i actually feel like it suites the web and now what i write will be matching the style of the blog.

Details:
Theme – Superhero
Background – Artwork by Giandomenico Carpentieri Italy (graphic artist and curator)
tumblr_mgxa5c075K1qzbl72o1_1280Sidebar – I added a sidebar for ease of access. Now every post is categorised
Tag cloud – Still a work in progress, from week 7 onwards i will update it
Bookmarks – need to get rid of some
yep.

It now looks more professional than the previous fluro writing and the tilling of the man in the ghost costume
tumblr_mvnfhcchtk1ree4l2o2_r1_1280RIP GHOSTMAN

Audio editing reflection of Project 3 ‘Head Trauma’

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This is a continuation of my reflection but focuses on the problems i had with audio editing.

Audio quality is a very important element in any video production, especially documentaries with interviews because they rely almost entirely on the clarity of speech.

The first problem i had with audio was at the recording location. I recorded the atmos track and noticed there was a small amount of noise despite it being a very quite room. I knew i could fix this in audition so dismissed it. I wasn’t  using a Zoom H2n and i should have borrowed one, but i thought using a friends new Rode shotgun mic would work just fine and cut most of the noise out.

When actually editing the audio I quickly realised the kerfuffle I was in. I captured a ‘noise print’ from the atmos track, then deducted the noise using the ‘noise reduction’ tool in Audition. Unfortunately by doing this it also cut out a lot of the harmonics and made the audio the sound as if it was being listened to though a long tube (like heavy compression on the internet). I applied a few different EQ’s (echoes as well) to beef up the low and high frequencies but it had minimal effect.

Screen Shot 2016-04-19 at 4.08.26 PM

As you can see in the above picture, the top right red audio wave was the before noise reduction, underneath is the is after reduction. The purple speckles have been totally removed giving ‘clean’ audio.

So i decided to hide the lost harmonics using music. I had always had the intention of using music to build the sequence but now it was even more important for ‘fixing’ the mediocre interview recordings.

Firstly i placed two music tracks (one ambient) underneath the entirety of the film. The music was integral to the pacing of the video as well as the delivery of the interviewees speech. As a result it would be hard to understand everything that was said on the first and second viewing of the film. I picked up on the illegibility while editing but couldn’t see the extent of it because I had been working with the same audio of many hours.

I did test the audio with headphones on and off  but i didn’t find the right balance between them. I could have added subtitles to the bottom of the video but it would have taken the audience out of the film instead of immersing them.
Reflecting on this project i wish i had of borrowed the Zoom h2N. In future projects i will record on two audio devices just so i have a backup recording

 

 

Head Trauma – Reflection – Project 3

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https://www.mediafactory.org.au/alexander-wilson/2016/04/19/head-trauma-project-3-documentary

In my last reflection I said I wanted to pull away from lo-fi aesthetics ad themes. I always had this intention. Now with Project 3 completed I feel like I have succeeded in making something a bit more beautiful.

So how did the portrait turn out? Pretty good.
I was happy overall and with the general flow of the film. It does have a certain momentum throughout. It has distinct peaks. It has a resolution. A climax as well. But one thing I will take away from this is a new profound respect for people who create documentaries. It’s bloody hard, tedious and tiresome. I spent so long going though the footage, cutting and positioning them to make sense of what I actually had.

Cuttings the easy bit. The hardest part is finding the best clip, out of the many. What makes it harder is that I have a particular OCD (self diagnosed but not that serious) with this kind of stuff I HAD to make sure I had the right piece of footage. I would often lose things throughout the premiere timeline and have to skim though every sound bite until I found the one that’s in my head.

Another thing I found hard, which I assume everyone else was experiencing, was trying to fit the story in 3minutes. I believe this is impossible to achieve (in most cases) if the story is to maintain its integrity. There were really important aspects in Ed’s journey that I couldn’t fit in. While the portrait still holds together, if I just had another minute of runtime the whole vibe of the video would be very different. But because there was such a hard constraint it forces your to decide what’s actually important, and what isn’t.

Seperate reflection on the audio composition

One thing I think I did well on the video was the incorporation of multiple storylines. There’s the story of the fish in the dirty tank then to the clean tank at the end, symbolising Eds positive outlook and reflection on the traumatic event. There’s the storyline of the invincible man which complements Eds story;

Zapped with electricity -> Eds seizure and coma

Waking up -> Ed Waking up

Confusion when waking up -> Eds confusion of the Clay woman

Indestructible man being helped to the bed -> Ed realizing the severity

I feel like harmony and closure of the plot was complimented thought this process.
I’m actually really interested in dream sequences so deciding to interview Ed was a no brainer (Disclaimer Eds also a good friend). For my VCE media video I tackled similar concepts of consciousness but because this is a real story I had to stick to it. I filmed all the B-roll in 60fps so in post-production I could slow it down to give it the ‘dream’ aesthetic. Fading the dark shots over each other and applying blend modes created some great transitioning. The RGB split represented Ed slowly falling into the coma. On all the shots I also added a blurriness to further the dream aesthetic

I purposefully didn’t show Ed talking till the pace shift (where the music changes). I wanted the audience to feel as though they were watching a story unfold. Then forced them into current time by showing Ed now, talking to the camera. I only revealed darkened glimpses of Ed in the bathroom to heighten feelings in the pace shift. I do worry that some of the narration is hard to understand and hear properly.

This project went a lot smoother than the last, mainly because I had to organise the interview at least a week before the deadline. I slowly chipped away at it. Although I spent all of yesterday working on this I am very happy with the outcome.

Collaboration and Good Teamwork

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“Groans”
Rachel raised a suggestion that most people in high school would ‘groan’ when hearing they have to do a group assignment. I love collaboration and have always loved it. In primary school, collaboration could be both the best and the worst. I had a partner id always go with (he was a good friend). Id end up doing most of the work which i found quite annoying. But at the same time i got satisfaction form it knowing that i had created something so good that it was at the level, or if not higher, than people who were in a good healthy working group.

When working on small scale projects it is very easy for one person to do  the whole thing. But obviously this pattern could not continue.
Jump a few years, High school Media year 10 elective. Group work was always fun because it was a bludge. We would make the worst, but best videos because of their sheer stupidity. The other reason why theses videos worked so well was because each member of the team had the same goals and motivations to work together.

What made our process of collaboration so good was that it didn’t matter how stupid the idea was. We would test it and if it didn’t work, we’d scrap it. This meant that no idea was a bad idea. Through this creative process we could share and evolve ideas with minimal criticism and usually build the weaker ideas onto larger ideas.

Collaboration: Alliance, partnership, participation, combination, association, concert; teamwork, joint effort, working together

Continuing on this idea of good teamwork. To be a good collaborator you need to understand your strengths and weaknesses. In ‘One flew over the over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) realises the team can capitalise on Chiefs height (a strength). He places him underneath the basketball hoop so when someone passes Chief the ball he can reach up and dunk it. He can also do the opposite for when the opposition is shooting, he can stop them from scoring

His strength is his height, while his weakness is emotion or speech. McMurphy This is one of my favourite examples of teamwork in film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WR_hisHKlI

Avant-garde web resource Ubu: I now feel the sun

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Im genuinely very happy I drifted though the internet to find Ubu.com

Last week i ‘soundhounded’ (pretty much shazamed) this song from a mix on soundcloud.  I re-listened to the song just now Tully – I feel the sun. I wanted to learn more about this band so i went on wikipedia. Tully were an Australian Progressive rock group in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
After skim reading though the wikipedia page i found that they had “close associations with Sydney underground media collective UBU”. I wanted to find out more about the “psychedelic light show” UBU created for Tully.

So i search what Ubu is and it was “an experimental film-making collective based in Sydney that operated from 1965 to around 1970”. Around this time i had been down teh rabbit hole for at least 20minutes. Cut to 40mins and i’ve seen a few of their experimental films and read a bit more about them.

QUICK DIGRESSION POST 1

Then i found though google Ubu.com ( or ubuweb.com)  where i would spend 30minutes finding more and more stuff which led me to further and further places. I feel like Ubu will be a valuable source in the near future because its pretty much an encylopedia of Avant-garde film, audio, performance, conceptual art, poetry and much more. I need to explore this website a bit more but will be making frequent posts on interesting things i find.

 

QUICK DIGRESSION POST1: Noticing Media (music)

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Digression in relation to Avant-Garde Web resource Ubu: i now feel the sun

A quick comment. This year i’ve started to actually appreciate Australian media more and more. The more i actually ‘NOTICE’ the media, the more i see how saturated we are by American influence. Recently i’ve been stumbling upon Australian music groups from the 70’s and 80’s (such as ‘Tully’ and ‘Flash and the Pan’) that are quite ‘underground’ (for someone whos grown up in a completely different era) and really quite interesting. You only hear John Farnham-eque songs on the radio but you never hear these for obvious reasons. While these are more ‘new wave’ they are actually kind of enlightening in their originality compared to music these days. Im not the type of person who says “i wish i lived in the _____”, and i do love current music, but its just the simplicity and progressive qualities of some of these songs from the early 70’s to mid 80’s that and so ‘original’.

Im going to explore Australian Media under a tagging system

Blurb, Still and Title shot for Production 3

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Blurb:

After having a warm bath to soothe his pulsating headache, Ed Rickards collapses on his bathroom floor. 3 days later he wakes up with no memory of where he is or who the people were at his bedside.


Still shotThis photo was taken before the interview took place. I made sure to place the interviewee in the right side of the frame as it formed an asymetrical balance to the background elements

TitleA screenshot from the Finished Film. I applied a blend mode on the fish tank so when overlapped with the interview photo, would cause saturation of specific areas

Selected Listening N°7: Domina – You Got My Soul (1984)

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https://youtu.be/24wmymrUU1I

Recently i’ve been listening to a lot of ‘club’ music from the 70’s and 80’s (disco music pretty much). This song is classified as Italo-Disco because
1. It was made in Europe (Italy)

2. It features electronic sounds, drum machines, catchy melodies, vocoders, overdubs, and heavily accented English lyrics

I found this song on the radio station ‘Beats in space’ but i didn’t know its name. Shazam didnt recognise it so i had to go though the arduous process of deep internet searching. I finally found it.

Things ive noticed:
The vinyl costs $100 USD so its a reasonably rare/wanted
The track really reminds me of the song A real Hero by College & Electric Youth.
I really love this song

Narrative structure – PB3 – Currently editing the footage

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    1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ (Robert McKee) of your portrait?
      So far I’m framing the participant (Ed) in a situation which he had no control in. I can kind of shape him as a survivor as he had a 1/10 chance of dying. I can also shape him as a reformer because he has looked back and re-evaluated his life and his memories. If I unpack his story carefully I will be able to have distinct zone where these ‘controlling ideas’ are evident.

    1.  How is your portrait film structured?  (Remember there might be multiple forms of structure employed)  E.g. Discussion and depiction of an event or process? A Journey? Use of voiceover narration? Other?
      This will be both a journey narrative and a voiceover narration. I’m going to make it so that it seems like the participant is just narrating the video but at the end finally show him in motion in an interview setting. I’m going to make it so there are three (or four) zones. The introduction (before the title reveal) will have a sharp statement to attract the audience to his story. The second zone will explain how the interviewee lost his memory. The final sequence will be a reflection of what happened. It will show how he lives on.

    1. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee? (e.g. What are you saying through them and/or human nature, human folly, or noble human inspiration?)
      Through the interviewee, I want to emphasis to the audience how fragile life can be, or show how simple problems such as a headache, can turn into a life or death situation. Most importantly I want the audience to sympathies with the interviewee and connect with him. Most people wouldn’t have been in his situation but everyone has family and memories which are precious. His family could have lost him and he could have forgotten his family.

    1. How is your portrait being narrated? Why? How does it affect the structure?
      The interviewee narrates the majority of the portrait. BUT friends and family have told most of the information to him because he was unable to remember what happened. For this reason he has multiple perspectives and conflicting views. I will have to be careful how I structure the narrative so it makes sense. Showing the interviewee talking at the end will also give the video better structure because it make it look as if it is current time, looking back on his experiences (which were narrated).

    1. What role will the ‘found footage’ play in your portrait? For example, reinforcement? Ironic counterpoint? Contrast? Comparison? Other?
      The found footage I will definitely compliment the narrative. I will use footage from ‘Dead men Walk’ and ‘The indestructible Man’, which obviously work well with the theme of the documentary. I will get footage from when they are creating the indestructible man such as the electric bolts followed by a shot of the indestructible mans head to represent the seizure and the change his brain is going through. When the indestructible man wakes up, the narration will also be talking about waking up. the footage will act to visualise the audio narration.

    1. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point?
      I think the portrait will have at least two or three turning points (if that’s even possible in three minutes). Like I said earlier I there will be a very abrupt sentence at the start of the film which will entice the audience into the narrative. They will know there will be a dramatic turning point somewhere. I think the main drama will come from the coma sequence and the waking up sequence where the interviewee doesn’t remember who anyone is.

    1. When does this turning point happen  in your portrait and why? At the beginning? At the end? Two-thirds through?
      Id like to think that there will be various turning pints in the portrait. The centre one, which is when he falls into and out of a coma will be in the middle, or 2/5th of the way in. Obviously the Ed is still alive because he is narrative, so, being that this event happened in the middle, will make the audience want to watch right though to the end to find out how he has progressed.

    1. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum?
      The portrait will gather momentum from the start as the audience is plunged into “I didn’t know who my Mum of dad were” or a narration a long those lines. I’ve chosen three songs with will lift the audience into each narrative zone. The songs have no words but they are constantly evolving with the narration. The pace of the narration will also be in time with the music so its not like I’ve just chucked music over narration. The momentum will also be maintained via thoughtful planning of the narrative. I don’t want to sell the candy too early so I will have to pace each zone into separate climaxes.

    1. Where will your portrait’s dramatic tension come from? The gradual exposition of an overall situation? A volcanic, climactic moment? An impending change or crisis? The contrast between what the interviewee talks about and the found footage?
      The dramatic tension will build from the first words as previously said (I don’t think its necessary to talk about them again). I will throw the audience into the situation. Each of the two or three peaks will give the portrait tension. the found footage will compliment the narration. I will select clips that demonstrate emotions of fear, curiosity or ‘awakening’.

    1. Does the portrait have a climax and/or resolution? Outline them.
      I feel like the climax and the resolution will mash over each other in the end. Every documentary needs a resolution and without a resolution, the climax will be crummy.  Climaxes usually happen just before the end but i hope to have a few throughout the 3minutes