There aren’t many careers in the media that don’t involve collaborating with someone. Our lectures believe that collaboration in this program is a skill set that can be learnt and there are specific practices and templates that can assist our collaboration skills.

Here are some cases of good and bad collaboration.

BAD

• You do all the work other people get credit for it.
• You don’t feel comfortable expressing your opinion
• You feel outnumbered
• You cant reach a compromise – the process either gets steam rolled or comes to an impasse

GOOD

• Shared ideas/ solve problems – more heads better than one
• Inspiration – when you are able to bounce off each other
• Rigour – having a stronger vetting process to evaluate ideas and approaches
• Support – having someone there to catch you when you fall
• Maintain focus/drive – it makes you more responsible
• Speed – can get project done faster – more hands
• Can tackle BIGGER projects

I’ve had many good and bad collaboration experiences… one time a group member wasn’t pulling their weight and began dragging us behind in a particular area of the shoot. This resulted in us still shooting B-roll on the day of its deadline…Absolute nightmare. On the other hand I had a group pitch for a short film once and we managed to communicate our ideas across effectively and received approval to shoot the film.

Looking forward to collaborating on projects this semester!

Today’s class had a lot to do with this weeks reading. We were introduced to Lee Bobker’s three elements of filmic composition.

1. Placement of people and objects within the frame
2. Movement of people and objects within a fixed frame
3. Movement of the frame itself

“Composition in film is unlike composition in any other visual art. The key is motion. Because no frame is exactly like any other frame, the image changes constantly, and the director and cameraman must exercise control over it at all times.”

Our exercise was to shoot a sequence of two people meeting, shaking hands then parting.

We found this extremely awkward to shoot so we decided to emphasise the awkwardness and this is what we came up with…

https://vimeo.com/124508465

The completed advertisement I made for the up and coming Architecture company – Brainchild
https://vimeo.com/123488049

I just got out of a Skype lecture with Anna Broinowski the Sydney based director and writer, known particularly for Forbidden Lie$ (2007) the documentary investigating accusations that “Forbidden Love” author Norma Khouri made up her biographical tale of a Muslim friend who was killed for dating a Christian.

I found this documentary one of the best I’ve seen and it was amazing to hear Anna give us an insight into what went on behind the scenes.

She is such an interesting and inspiring character… Something she said had a huge impact on me and it think will certainly have a long lasting effect on my work.

She told us about the third eye she has, that sort of floats above her as the cameras are rolling…She said when someone is screaming at her right in the face she’s thinking ‘is this blowing out the sound level, have I got enough battery for this’ …all the while the third, rational eye doesn’t allow what the persons saying to have an affect and let her be broken down. Not sure if this makes any sense but its definitely something I’ll be conscious of in the future.

Speaking of future work, project brief three was revealed yesterday. A self-portrait on someone we know. I have some ideas already and will be trying them out soon on someone I have in mind.

I’m interested in playing around with the 70-30% found footage spectrum we have to adhere to. Keen to start testing the limits of what kind of meaning, emotion and communication the found footage can offer. Start splicing together bits of celluloid… thinking of the found footage as a kind of ancestral lineage…orphaned footage… emphasising the contrast…letting disjointed things be brought together through the editing practice giving it a kind of metaphorical enallage.

Rachel gave an interesting example…say there’s some old historical footage of how not to chop your hand off with a piece of machinery, what is interesting to us now is the trams going past in the back ground…the context is ignored, it has an evolving meaning. That’s what we have to do. We have to have a particular attitude to the kind of material…use it in different ways…creative appropriation.

Bruce Conner’s video A Movie is a 1958 experimental collage film in which he cuts together snippets of found footage, taken from B-movies, newsreels, soft-core pornography, novelty short films, and other sources…It has a kind of political edge to it in terms of using the randomness to re-contextualise and subvert the footage, swapping back and forth between cowboys chasing native Americans and then the opposite. Cool stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FMjBtvsx2o

Another example below I found really effective and emotional…will definitely try incorporating some techniques into my own clip.

https://vimeo.com/77062487

https://vimeo.com/123602356

The driving force behind my self-portrait is the conviction that a person’s interiority can be articulated visually through what surrounds them. The ideas I had for this video started as a “living collage” in my head, which in turn became my working reference. I wanted to bring disparate images together to form a new and cohesive whole – an intersection of environment and identity, capturing my life which recently feels like a fresh start…new city, new home, new friends, new university and ultimately ‘new beginnings’.

Making this video made me realise I have a lot to learn about how to effectively communicate my ideas. I believe that someone’s surrounding environment can, conversely, point to or even reveal what might otherwise be invisible in his or her personality. I love entering a house of a person whom I know little about and slowly get a sense of who they are through what I see. So in terms of editing I tried to cut as much elements as possible (furniture, music, food) to serve and enhance the representation of me. I have noticed now that this is possibly a bit overwhelming and perhaps having a more simplistic approach would be more effective.

Having a particular rhythm to the video I felt was essential. I enjoy editing to an audio track and feel it furthers the constructive engagement of interpretation and meaning.

I tried to edit together shots that symbolise the things that I have strangely missed whilst being overseas for so long (cooking, hanging clothes on the line, bike) and the fact that I am slowly re-adjusting to having these things back in my life.

I also chose to shoot myself building my bed out of crates to symbolise my financial situation, my need to rebuild and to re-examine my priorities. It demonstrates that with this change in lifestyle I need to be driven, devoted and the most productive version of myself.

I found that although this video may seem to some extent be scattered and difficult to interpret, the meaning and theme still comes across effectively. I believe I showed my ability to integrate all of the four elements of media I created into a smooth and consistent edit, illustrating a small part of my story.

Editing an advertisement for the up and coming Architecture company – Brainchild

Full version coming soon….

Last night I went to a public forum at Deakin Edge where a number of speakers were discussing Indigenous visual representations in Australia’s architectural and design landscape. The discussion centred around the recent unveiling of the 31-storey portrait of Wurundjuri leader and elder William Barak in the balconies of the new white apartment building that sprung up next to RMIT.

The news of the portrait provoked widespread social media commentary both for and against. At times the discussion became quite heated particularly between Linda Kennedy a recent graduate of Melbourne Uni and writer of the blog page – Future Black and Howard Raggart one of the architects of the William Barak apartment building. It was impossible for these two to meet in the middle and I found myself strongly siding with Linda.

I find the building a shallow contribution towards reconciliation and a distraction from the reality of life for Indigenous Australians. Especially at a time when the government is cutting funding to many Indigenous programs and communities. I felt like Howards foremost intention was the creation of 530 luxury CBD apartments and the lifelong dedication of William Barak and the entire Kulin nation struggle over land was to give the building significance as a kind of backhanded tribute…He just didn’t seem like he did it for himself and indigenous people. I’m probably being very harsh but for someone that knows very little about architecture, I find the building will flicker across the retina and dissolve from the consciousness as quickly as a billboard…okay maybe occasionally someone will pull out their phone and Google who’s face their seeing but I wonder how many people know what Barak was actually famous for? Some people might be shocked to learn that our ‘settlers’ were such ruthless and brutal people.

Liam ward popped into our lecture to give a quick interesting overview of the power of editing. A couple of things he talked about really caught my attention…the graphic match he showed us from 2001: A space odyssey absolutely blew my mind. I had seen the movie before but never really noticed the significance of the the cut from the bone gliding through the air to some kind of satellite weapon floating in space… implying that the discovery of the bone as a weapon inaugurated human evolution, hence the much more advanced orbiting weapon millions of years later.

Liam then gave us a great example of the Kuloshov effect. Lev Kuleshov, a Soviet filmmaker, was among the first to dissect the effects of juxtaposition. He discovered that depending on how shots are assembled the audience will attach a specific meaning or emotion to it. Liam then switched between two slides… one of the evil king Joffrey from Game of Thrones and the other of Christopher Pyne, the Minister for Education who continues to propose the deregulation of universities…In other words one is an unemotional, ego-centric person who sits on his throne and undermines democracy and the other ones a king.

Yesterday we gave each other feedback on our self-portraits using Edward De Bono’s six thinking hat method.

The premise of this method is that our brains all think in a number of distinct ways and can be deliberately challenged, allowing us to develop tactics for thinking about particular issues. De bono identifies six directions in which the brain can be challenged. None of these directions are completely natural ways of thinking, but rather how some of us already represent the results of our thinking. We decided that only four hats were necessary to receive sufficient feedback. They were…

• RED Emotions – intuitive or instinctive gut reactions or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
• BLACK Discernment – logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious and conservative
• YELLOW Optimistic response – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
• GREEN Creativity – statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes

I was given the black hat…I found I was overly cautious of offending my peers when providing black hat feedback. Something I need to work on…

Received some great feedback on my self-portrait that I will be keeping in mind when working on my next project for week five.

Here’s some footage I cut together for an editing exercise we did at the end of class…The theme was Colour.

IMAGES

New beginnings

View post on imgur.com

Me (not a selfie)

View post on imgur.com

Bedroom

View post on imgur.com

two years of travelling over

View post on imgur.com

VIDEO

https://vimeo.com/122512604

This clip of me building my bed out of crates, not only symbolises my financial situation and furnishing a new home. It also represents my need to rebuild, refocus and the importance that at this point in my life I need to be driven and devoted, not to break apart but to be the best, most productive version of myself.

https://vimeo.com/122512605

an instrument of some kind fills the house continuously… music, whether I’m making it or listening to it is something hugely associated with my life.