After reading and listening to the wonderful words of Mr Cal Newport, I guess one thing became very apparent more than ever, so many of the people I know in university completely lack direction, not through any fault of their own, but as far as I can see, predominantly because of a pressure to find their passion and instead of finding something they are passionate about, they become afraid of making the wrong decision because the very concept of passion has been turned into a fixed thing that will carry you through your whole life. Unfortunately, as I have found, just because you are passionate about something and dedicate study and time to it, does not mean you have a career and this seems to be very apparent to those of us who have found our passion and not to those who haven’t. There is a definite fear of commitment amongst teenagers because of a lack of experience and information. In the information age, more and more emphasis is placed on making intelligent, sensible and considered decisions but the truth is this area is an area with which we lack understanding; we lack the facts necessary to make a decision which we believe (falsely) to have life-long consequences.

When I was very young my dream job was to create LEGO sets. I was convinced that I was going to be the architect of the LEGO world but my revelation came when I was eight years old. I had always loved PIXAR films and one night I flipped over to disc two of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles and whilst watching the behind the scenes fell in love with the art of filmmaking, here was art, science, music, technology all in one beautiful place.

Newport suggests that the secret to working life success is in fact to become the best at something and allow that to drive your entry into doing something you love, but in many ways, his address at the Bechance conference suggests that you almost need to stumble into this area of work, I have for as long as I can remember, wanted to be a filmmaker. I started editing as a nine year old and am extremely fortunate that I had the tools at my disposal to do so. I don’t know where I would be without my film dreams. All I want to do is sit in a theatre with an audience and see a film I created on the big screen and share the experience as just another audience member. I certainly didn’t stumble into this dream and there are millions of others who share the dream, I know this. I do have a passion, I pray I won’t grow to dislike it.

We are the beginning. We are the end. We are the media. We control everything. Fear us.

Nine times out of ten, when I hear the word media out in the big, bad world, they’re really talking about thought control. The folks at the big news corporations, television networks and Hollywood studios have all got an agenda and we’re surrounded by it, the helpless public, what can we do but bend, broken and brainwashed.

Though most everyone I meet outside of the media industry, for some awful reason actually believe this tripe, this way of talking about the media is archaic. For years, this was a legitimate theory of media in the 1930s, often called the hypodermic needle theory or magic bullet theory. These negative connotations are fair in the sense that the theory proposed that the mass media powers that be simply said words and everyone instantly absorbed them, much like a hypodermic injection. The key here (and the reason the theory is no longer accepted) is that the audience is powerless in the face of the mass media. So, really, the question should be, to anyone who ever says that the media is all powerful and is out to brainwash us, who gave you that idea in the first place? Were you a victim of media influence via a different means? Maybe one of your paranoid, conspiracy theorist friends posted something on Facebook and you adopted it as your mantra.

The truth is the media is heavily regulated, in almost every country that has a mass media industry. In Australia we of course have ACMA, a regulatory board that resides over television, radio and print media, controlling how biassed a report can be, if a report or advertisement should be banned from television, who should pay damages for misrepresentation and the minimum quota Australian content for a network in an effort to preserve cultural identity.

As a society, we tend to think of media as almost an institution, a machine churning out data. It is remarkable how much of it there really is, all around us. But the media should not be thought of as simply a group of people; especially in the digital age, we all contribute to the media and we all have a place in the landscape. Branston and Stafford suggest that the media “are not so much ‘things’ as places”, going on to also suggest that we indeed spend most of our lives involved in the process of media creation. No doubt if you are reading this, you have taken a photo before. There is media ingrained in almost every aspect of our modern lives and it is in many ways a positive experience of connection and sharing.

When I bring sharing and connection into the discourse, I don’t simply mean the relationships between one person to another in the literal sense in media communication, (e.g. Facebook and similar social networks) I am also concerned with the relationship between creator and audience. In many ways cinema, advertising and the written word, creates an implicit relationship and connection. You and I are connected by this very connection. Meta.

The question therefore becomes, what constitutes media?

Media is not just simply the plural form of medium, it has grown to mean much more in a modern, societal context. Media is a location, a place in which meaning is created and shared, where a relationship is born between people through a mediatorial force, a process that requires mediation and the media is this middle man, the place through which information flows not begins.

The control paradigm belongs in the mass broadcast era, an era before a porn star’s family could become influential thought drivers. It is on that note that I leave you with this quote from Kylie Jenner:

“Like, I feel like every year has a new energy, and I feel like this year is really about, like, the year of just realizing stuff. And everyone around me, we’re all just, like, realizing things.”

So I’m doing a self portrait, okay, where do I start, a picture… a picture of me. No. Can’t do that. A… Photo of a piece of music? Too obvious. A camera? Too… meta. Six photos, three videos, three sound bites. Okay. Let’s do it.

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1. The Coffee Cup

The natural choice for a student. This cappuccino sums it up. They say you can tell a lot about a person by their tea vs coffee preference. No tea here.

2. The Daily Commute

Every day, I make the journey. Much of my life is spent here, at the platform… waiting. The tracks seem endless, just like the stopover.

3. Hilltop Sunset

Taken on a hill in Upper Ferntree Gully, watching the sunset with friends, I snapped this one whilst looking for self inspiration. Though you can’t see my friends, they mean a lot to me. They were there.

4. A New Favourite Place

This is my favourite place on Campus at RMIT. There is something about this alley that is so thrilling and beautiful. The spot under the mural is rarely populated and it’s a beautiful place to retreat from people. Solitude is important to me as an only child, and this place is where I go for it.

5. The Lakes

The Gippsland Lakes and it’s surrounding area is my favourite place in Victoria, it’s so quiet and still and surprisingly picturesque. So much of my best thinking is done here. The water is beautiful. This photo was taken one New Years Eve as the sunset through the masts of the docked yachts.

6. My Instrument

This is home for me. There’s a transcendent disconnect music brings. It’s pure magic.

 

My Audio:

1/ The start of an original piano track I wrote for a short film, this represents both the importance of music, as well as my journey making films.

2/ The twelve bar blues scale on guitar. This is a familiar sound, my Dad practising his guitar while I work at home.

3/ The soundscape of Melbourne. This sound effect accompanies the photo of RMIT.

 

My Clips:

1. Night Out of Focus

This is more of an abstraction of what I feel my mind is like. Sometimes it is quiet and sometimes there are things moving quickly. It’s always kind of dark and hard to see. Someone turn the lights on please.

2. Walking Through the Park

So much of the area around my house is parkland and I find myself constantly walking through it. I have grown in my appreciation of the seasons this way. I am more in tune with the way nature works. This video is taken on the very edge of parkland.

3. On the Train

Again, as I said, I find myself here all the time. Though I am fascinated by the zoetrope-like effect of light shining through train windows and this connects to an early fascination I have with animation.

Day one of a Media degree and the question was asked what do you want from the degree? After pondering the answer to this question I could only return a couple of answers in my notebook and they were as follows:

1. Properly understand how to create meaningful expression – not just wing it

I have found that, particularly as a filmmaker, a lot of what I learn is from watching other people’s work and I would love to have someone teach me how to elicit responses. What particular heart strings can you pull with a cut from a close up to a painful wide. How can someone so gracefully break the heart of the audience and have them laughing in the space of three minutes like Pete Doctor does in Pixar’s Up.

2. Talk about media things sort of pro like

I can’t believe I actually wrote that. However, in theory, this is very important to self presentation. Especially in my freelance work, I constantly have to talk to potential clients and tell them why what I am doing is going to work for them and how can you do that if you can only express things as “That thing they do in that third Indiana Jones movie where he walks across the bridge that isn’t really there and the camera kind of suspends in the air”

3. Know and understand the industry

The media industry is massive and yet so many people claim to have trouble getting into it. I would like to properly understand the options I have, how extensive is the Australian film industry, does narrative television have a future in Australia or does everyone actually want to watch the (struggles to find adequate word) that graces our screens like My Kitchen Rules.

4. Gain insight into how new media forms are merging or being used inventively

I know that in many ways media is changing as the forms change, the social networks, the apps, the advertising spaces, as everything changes so do the places in which media exists and being at the forefront of that change is exciting.

5. Finally, how can I be better at working with others

I am excited about the possibilities of finding people at university that somewhat care about my passions. It is always a struggle to find people that have similar interests and this is finally the time.

I look forward to the years ahead 🙂

As one of the most poetic, modern lyrical wordsmiths, Mike Rosenberg (Passenger) puts it, “everyone’s filling me up with noise, I don’t know what they’re talking about!”

In a culture of senseless noise and advertising, over stimulation and chaos, we have become a planet of lexically desensitised people. A generation of non-readers, who are so bombarded with words on a regular basis that we lack the basic ability to imagine and extrapolate from the page; a job the cinema and television have done for us all our lives. The question becomes therefore, what is the place of a blog, a consolidation of written thoughts in a shouted landscape? As passenger then says, “All I need is a whisper, in a world that only shouts,” it is here, in this whispering landscape, in the quietness of the literary retreat, that we find the Blog.

Blogs were, in many ways, the first departure from static online pages. The blog was an early stepping stone in the world of interactive digital media. Today, my lecturer described it as the pre-cursor to social media. This of course makes sense when you equate the billions of individual posts within Facebook. Every sixty seconds over 293,000 statuses are updated and every individual comment has it’s own permalink; Google doesn’t even begin to crawl the surface of the social media giants, far less the internet itself.

It’s obvious there’s a lot of talk on the net, but has all of it drowned out the small, coffee shop blogger? What place do small research blogs have in the scheme of the billions of posts outnumbering the human race one hundred to one?

The truth is, blogs are an increasingly declining media form, not in size or users or engagement, but in exposure. It’s very rare that a blogger, without first exposing themselves on some massive social media machine, will gain attention. This of course does not apply to those fan fiction writers and inappropriate image collectors on that uh… other blogging site.

The blog is fast becoming a tool for commercial enterprise: for every personal blog, there is at least another blog dedicated to some business or juice bar, a Facebook page concerning a freelance painting teacher. The internet has taken a beautiful thing and, as usual, diluted it with noise. I am personally, guilty of this. My freelance videography adventures are documented on a blogging site. Portfolio blogs are great ways of curating work and showing potential clients your flavour.

And so this marks day one of my University blog. Where I shall write about what I learn and study and care about.

Connecting all the dots here is a tricky business. I really don’t have a point, which is sad… really. I wish I could say that blogging is a fantastic and engaging, current art form, full of whimsical expressions of love and passion, but it really is becoming increasingly sterile. But it still remains an excellent place to curate my work for University and so I shall “create and curate”. There I’m coining it.

Much Love,

Jake