Media One was a substantial change of pace to what I was used to in high school. The course is very fast paced, almost the moment you start you’re already thrown in the deep end. I think as a whole the course has helped me in reflectivity more than in any other area. I went in to the course having worked with clients, on larger projects, my own short films and with a degree of technical knowledge I had gained through volunteering with media makers. For me, I was in this course for the opportunity to make a diverse range of great content, and I think the course certainly pushed me to do the best with what I had.

What I have learned in Media One:

I think more than anything Media One has taught me that intense focus is not always the best way to go about things. Throughout school, we would have these moments of focus, these hot-spots of assignment deadlines and essays and long winded academic writings and study. This course has really gone out of its way to undo me, in the sense that, we don’t have long essays or even exams at all. The content we create forces us to spend a long time planning and organising, effectively undoing the “short bursts of intense focus” doctrine that school has been teaching me all my life. I think this has changed the way I create content and has taught me to rely less on talent and more on theoretical knowledge. One of the disadvantages I had going into the course was technical knowledge. I had operated broadcast cameras, professional field recorders and have been using Premiere Pro (admittedly not always proficiently) for (no joke) almost a decade of my life. In that way, for me it was the self-discovery that I found most illuminating not so much the technical training.

Learning Graph

How I learn:

I have always done my best learning, discovering on my own so this course has been a little rough starting out. A lot of the course has either been revision or things I just entirely had never considered in my life. I learn best when I am given the opportunity to explore past the obvious. I think I have, coming back to my earlier point, been able to focus intensely on a task and not been easily distracted. I attribute this to the way we were brought up in school, this has made blogging particularly hard for me.

What I have found most challenging in the course:

Following on from my last point, blogging has probably been the most difficult part of the course for me. I would have rather written an essay for each week of the course than written five different blog posts about each of it’s facets, because that’s the way my mind has been programmed by years of teaching. I would often leave blogging to too late in the game simply because in many ways I dreaded slogging out such a short piece of writing having usually written longer form pieces, this is why you might find my blog has fewer pieces than most, yet the average word count is more like 450 words. During the semester, my grandfather passed away, this made family life a little strained as my parents expected me to attend a lot of events and to be ready to take care of things at home and abroad when they needed to be elsewhere. This had a substantial negative impact on the work I was doing in the course. I tend to compare and consolidate many things I learn into singular ideas rather than a massive explosion of seperate thoughts. I think in many ways, the difficulty in blogging is just a VCE hangover but also I think I could have done better work if the blogging had been based on say, a minimum word limit than a minimum post count.

What I have discovered about my own practise:

Through the semester I was also directing the second of my festival short film entrants. I found myself using a lot of what I had learned theoretically in the course and in Cinema Studies in my direction of the film specifically when communicating with my DP. Though, on my film everyone who I worked with was amazing, the group projects I have engaged in across electives and courses has told me a lot about conflict management and also how to choose my battles wisely. In a lot of cases, compromise doesn’t have to have a negative effect on the work and the work is the most important thing.

I have enjoyed the course so far but I am very excited about Studios and being able to hone my craft in second semester. I look forward to continuing my media journey here at RMIT. Thank you to all the amazing tutors particularly Seth for supporting us through the course.

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Links:

Google and New Media

Making the Cut

Blogs with words (in a culture of noise)

The Various Philosophical Issues with Narrative as a thing

Practical response to our Audio Essay topic

Having completed two films together, many members of the production team on these films have kind of become a studio family and the task now is to try to expand to include more and more people. I think many crew members went into the film, quite honestly unsure of what to expect but came out just wanting to do another one. Having asked a few people’s help with editing and now having finally synced all the production audio, I have the monumental task of shipping data left, right and centre attempting to facilitate an online edit workflow.

Online-Offline

Online-Offline is a technique for editing tape where you would have the high quality film print made at the end of the film based on the editing decisions made using tape media. In the digital age this isn’t strictly necessary when shooting with manageable files but because this film is so long it starts to get a little crazy. The film we’re working on has approximately 300GB of footage which is barely any considering the film is meant to run 22 minutes in length. The film was shot using terrible H.264 QuickTime files because no matter how hard we hacked the Nikon SLR we were shooting on, we couldn’t escape compression (even with an external recorder, we still wouldn’t have gained any quality improvements). So here we are attempting to have three editors editing simultaneously and, it’s very difficult. The reason online-offline comes into it is that we’re all trying to edit the same footage, keeping all the metadata intact across three project files and create a workflow where we can email each other project files and simply relink the footage to our own drives and go from there.

Server

After realising that we needed some more infrastructure, I grabbed an old netbook, an old router and a 1TB WD drive I had lying around and rigged it up to be used as an ftp server for the studio. This has opened the doors for a great backup solution but at the moment it requires constant refreshes as it doesn’t back up any of the file based metadata logged into the footage files.

Unfortunately there’s no real way to combat this.

As many of you know, I have been working since the beginning of the year on a project entitled Memoriam. Having wrapped the film more than a month ago. It’s extraordinary how long it’s taken even just to prepare for post production. This is my post post, my post about post.

Syncing

Ten weeks since we wrapped and quite frankly, I’m shocked it’s taken so long to sync all the footage. We thought we would be clever and use sync slates and an on-camera shotgun microphone. In my mind, there was no way this would be time consuming, I mean how hard is it to line up some sticks in editing right? Well I was so far from correct. Having a 22 minute film’s worth of footage is one thing. Having to sync it all, is something else entirely. I am so incredibly grateful for the sync slate. Quite frankly, without it, we still wouldn’t be synced, but it begs the question, how can independent, amateur filmmakers improve their production workflow to allow faster syncing in post?

In the industry, timecode is used to sync the sound and picture with multiple timecode “lock-it-boxes” feeding into each individual device to allow LTC (audio-based) timecode to be used to sync. These are expensive pieces of equipment, most lock-it-boxes start at well over $500 and you have to have more than one or there’s literally no point. There are some cheapies out there, most notably the new Tentacle-sync timecode boxes, but even those cost about $500 for a pair (that’s a huge saving over timecode buddy or ambient). So if the industry standard option isn’t available, what is? Well probably one of the best, inexpensive solutions is wireless audio. You can use wireless receivers and transmitters to send identical audio sources to the camera and audio recorder, but even this is incredibly inefficient, requires heaps of batteries and also, is still pretty costly.

I think the best solution is to have the DP always with headphones on and have your boom operator on a longer cable tethered to the camera. It’s not the most ideal situation, especially when shooting long distance to the subject but it means you can use PluralEyes or your editor’s built in audio sync functionality to sync in post.

 

For this post, I’m exploring ideas presented in J. Van Dijck and T. Poell’s ‘Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media’, one of the course readings for the media institutions topic, which if you haven’t been around my blog is the very topic my final assessment is based upon.

Originally, when my group started putting together the video essay, we referred to the idea of Public Service Broadcasting heavily throughout the essay, but I pushed to only refer to this as social media for the reason that is though, yes, social media is public service broadcasting, the inverse is not true. In some circumstances, also, Social Media is not public service broadcasting. Me posting a photo of a cat, isn’t a service. Really. So we changed the wording. What we were originally talking about is this dynamic shift of power between big institutions and small individual humans with Facebook accounts, somehow able to draw a large amount of viewers. As many people watch PewDiePie as they do just about any Australian News Program and this is one of the ways in which the world has changed tremendously over the past few years.

In Van Dijck and Poell’s work, they explore the ways in which institutions have reacted to the rise of social media and the ways in which social media has responded to itself becoming a broadcasting platform. Though most people tend to think of Facebook and YouTube as platforms, they are as much media institutions as any non-web-based institution, so in that way, it is worth pointing out that YouTube and Facebook have ads, sponsored posts and many other revenue avenues including an enormous amount of data mining that occurs without you even knowing it. Check out my post here for more of my thoughts on that. Facebook, especially is a huge corporation, and funnily enough these online mega-conglomerates are just as incestuous as the offline institutions, Facebook owns Instagram, Google owns YouTube, in fact, between Facebook, Microsoft and Google, most people would find themselves on one of their sites all the time.

Similarly in the reading Van Dijck and Poell explore the way television has reacted to social media. Now the networks are trying to breed social media with their own content, Q&A is a great example, taking questions from both the in-show audience and the twitterverse as well as the live feed on the program. If anything will save conventional media broadcasting (which nothing will), it’s the way in which the two of them are colliding to become more involved and open.