We started the week’s workshop with some discussion from this week’s reading, which is Danah Boyd’s “Did Media Literacy Backfires?” which is about unreliable resources on the internet. We talked about some examples, and Tristan came up with the story of this woman who fake having a cancer in the social media, which was really bad (although I’ve never heard about it).
Then, we have a film festival a.k.a screening of our PB3’s final products. Guess what? I’m chosen to go first, again! (I guess it’s an honour) Well, as I’ve written in my previous blog post, I’m interviewing a friend of mine from Indonesia and it’s about her experience as an international student in Melbourne. Although it’s my second time showing my work to the class and not being in the video, it’s still a mixture of excitement and nerves. I do kinda like the end product, so it was a pretty great time.
Afterwards, it’s the turn for other people’s work. It was such a wide variety of approach and it’s really interesting to see how everyone’s style’s differ from one another. There are some who included themselves in the interview, and there are some who did they way I did, focusing solely on the interviewee. I do notice that some videos has issues, which I hope to learn from. From audibility, some interviews were unclear because their music was too loud, bad lighting, unfortunate overlaying of video, to audio/video not in sync and unstable/stuttered zooming. There were also some really creative approach to the video. Some uses really bright, poppy colors and funky music making the whole thing alive, portrait-mode framing which was really unthinkable.
ZOOM H2N
After we’re done, it’s time for another grouping. The only difference was that the group we were appointed to will be the group for our final project as well. I’m teamed up with Aria and Kate (she didn’t come at the time). As usual, Jeremy sent us to get the equipment needed, although this time it’s not a camera, but a sound recorder! It’s the ZOOM H2N which is pretty fancy as I’ve never seen or operate anything like that before. (p.s I really want a good mic)
Jeremy then briefed us through our PB 4 just to make sure we know what we need to do. Since we’re new to the mic, he also taught us some basics on how to operate it. He explained the mic’s pick-up pattern (omnidirectional, bi-directional, unidirectional), signal noise ratio (the higher the ratio the ʻcleanerʼ the sound) and recording levels (usualy around -6dB to -12dB, monitored visually and by audio). He also went through some of the mic’s basic functions.
Lastly, he distributed some handouts, which were the:
We’re asked to skim it through and discuss among ourselves a little regarding the PB 4 before we ended the class.
handouts