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Exploding Genre – Reflection Post – Week #3

August 4, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Romantic Comedy aka Rom-Com.

This week’s screening was Sleepless in Seattle directed by Nora Ephron, starring Tom Hanks, whom is one of my favourite actors. Watching it for the first time, I personally enjoyed it. Having your typical Classical Hollywood narrative, 3 act structure, a situation, a problem and a resolution, with comical elements such as Tom Hanks’ use of sarcasm throughout the film. One in particular I recall is when he was on a date with another lady (I think it was Victoria), and he got a phone call from his son, Jonah, and at that point in the film, he seemed pretty annoyed with Jonah. When he got back to the table with Victoria, he went on to ask her if she has kids, and her respond was no, and he went to ask her “Do you wanna have mine?”. That line struck my humour bone as it had a pun in it while being sarcastic. Usually people would ask celebrities to have their kids as a way of saying they would like to sleep with them, and this seems like a link being placed in the context that their on a first date and he was getting to know her, but at the same time it was him finding a way to vend his annoyance of his child, putting his son up for grabs.

Rom-com has entertained viewers with cliched plot lines, dialogue and “happily ever after” endings. But what keeps us coming back for more ,despite knowing the end of the story where the 2 were destined to be together? It is the use of repetition and variation the filmmakers employ in their films to draw viewers. We as the audience want to see the struggles the protagonist(s) go through, just to be together with their other half. The stronger the filmmaker can “trick” the audience into believing the 2 are not going to be together, the greater the effect of the resolution when they finally meet up and “live happily ever after”.

Having said that, I believe this might just apply to any genre be it rom-com, horror, murder/mystery, action… The tougher the struggles the protagonist have to go through, the more satisfaction the viewer gets at the end of the film when everything is resolved. Using songwriting as an example, most pop music today would resolve on a particular chord in a chord progression to cue listeners that it is the end of the song or a verse/chorus. It is that resolution that does not leave the listeners hanging, hence giving that “hook” effect that is stuck in your head. And this songwriting technique is employed in most popular genres, especially in pop songs today.

Exploding Genre – Reflection Post – Week #2

July 30, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Westerns have always intrigued me since my childhood days. Cowboys, red indians, horses, gunfights, the old dusty dessert setting, are just a few of the many tropes that you might see in a Western film. Latest western film I watched would be the remake of The Lone Ranger (2013) directed by Gore Verbinski, starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. It was not very well received by critics, but I thought it was overall a very entertaining film. I have not watch nor listen to any of the franchise that carried The Lone Ranger name prior to the remake, therefore I might not have any basis to judge my viewing experience of the film to compare with other renditions, but as a stand alone, I thought it was pretty well done and it carried majority of the tropes that made a Western film.

Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) directed by Takashi Miike was screened today during our first movie screening of the semester. Just by the name itself, you could tell it was going to be a strange and wacky film, Sukiyaki is known to be a Japanese dish that is usually served in a hot pot style, Western, I assume is where the film was set in, and Django could be the film making some reference to the Spaghetti Western film, Django (1966) directed by Sergio Corbucci.

Before I give my take on the film, I would like to reflect on a talk that I attended some time this week delivered by a professor who came from my home country, Singapore. Associate Professor Stephen Teo, from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) came to RMIT to conduct a lecture on Eastern Western. I found it really really interesting how it took a Chinese man, explaining “Rasa Theory” a ancient classical Indian theory that was formed between 200BC and 200AD, to a bunch of white men and some asian students. It just goes to show how far globalisation has taken us, but that’s a little side note that I took from the lecture. Basically, what I got from the otherwise very complex and highly academically structured talk, was that we can apply a set of readings and theories written in the ancient times to a Western film or any film for that matter and it could fit, with a little in depth analysis. What I have been taught so far through Introduction to Cinema Studies and Popular Cinema, is how we look at films from a academic perspective, however these  teachings and readings have been pretty much highly regarded to western Hollywood film theory and techniques, therefore I thought it was a refreshing experience that we could analyse films not just through the academic standpoint, but also using the eight Rasas in the Natyasatra written from ancient India.

Back to Sukiyaki Western Django, from the get go, I thought the film took on a very similar shape to an anime, in terms of use of colour, cinematography, and performance from the actors. On the other hand, it still carried the tropes of a western film, having set in the dessert, a small town, an outsider coming in to restore order and stability to the town from an opposing force. However, western being western, the film embeds very heavy oriental roots and like props such as lanterns, the tattoos on the back of some characters, the battle between red and white (symbolic to chinese/japanese) and so on. I thought the film wasn’t bad at all, although some might oppose to that. I feel that you can’t label a feel good or bad, just because it doesn’t fit the right template or model in the genre it seems to be classified under. In the film’s own right, I thought it fit very well using genre conventions, but still carrying some Asian flare, just to say it was made by a Japanese.

I wouldn’t classify Western as one of my favourite genres, but I would really like to go more in depth into the genre and exploring even more into it, and maybe employ some of the conventions into my video genre sketches.

 

 

Exploding Genre – Reflection Post – Week #1

July 24, 2016 / / 0 Comments

So this week’s been pretty introductory. We had a full blown crash course on genre and the whole tale behind it, from different point of views, academic, critical, and even just layman.

What makes a genre? We can find genre almost everywhere even outside the realm of films. Music for instance carries many various genres and sub genres (which is another layer to touch on maybe later in the semester), from old school classic rock to electronic dance music dub step, country folk music to big band swing…the list goes on. Genre helps one to categorise things in a neat and orderly fashion. Since the dawn of the human species, we tend to group stuff together base on certain characteristics, tropes, and traits. From primary school science, we were taught to categorise between living and non living things, plants and animals… I believe it might be in our DNA to create order and categories.

So film genres, what is it? Some say that it is a tool made up by the studios to sell films and that it doesn’t really exist, and if we were to go along with that, it just puts whatever I’ve mentioned above down the drain. There is definitely a need to categorise films, and even if it was intentionally or unintentionally created by the institution to make consumers buy more films, eventually genres will be created organically. We need something to refer to, something to make a reference and to gauge. But film genres are not very well distinct, it is fluid, it overlaps with one another in intricate twists and variation. Which, I believe, is why most of us elected to do this particular studio to see how genres overlap each other, and also distinct themselves from one another. Can’t wait to see how this semester and this studio unfolds as we explode genres week by week.

Project Brief 1.1 – Week #1 – Semester 2

July 24, 2016 / / 0 Comments

EXPLODING GENRE!

Can’t get over the wacky titles for the individual studios. Gone are the days where the names of the classes or modules I’m taking just represent the subject that I’ll be learning like, Maths, Science, History, you get where I’m going with this. During my trip back to Singapore, I find it a challenge explaining to people what kind of studio am I doing this semester and end up breaking down the name “Exploding Genre” for them.

I chose this studio in hopes of being able to pickup the ropes of producing and maybe making, a short film myself, and it doesn’t get any simple than that. I do understand that a lot of time, effort, and manpower would go into making a film. Pre-production, production and post-production, each carrying their own importance and we have many distinctive roles for people to fill up and contribute into making a film reach its final stage where it can be screened onto the big screen. Whether that screen is in a commercial theatre complex or just in an AV room of your parents’ apartment is a separate discussion.

Besides uncovering the various methods and theories that may be employed by multiple filmmakers all over the world to give a film a certain characteristic to be classified as a particular genre, I would also like to acquire the skills and knowledge on the “technical-know-hows” on how to actually write, film, produce, edit and maybe even publish? Of course, the entire process can’t be taught within the duration of an academic semester, but just knowing the basic knowledge of how everything flows would be my main outcome in general.

Looking forward to exploding many genres week by week as time goes by.

Project Brief 4 – Reflection – Week #13

June 2, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Alas, the end has come for us to say that we’re done with Project Brief 4. Both audio and video essays are very much completed and ready to be submitted through our google drives. It comes with great pleasure to be writing this blog post, not only because it’s the end of yet another long and gruelling Project Brief, but also the end of the first semester of uni, but I will reserve my comments on a separate posts regarding that. For now, I’ll express my thoughts and feelings that occurred over the course of this assignment.

For starters, it is the first assignment that is done as a group instead of individual. This comes with a set of pros and cons, fortunately, it all panned out with more pros than cons for this particular assignment. Way back in week 4 or 5, we received a lecture on teamwork and collaboration, which I mentioned in a blog post that I was pretty baffled that even in uni we are still being taught how to work with people. Thankfully, with the stroke of luck or whatever you want to call it, my group mates and I were all within the same wavelength and it was easy communicating with one another. Even when we couldn’t agree on certain things, we managed to work something out and achieve a general consensus accomodating most of our individual opinions.

The group didn’t waste any time getting started on PB4. We sat down to brainstorm ideas and arguments related to our topic, Audience. I still remember one of our very first group meetings, we were tossing out ideas, thoughts, opinions, personal experiences, academic articles, basically anything and everything that we could think of that is related to the word Audience. Like the other topics on media affordances, Audience is a really broad topic, and we needed to streamline our ideas to a specific question to form an argument and debate around that. This was where our annotated bibliographies come in to help narrow down on our findings and find a specific topic for us to debate back and forth on. Personally, it was a challenge putting together an annotated bibliographies as I’ve not done anything like this before. Moreover going through all these academically written articles and journals, it was quite a tough read for most of them. What more, sieving out information that might be related to our essay topics, and putting it into context of our arguments.

A few weeks went by and we were ready to record our audio essay. The night before, we had a conference call over Skype to finalise on our audio scripts. Unfortunately, I wasn’t available to attend the recording as I had a lecture to attend, but I accepted the role of editing and mixing the entire audio essay, as well as adding extra textural elements and composed a starting/ending theme song into it. I guess that should count as my “voice” in the essay, since my actual voice is absent from the audio essay.

Once we got the main bulk of the audio essay down, we began planning, storyboarding, and coming up with scripts for our video essay. Since we’ve already got the main content and arguments in paper, it was only natural for us to bring those into live action. We thought of a place and setting for everything to take place, and what better way to present on the topic of audience than being a group of audience ourselves. A fellow group member volunteered her lounge room over at her place for us to shoot our video essay and that was pretty much our set for the video essay. A bunch of us sitting on a couch in front of a television set talking about the whole concept of the shift of passive audience to active audience as we move from broadcast era into the post-broadcast era. Since non of us received any professional acting lessons or came from any performing arts background, it was a challenge for us to memorise our lines and speaking right into the camera. We had to do several takes on and on before we could get a hang of it. A simple trick we did was to place one of our laptops right in front of the television and that became a “teleprompter” for us in case any of us forgets our lines. Another minor problem we faced was getting a clean audio recording. The mic that came with the Sony MC50 that we loaned from the tech store at Building 9 was too sensitive and it was picking up almost everything in the room, and since the room was not acoustically treated, it sounded really echoey and boomy in the recording. To counter this issue, we decided to record our speech on a separate device, using one of our iPhones as a audio recording device. Thankfully, the audio that was recorded using the iPhone was not as echoey or boomy as the one from the Sony MC 50.

One of us decided to take on the role as the overall editor for the video essay rough cut. However, we sat down as a group to chip in our own input to the video essay during one of our final group meetings. We booked an editing suite at Building 9 to sit down and run through the final cut of the video essay. We also took the opportunity to target any last few kinks that were in the audio essay and made final adjustments to both audio and video essays before they were ready for submission.

PB4 is definitely not an easy task to be taken lightly, and it was pretty daunting in the beginning as the tutor distributed the hardcopy around the class. To see that we had to produce, not one, but two essays, both with different content and only 30% could taken from each essays, was initially quite intimidating. Just visually, looking at the project brief felt suffocating and the list of submission requirements just seemed never ending. However, we took it one strike at a time and planned our group discussions, and what we needed to accomplish at the end of every meeting. One thing I would attribute the ease of going through this assignment was how we managed our time. Time management was crucial when it comes to producing two essays. We needed to know when we should put a pause for the audio essay to start on our video essay and also finding a common time for everyone to meet. The group had to rely on skype calls quite a fair bit on a few occasions, due to circumstances that we are not able to meet in person or the timing just does not permit us from seeing each other, however, it was these sessions that we managed to cover quite a lot of ground when it comes to coming up with our scripts, ideas, and content for both essays. I also felt fortunate that our tutor allowed us to carry out our discussion during class time therefore we had more time to ourselves to focus on other assignments from different courses.

On a personal level, I enjoyed collaborating with my group mates coming together to produce these two final products. You hear stories and rumours from other course mates about so and so not carrying their weight, or so and so is not turning up for meetings and so on, but I guess we’re fortunate enough that this wasn’t the case for us for this particular assignment. Look forward to the many collaborations I might be participating in future.

 

Feedback Feedback – Week #12

May 27, 2016 / / 0 Comments

For the last 2 workshops, we reviewed our audio and video rough cuts to our tutor during class and received really good constructive feedback from her in order to achieve the desired grade the group is aiming for.

For one, our audio essay lacked texture, and it was rather monotonous. This I can agree with, as I was the one responsible for mixing and editing the audio clips together and adding sound effects, music, and other sound clips that could lift the audio essay to sound a little more entertaining rather than just 3 people speaking. But due to the limited time in producing a rough cut, this was the main bulk that could be produced for the time being, and adding in extra textual elements would be slightly less taxing than arranging audio recordings and mixing the audio levels.

Our video essay was also coming together, but like the audio essay, it lacked extra textual elements such as found footages, still images, and maybe some minor editing techniques to make the video essay a little more engaging as well as entertaining instead of just 4 people sitting in front of the camera talking. Content wise and arguments, our tutor remarked that it was spot on and it was through provoking to the viewer, but also has a good resolution at the end.

This left the group going back to our drawing board to see how we could enhance our audio and video essays, adding extra sound effects, clips, found footages, images, and applying various technical effects to lighten up our essays to a more entertaining level. It’s easy to just produce an audio or video essay, after all, it’s just an essay with people reading out from a script through video or audio, but it’s not easy to make the final product something the listener/viewer can maintain their attention before they decide to stop and doze off into oblivion. We planned to use the remaining time frame that’s left before the deadline for PB4 to enhance our essays.

Not so Good with Goodbyes – Week #12

May 26, 2016 / / 0 Comments

This is pretty much the last week of teaching, lectures, tutorials, and, meeting people. As the clock reaches the last few minutes, students would line up around the classroom door to leave, and awkwardly looking at each other thinking of what to say as we all know we might not be seeing each other again next semester, particularly for school electives.

Personally, I would just smile and thank the tutor and carry on with my own way. If I do engaged with a conversation with a fellow course mate, would probably break into a conversation on how time passed so fast, and how the first semester of uni just flew by. When you’re actually in action while the semester is going on, you tend to wonder why does time pass so slowly and you can’t wait for the next break to happen so that you can enjoy your freedom, but when the last day of classes comes, you’ll think back and wonder where did all the time go and what have you managed to achieve over the period of the past few months.

I never felt more on top of the ball in this week’s lectorial, and for once I felt like I understood everything that the lecturer was saying. Only because, it was regarding the various studios that we will be attending next semester, and not something regarding media affordances with big words, theories, concepts and academic references. Don’t get me wrong, I try to understand and grasp the knowledge the lecturers are trying to convey to us during these weekly lectorials, but some times I find it a struggle to even just understand these theories and applying it into real life. I do question myself if I’ll ever apply this knowledge to my future job scope. Anyway, I digress, this week’s lectorial’s main focus was on the balloting and an extended announcement on attending a studio pitch that will be held on the 9th of June. I still have no clue what studios that I’ll be interested in, but I guess that studio pitching session should help ease my decision making when I come to it.

Come Wednesday, my weekly Media 1 workshop went on for the last time this semester. Our tutor was sweet enough to give out little bite sized candies like Maltesers and Sneakers. Just little gestures like this makes us, the students, feel like we actually matter and not just a body of people you come in to meet day in and day out. I would like to express my appreciation towards all the tutors, across all the courses I took this semester, and hope to see them again soon.

The End is Here, or issit? – Week #12

May 23, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Today marks the end of Photography 101, a school elective that I’ve enrolled back in February. It has been a long time coming, starting out from not even knowing the 3 basic parameters on the camera that will determine your exposure (ISO, Shutter Speed, Aperture), to actually getting my own DSLR from Gumtree, (funny story ’bout that, the guy who sold me the camera was a former student from the same Photography 101 in RMIT), to going out shooting and to find something really therapeutic about capturing moments, freezing motion, stopping time, all with a click of the shutter.

In today’s lecture, we were told that they are considering stopping this course for some reason, which kind of aches my heart to hear that. Personally, I always had a keen interest in photography, but haven’t gotten down to learning the ropes of doing so. Before enrolling to this course, I took pictures with my phone and posted them on social media, that’s as far as my photography skills go. After joining this course, it has taught me so much, and it is just another mode or avenue to express one’s self, much like music, paintings, or filmmaking, photography is another art form.

Where would I go from here? Well, I’ve already enrolled for Photojournalism as another school elective in Semester 2, so that’s that. But on a personal level, I am actually quite interested in joining some local photography competitions, which I might have to do some research on. Wouldn’t want to play ball with people who are way out of my league, therefore this requires some thought and help from peers or lecturers. One thing’s for sure though, you’re not going to find my camera in an ad on Gumtree, I can guarantee that.

PB4 Video Essay Shooting Day – Week #11

May 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

One of my group mates have graciously opened up her house to be the set of our Project Brief 4 video essay. My group’s topic is Audience, and what better way to present the concept of audience than being an audience ourselves. Our concept for the entire video essay would be us (the whole group of 4 of us) sitting in front of a television in the lounge and giving our takes on the change from broadcast to post-broadcast era and how it has affected the change from passive to active audience.

I don’t think I’ll be spoiling anything for anyone since this video (and audio) essay are not going to be uploaded onto YouTube or Vimeo and I doubt it’ll be shown in class. Therefore, non of us would be able to view each others’ work and the sum of research of all of us has done over the past 3 – 4 weeks on our different topics on media affordances. While it I am totally okay with that idea of not uploading our work on any online social networking sites due to the copyright issue, I was wondering, wouldn’t it be a more cohesive learning experience if we were to share with the rest of the class on what we have researched on. I’m not even thinking of a formal presentation, but just a screening and hearing of our video and audio essays, so everyone’s got a clear idea of what everyone of us has done.

I might be wrong in my last point, and I am pretty sure I’ll be slammed quite hardly if I were to express my view on a more vocal platform (like in the middle of a lecture), as different people might have different opinions and ideas. Some might want their work to be best kept between their tutors and group mates, some might prefer not to have the extra weight of thinking that their work is going to be screened and aired to the entire class, and many other reasons that might have gone passed my personal thoughts.

Okay, I just realised I have gone quite off point here with the last 2 paragraphs, so back to the video shoot. We managed to cover everything that we needed in a couple of hours. I was pretty pleased with the outcome, and am quite excited to view the rough cut which one of our group mates has volunteered to do. Though our procedures and filming techniques were pretty primitive, to hear the sound of one of us yelling, “It’s a wrap!”, had a certain sense of satisfaction ring to it. We loaned the Sony MC50 from the tech store in Building 9 and used a Canon EOS 700D DSLR provided by one of the group mates. The Sony MC50 was more or less dead center on to us, while the Canon DSLR was at an angle to provide a different perspective as well as adding texture to our video essay.

Apart from filming ourselves, we are adding some extra bits of found footages in between to elaborate our point on passive audience going back to the black and white television days. This also aids in bringing up our video essay running time to about 5-6 minutes instead of 4-5 minutes, since our group consists of 4 people, unlike stated in the project brief where each group should consist of 3.

Overall, I believe that we all had fun having gone through the experience of filming ourselves and doing several takes due to the difficulties of memorising our lines. Glad that the whole bulk of PB4 is coming together (video AND audio), and now is just putting everything that we have done together and preparing it for submission on the 3rd of June, that includes the production dossier and an 800 words reflective essay.

Rudderless – Week #11

May 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

rudderless4

Just finished watching this film titled Rudderless, 2014, William H. Macy, and I would highly recommend it. What caught my attention to watch the film would be its soundtrack. Being a casual musician myself, I find myself always leaning towards films with strong music soundtrack and musical theme. This film is no exception, and I spent no time watching it over this weekend in the middle of this hectic week where it’s near the business end of things for most courses.

In terms of film review, I would say it is driven by a very strong narrative, stylistic cinematography and well written folk pop songs. The main character shown in the picture above goes through various incarnations from the rich and wealthy to being alone, shabby looking and everything in between.

Would not want to spoil anything else for you, so if you’re looking to escape from the crazy busy week that you might have had like me, grab yourself a copy of Ruddlerless and sit yourself in front of the TV screen.

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