Category Archives: Uncategorized

Filming for Broadcast Media

This week I submitted an evaluative assignment on this blog for my class, Networked Media. In this evaluation of my blogging, I was forced to put down on paper a thought which I have managed to supress for a while: I could be using this blog better.

As far as an educational tool goes, blogging is a big one. An academic blog is like an archive of categorised and archived notes, portfolio pieces, opinions and ideas in one. Everything is linked in a linear way through chronology but also in non-linear ways that would be far more significant for learning. It also stays online to be reflected on later, even years later as paper notes and jotted ideas do not. Not only that but it is all writing practice, after all it is published, public writing, and is therefore practice for committing yourself to something, both the blog and the educational boost that it promises in the long term.

I haven’t used the blog to its best educational ability. In order to do that I would need to write and integrate more blog posts on other work from other classes, other readings and material that I find out of class that I find relates to class content- which is growing every day.

So today I will start trying to use the blog better. Starting with this post about my lack of utilization so far and also about my other summer subject, Broadcast Media.

Today we didn’t have classes, but my group and I did a lot of work on one of our major assessments which is filming and producing a current affairs segment for Today Tonight. The theme is summer and we have chosen beach safety as a topic.

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Today we were filming on location at Mill Beach in Mornington. It was a beautiful day, the location was fantastic and everything went smoothly. We were lucky to have very accommodating and helpful interviewees who were patient and allowed us to boss them around and move props around and even assisted us in re-enacting a beach rescue (for which I rather embarrassingly had to play the victim). This made the day flow so easily, but it was a great learning experience nonetheless.

As I film weddings and have seen current affairs pieces filmed before, I thought everything would be a breeze, but there were things to think about which I didn’t expect.

We had to change the direction of the subject and the camera to get the right lighting as it was an outdoor shoot, we had trouble levelling the tripod because it was on sand, the microphones were extremely sensitive to the sounds of the ocean and so we had to swap microphones and be careful of the direction. The angle of the camera in relation to direction in which the speakers were looking and the composition of the frame. All these were things that we’d discussed in class that seemed like common sense were things that you really had to think about in the field.

As we had planned to get all our shooting done in the one day on location, we couldn’t afford to get anything wrong and wanted to get the best possible shots with every piece of recording. However, once you start recording you tend to just point and shoot and forget about some details, the details which make the overall piece look professional.

It will be interesting to see how it turns out. I think there are little things that we could have been more conscious of that will really separate our piece from professional work. Our content is going to be fantastic, our interviewees were amazing and so were our vox-pops, and although I didn’t see our re-enactment as I was the actor, the others said it is looking good as well. Over all the day felt like a huge success for a first time filming this type of current affairs segment. Having watched this segment from Today Tonight since returning I have noticed the small things they do which we took no notice of. On the other hand I think our content is more relevant, interesting and significant than many of their topics and so maybe that levels us out.

There are things I would do differently if I could go back, one thing in particular is to have the presenter standing next to the camera so that when the interviewee speaks he speaks almost into the camera but not directly. This technique is just a minute detail, but it makes Today Tonight, and indeed much TV journalism, more professional now that I think about it. But I think that’s a good thing that I’ve noticed this now. I will be more aware of the details next time, and that’s what the first few times of doing anything is all about.

Trial and error on Social Media

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of posts, I currently work as a freelance photographer and videographer. I love my job; I love capturing true emotion on film. This is what I’m good at and I hope to one day turn my passion into an alternative creative media company.

What I’m not so great at is the business planning side of things. I started freelancing just by putting an ad on Gumtree and I have gradually been growing the business ever since.

Today I decided to set aside the day to set out a business plan. I divided this into three categories.

  1.  Business goals
    Here I set out the things that I want to achieve in the short term and long term, and outlined the steps in achieving them 
  2. Work efficiency
    This category covers all the boring organisational stuff. Payment methods, booking sheets, editing software, file organisation and backups etc. The stuff that no one enjoys in but it needs to be done in order to work effectively.
  3. Advertising and social media
    All my advertising is done online, on free ad posting outlets and through social media. I intend to create more work opportunities and contacts by putting more effort into my online presence.

Advertising and Social Media should be the area that I most enjoy working on, but I quickly found out that it is more difficult than other people make it look.

I already have a pretty decent website up. I’m quite proud of it because I did everything myself through Adobe Muse. I also have a work Facebook page and I occasionally use my personal Twitter and Instagram accounts to post  work related content.

View my blog here.

Today I set out to make the tools I already use more effective and to integrate other popular social media tools in order to reach a greater population.

I was inspired by Linh Luu’s work, he’s a classmate of mine who happens to be an extremely talented photographer and possibly an even more talented social media tycoon. His Facebook page has over 27 thousand followers.

I’m also inspired by Lakshal Perera, a wedding photographer whose work I follow through his Facebook page. Other than admiring his work, I really love the way that Perera uses his blog on his website to connect with fans of his work. He reflects on every wedding he photographs and his blog is a reflection of his amiable nature, talent and also genuinely caring work methods. This is so effective that he doesn’t even need to advertise.

I genuinely love filming weddings, and I feel a connection to the couples that I capture on film through the emotion that I sense on their big day. But this is something I find very difficult to get across, not in my work but when I talk about my work. Letting the work speak for itself isn’t enough online.

So today I went about adding a blog to my website. I had a long series of issues with embedding the blog, I tried multiple platforms and landed on one that worked. Then I had trouble uploading the photos, I couldn’t upload them how I wanted them no matter how many different methods I tried.

I decided to give that a rest and move on to something else. Adding new social media profiles. There are so many visually engaging sites that people are using these days which I could utilize to promote my work, such as:

  • Facebook pages
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
  • WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, LiveJournal etc
  • Instagram

I want to get my work out there, but posting individual photos to each of these platforms would just be too much work. I decided to use IFTTT in order to integrate some of these processes. Again, I had a lot of trouble. I ran into problem after problem and after five hours of work, I feel that I have accomplished very little.

I expected it to be difficult and time consuming, but I didn’t expect to be right back where I started, only with less options and a throbbing headache, after hours of work.

However, I am determined and I am going to jump right back into it. I am hoping that once I find something that works, with practice and effort it will become much easier. So adios, I have tutorials to watch, questions to Google and code to attempt. Trial and error until I find something that works, and it could be a long night.

Oh and here is a great blog post about creating great content rather than flashy content. Once I figure out how to get my content online and integrated, maybe I’ll be able to take the advice!

Playing the sexist “PMS” trap

I should have learned by now that voicing my political opinions on Facebook is never a good idea, but I did last night and as a result, a man I went to school with came back with, “Someone needs to change her tampon.”

I wasn’t even being overly emotional, I was voicing a reasonable and evidence-based argument that Tony Abbott is a bit of a moron.  I have to admit that I did use some naughty words, but that was more for emphasis of my distaste for certain racist political campaigns and some bad decisions in relation to certain environmental and educational budget cuts.

And then he pulled the PMS card.

It’s a trigger attack. Obviously this line is going to enrage almost any woman even more, and by becoming furious, as any woman would be entitled to be, she proves the man’s point.

It’s a trap that sexist morons have been leaning on for years. She can either retaliate, proving him ‘correct’ or back out, giving the man a false sense of having ‘won’. I backed out.

A friend kindly pointed out that any man who needs to use the PMS line is obviously lacking in any kind of intelligent argument or general decency. That friend happened to be a woman and this man’s response was, “Cycles are in sync.”

This happens to women who voice their opinions all the time.

It’s unfair, it is blatant sexism and even as a joke-at a woman’s expense-it reinforces the inequality that men and women have been working towards straightening out for decades.

A woman can’t be emotionally invested in an issue without some dumb arse somewhere telling her she’s “on her rags”. It’s sexist, it’s unfair and it needs to stop. It should have stopped about 40 years ago. It should never have started! But it did, it continues and it needs to stop.

Even when men use the line just to push a woman’s buttons, it genuinely does stop women from voicing their ideas. It really does.

There are women and girls out there who don’t want to stand up for themselves and their opinions because they don’t want to be seen as an unattractively emotional and angry feminist.

There’s an unfair stigma around the word feminist so that instead of simply meaning, ‘a believer in gender equality’, it implies ‘angry and emotional bitch’.

It shouldn’t be that way. If you believe that men and women are and should be treated as equals; congratulations, you are a feminist. It’s not a bad thing and no one should be embarrassed to admit it.

In fact, every decent person should consider themselves a feminist, perhaps not an active one but a feminist at least. By not doing so you’re suggesting that you don’t believe that men and women are equal and you are probably not a very nice person. Gender equality is a sensitive issue, stay away from an argument by simply saying that you believe we’re all equals, and mean it and act like it.

And don’t ever put a woman’s (or a man’s) opinions down to a by-product of PMS. Very, very uncool.

And if you were wondering, this is the video that I posted that started it all.

Falling for Jonathan Harris

Before our workshop and the introduction to our Niki topics, I had never heard of Jonathan Harris. A couple of days later and I’m 90% sure that he’s the man of my dreams. The 10% of uncertainty is due to the fact that I’ve never met the man, but he’ll be in Australia quite soon so who knows.

Jonathan Harris can be described as an innovative new media artist/network developer/ideas man/anthropologist philosopher/designer.

His work includes an array if interesting and varied projects including CowBird, “A public library of human experience”, and I Love Your Work, an “interactive documentary about sex work”. His work can be viewed on his website, here.

The thing that I adore about Jonathan Harris is his way of life. He doesn’t have the average job description, instead he has ideas and he makes them happen.

Not only that but his ideas are focused on creating empathetic connections between people and using technology to strengthen human relationships rather than weaken them.

He also spends a lot of time trying to understand other people, immersing himself in lives completely seperate to his own and lands very distant from his home, in order to better understand himself and other people.

He’s also wise:

Spend time alone in nature. If your ideas still seem worthwhile in the presence of natural solitude, then they are probably worth pursuing.

Jonathan Harris

 

He is also ethical and altruistic:

Remember that businesses were initially created as a way to solve social problems, not just to make money.

Most businesses nowadays have become like monsters.

 

I agree with a lot of his ideas and I love his work. I’ll be creating a Niki page on him with Esther and James, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Indian Culture in Varanasi

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I returned from India less than two weeks ago. It was my second trip to the wonderful country, having decided to spend December there after living there for six months in 2012.

India is a world away from Australia. The sights, smells, tastes, colours and noises are all more intense and everything works in a completely different way, but it has that familiar sense of community that gives a place its substance.

India is an incredibly diverse and interesting country. Thousand of different dialects, a myriad of devout religious communities, extremely varied cuisine, arts and fashion are just some examples of the diversity of the culture. And just to scrape the surface of the landscape there’s the coastal areas such as Kerela, the desert in Rajasthan, the mountainous areas of Ladakh (described to me once as “heaven on earth”), the entrance to the Himalayas and then there’s the Holy City, my home in India, Varanasi.

Varanasi is, in my opinion, the most cultured city in India. Where other cities of Varanasi’s size are becoming increasingly less traditional and more westernized, Varanasi is doing it old school. This is because the Holy City is situated on India’s holiest river, the Ganjes. Every year millions of pilgrims come to Varanasi for religious festivals and cleansing. It is an extremely holy place. As a result there is no alcohol, women choose to mostly wear traditional Indian sarees or Punjab suits, cows roam the streets (literally strolling down extremely busy roads, without a care) and most religious traditions are still thriving.

Living in Varanasi for six months, I became very close to several families. One woman who I was particularly close to, Mumta Ji (Ji is an Indian mark of respect) was very interested in Australian culture and we would swap stories about our cultures, she would laugh at my choice of clothing and the fact that I get so excited about elephants, and I would show her photos from home and marvel at how different our cultures in fact are.

As a woman, Mumta Ji lacks many of the freedoms that I am privileged to enjoy in Australia: dating, wearing what ever I like, talking to whom ever I please, deciding where I want to live and who I will marry, drinking alcohol and eating meat to name a few.

Mumta Ji isn’t all that bothered by this, for the most part, she finds my lifestyle a novelty. She is most shocked that I don’t intend to have children until I’m in my late 20s-if at all; this she cannot comprehend.

However, as many differences there are between Mumta’s culture and mine, there are so many similarities. The most important thing that I learned while in India is that people are the same, despite their differences, where ever you go.

Sorry for the paradox, but it’s the simplest way to put it and it must be simply put. Where ever you go, you will find the same office politics, kids who are loud and giggly and shy kids who hide behind their parent’s legs, community gossip, affectionate teasing, the same willingness to help out a stranger, the same laughter, the same terrifying and passionate mothers, the same friendships and the same conflicts and the same

While our cultures differ, our emotions and our connections are the same.

That’s the brilliant thing about India. It’s a whole other world, the sights, smells, tastes and sights are all more intense, everything works in a completely different way, but there’s that same sense of community and it still feels like home.