As we enter into Week 3 of Uni classes it has become a little bit more clear to me as to what I should be looking for when considering observation according to the outlines made in the first two outlines of Media 4’s Translating Observation. Yesterday I experienced a moment where I opportunely grasped onto while on a train ride home from the city.  The journey began like any other. I plugged my headphones in, turned on my music and starred outside unfocused, not really thinking about anything in particular, I was standing due to a back injury making it uncomfortable to sit for prolonged periods of time. After around 25 minutes of this my phone alerted me of low batteries. Knowing I needed my phone battery for later that day I made the quick decision to turn off my music, I kept my headphones in however. As someone who is easily distracted I stood there, watching people go to and from wherever it was they needed to go. I decided to tune in to what little entertainment I had around me, conversations of other traingoers. I personally hate the idea of eavesdropping but in this particular situation it was somewhat involuntary. It was interesting just being there, hearing parts of peoples lives as they went on. Strangers, not knowing anything beforehand. The man standing to the left of me seemed distressed. He was on the phone talking to someone about his disdain that all his friends were getting married and comparing it to his own life. To the right of me sitting in the disabled chair space, a  teenager I assumed to be not much younger or older than I, from the way his sister/friend next to him was speaking to him as well as his way of speaking it become clear that he had some form of mental disability. I found it somewhat interesting the way his sister spoke to him. Calm but in an almost condescending way, not to be confused with a friendly or motherly tone. In her words I could feel a hidden layer of weariness that seeped out in between the crack of what little conversation exchanged between the two. To the right, a group of teenagers enthral in their phone screens, speaking a hybrid language between english and words clearly relevant only to the game or app they were all talking about. While there wasn’t anything particularly interesting about any of these particular stories I found it somewhat refreshing to be lost in that moment, to allow myself to just tune out of my own thoughts and hear others, try to piece together ideas of those people based on what I was seeing or hearing. As we move forward into week 3 of classes I will attempt to explore these human behavioural observations further a a potential framework for the first assignment.

Attempt at focusing on Meditative/Philosophical Observations

Natural World/Meditative Observation:

As I walked through the streets of Melbourne on Tuesday running an entertainment event with Assumption College as part of their events Management course, specifically having them attempt a rendition of The Amazing Race through the city of Melbourne I observed the influence that the weather had on mood and motivations. A typical winter day in Melbourne: the cold, the bouts of rain, puddles being shot of into the air by the cluster of cars as they drove by trying to just edge over the lights before the dreaded yellow light turned to red. As someone who finds comfort in the cold for reasons I myself have yet to uncover, I always find it strange when I hear complaints for summer to arrive again. Yesterday my work colleague made this assessments stating he was “born made for the summer”. A particularly resonate choice of words given the past few years and the onslaught of record breaking heat days. No, I thought to myself, we were born made for the summer. We were born made to survive climates, but that doesn’t make us immune to severities. Tuesday was very cold, cold enough that as I attempted to write down the scores from checkpoint to checkpoint for our Amazing Race contestants I felt my fingers go numb, struggling to maintain pressure on the frosted pen and clipboard I held in my hands, but at no moment was I in particular threat from this climate, perhaps a cold, but something like hypothermia was simply out of the question. On the other hand I dwelled upon the idea that soon this cold season would once again end and we would be brought back into the hotter months. I considered what it would be like running these same particular event in the peak of summer. The 9 remaining water bottles out of a pack of 16 that I had yesterday would surely be gone, the course would remain the same, but the chance of endangering ourselves, running about for a bout of 3 hours in the summer streets, not something I would ever be inclined to attempt. This framework of thinking, comparing opposites to each other brought about by simply comparing the seasons and their hypothetical implications on what it would be like to work within them was merely a passing notion, not something that I thought to dwell upon at a later date, but as that day went to an end and I woke up this morning at 6am in order to capture first light for a filming assignment I yet again thought back to the idea of seasons and opposites. The thought that two extremes, both hot and cold had the same end effect, with the death of the subject being exposed prolonged, but the route of getting to that stage severely different highlighted to me the idea of variance. That no particular route will lead you to a different end result, but perhaps the journey will be different invoked a sense of catharsis to me. Perhaps an overanalyses, but as a university student who’s given particular assignments, goals and requirements, but encouraged to put my own flare and imprint on these tasks in order to achieve the same goals shows to me that perhaps when undertaking this particular course I should look more into linking together ideas that are prominent in life. Observing opposites and comparing, analysing the idea of the journey and destination and embedding these notions into these assignments that translates our observations into video form, this reflection in itself is a Meta example of placing an idea in the page for the purpose of exploring ideas.

 

 

Week 2 undertaking Media 4’s “Translating Observation”, a subject that entails observing everyday life and interpreting it into media form. With our first ungraded assignment requiring us to record two 50 second videos of a location using Sony EX3 cameras and manipulating one of the shots to recontextualize or place new meaning within the shot I have spent a large portion of the week with that notion in the back of my mind, scouting out potential ideas in my everyday life. Today I ran an Amazing Race style teambuilding activity with a school group through my work which meant I spent the majority of the day in the city running about from place to place, checking off teams scores and trying to stay ahead of the teams that were both competitive and efficient with their time management. As I walked the city I saw busy streets with busy people going to and from their works, lunches and whatever else they may have been doing to fill in a day. One thing i specifically did notice was the lack of overall smiles from many of the people walking by, something I only noticed as I was discussing the state of the world with my work colleague as we conversed on the way to a checkpoint to meet up with the teams. This struck me mostly because of the fact that not minutes ago I made the point to my work colleague that Australia and specifically Melbourne had it better off than the rest of the world, and even still many people I saw as I walked around took very little time to take a second just to breath in the environment around them. The safety of it, the fact that no matter how bad the world might seem, we were living in a city that was almost a metaphorical candle in the dark. Perhaps an over-assumption on my part as to the ungratefulness I assume these people felt, as sometimes people feel completely different on the inside to how they may present themselves, but as I walked through the city on a particularly cold and overcast day, I did take a second to stop, look around at the towering buildings, busy streets filled with busy people going to and from busy places and just breath in the vibrant life, the freedom in safety. An observation that perhaps may translate into a more distinguished idea for an assignment perhaps? Only time will tell.