Tag Archives: exercise

Noticing things on my daily walk

Every day I walk to and from the station to make my way to uni. Today, however, freshly inspired by the Media 1 workshop and John Mason’s Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing (London: Routledge), I decided to make a deliberate effort to notice, mark, and record (right here!) some of the interesting things I saw. So without further ado, here you go.

  1. The smell. The first thing that I noticed emerging from the sub-terranean kingdom that is Boronia station was the lovely smell in the air. I remembered that I’d noticed this same smell last week when I got home around the same time, and concluded that this smell must just be evening.
  2. The sky. As daylight savings has ended, my walk home on Wednesdays now occurs when the sun is setting, granting me some beautiful vistas.
  3. The girl walking behind me. I realised she was the same girl who I’d witnessed awkwardly missing the bus yesterday morning. I was the only one who saw and she tried to brush it off but know I feel I know some sort of secret only shared between us.
  4. An abandoned trolley with an empty can of beer in it sitting all by its lonesome on the naturestrip.
  5. A bus stop covered in empty cans of beer. I’m not kidding, an entire mountain. The only explanation I can muster is that the empty trolley and the bus stop are somehow related. I’m imagining some sort of incident involving someone very drunk pushing a trolley full of beer down the road and it not ending very well.
  6. The roadworthy assessment place on the other side of the road is actually closed, and has been for some time. I can’t believe I never noticed this before – I always just assumed it was a quiet business.
  7. A weirdly exposed backyard. When I walked past this morning, I was thinking that it was very odd everyone walking past could see right into this house’s entire backyard, and how it must be awkward if people were in it. Of course, when I walked past the same backyard that very afternoon, there was some one it, and we made very uncomfortable eye contact.

These are only a few of the things I noticed that I was able to mark and record. I quite liked this exercise – it was a fun way to get more acquainted with my neighbourhood and add some life to an otherwise mundane walk.

Sony MC50 Camera Exercise

As you can see in the finished result of this exercise embedded above, we faced a few challenges. When we struggled to even set up the tripod properly, we knew we were in for a fun ride (we did figure it out eventually!). It was hard to find a suitable place to conduct the interviews that was quiet enough, had an interesting background, and decent lighting, we ended up having to compromise on all three of those points.

Upon viewing the final footage, I realised that some of the shots weren’t properly focused on the interviewee, so this is something I will have to make sure of in the future, as this really affected the quality of the shot. It was also hard to make the reverse shots of the interviewer look consistent as we didn’t have control of the lighting and were inexperienced at setting the white balance of the camera. It did help us to realise that framing the interviewer and the interviewee properly had a significant effect on the consistency of the interview.

I think the establishing/wide shots were the most successful, as it was easy to get a shots that reflected RMIT life in and around building 80 due to the interesting architecture and large numbers of students.