Previously blogged problem about obtaining photos for the Whack A Mole sequence solved.
FINALLY managed to locate a graphic artist to draw us caricatures of mobsters for the animation, which was what we’d originally hoped to obtain at the beginning of the semester.

Lessons learnt?

1. Never underestimate the talent of your friends and the kindness of their hearts.
2. Never dismiss a contact just because you assumed they wouldn’t agree right from the start!

Attempting to find pictures of deceased mobsters on the internet to construct some graphics for our TV doco is far harder than I thought it would be. Most pictures available are tiny and of poor resolution. Also, I’m not too sure what the possible copyright issues might be… Are we allowed to use photos taken from newspaper clippings with credit but without permission, or is that completely illegal? I often find myself a little hazy on things like this, especially with graphics and footage that are disseminated so freely on the internet! One if often lulled into thinking that it well and truly IS free for use by all and sundry.

To solve this problem, we might have to use cartoon variations instead for what we had in mind? We’d been discussing animation and cartoon caricatures right from the start, but of course, finding an artist available to work within our time frame and budget (or lack thereof) might be tricky. I’ve been scouting around but still no luck! However, perhaps cartoon illustrated pictures might work quite well for our mobster doco “game” of Whack A Mole. Apparently, we can do our animations in Flash, which I have no idea how to use, but Terry seems to think it’ll be easy enough.

Some links I’m going to blog just because it’s good to keep them handy:

Mobsters Inc: Cast List of Characters and Key Hits
Deadfellas
Lewis Moran Killed
Transcript – Lewis Moran Murder, Live Report on AM, ABC Local Radio
Men charged over Moran incident
What Mick Gatto told the Jury
Mick Gatto 2
Mick Gatto 3
Mick Gatto 4
Mick Gatto 5
Mick Gatto 6
Mario Condello Charge Dropped
Mario Condello Interview
Transcript – Mario Condello Live on The World Today, ABC Local Radio
Transcript – Mario Condello Murdered, Live Report on The World Today, ABC Local Radio
Mario Condello 1
Mario Condello 2
Mario Condello 3
Mario Condello Quotes
Gangland Suspects Face Interrogation
Andrew “Benji” Veniamin 1
Andrew “Benji” Veniamin 2
Carl Williams 1
Carl Williams 2
Transcript – Carl Williams Arrest, Live Report on The World Today, ABC Local Radio
Gangbuster New Law
Underworld Lawyer Found Guilty of Contempt
Pack Of Lies In Gangland Murder Case
Wikipedia – Melbourne Gangland Killings
Taskforce Purana

Who is Roland Barthes?

“French toys: one could not find a better illustration of the fact that the adult Frenchman sees the child as another self. All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size.”
- Mythologies by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, New York, 1984

According to Wikipedia, “Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician.”

Born on the 12th November 1915, Barthes went on to write works such as LE DEGRÉ ZÉRO DE L’ÉCRITURE (1953, Writing Degree Zero), MICHELET PAR LUI-MÊME (1954, a biography of Jules Michelet, a 19th-century historian), SUR RACINE (1963), LE PLASIR DE TEXTE (1973), L’EMPIRE DES SIGNES (1970, written after Barthes’s visit to Japan, and dealt with the country’s myths), ELÉMENTS DE SÉMIOLOGIE (1964, in which Barthes systematized his views on the “science of signs”) and LA CHAMBRE CLAIRE (1980, Camera Lucinda, in which photography is discussed as a communicating medium) amongst others. His early works were mostly a response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, and he found no love for both established mainstream works, as well as the alienation of more avant-garde text. He went on to confront a great variety of forms and theories, such as Semiotics, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Myth, Textuality, Marxism, Novelistic Writing (splitting cultural language into two modes that he called “Doxa” and “Para-Doxa”) and Photography amongst others.

“Photographs do have an aura, the aura of lost time and lost memories. I would add that this aura is sharply increased when the gaze of those who “knew” the person or scene in the photo seems lost.”

A significant postmodern theorist, Barthes was partial to semiotics and the vocabulary associated with it, such as the “sign”, the “signifier”, the “signified”, the “second-order semiological system”, “taxonomy”, “mythic signs”, “slippage”, “discourse” and “denotative system”.

“Textual analysis indeed requires us to represent the text as a tissue…as a skein of different voices and multiple codes which are at once interwoven and unfinished.”
- Barthes, 1981, cited in Lodge, 1988, p. 193

Barthes also coined the phrase “The death of the author”. With this phrase, Barthes rejected the view of several other theorists that the author was the sole authority of the interpretation of text and the source of its meaning. He favoured the idea of the reader as being more than a mindless consumer of fixed meaning. Rather, he felt that the readers themselves were able to produce meaning through the interaction between them and a work of text, much like Gadamer’s “fusions of horizons of understanding”. Nevertheless, this also suggests that:

“…’as the reader adopts different viewpoints the text’s meaning is produced in a multitude of fragments which have no inherent unity”
- Barthes, 1970, cited in Selden, 1985, p. 77

According to The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ‘Barthes was eager to promote his French brand of Structuralism for only a few years before he rejected most of its methodological assumptions. His numerous essays and books, written over 25 years from the 1950s to the 1970s (some published posthumously in the 1980s), have taught a whole generation “how to read” (to quote Ezra Pound) and have accompanied that generation through increasingly rapid changes in theory. Besides, even though he retained a set of favorite concepts, Barthes’s own swiftness of mind rendered these concepts mobile and capable of important shifts in meaning’…

Barthes’ work and contribution to structuralism included dividing a piece of work into 3 hierarchical levels – ‘functions’, ‘actions’ and ‘narrative’. ‘Function’ involved the basics and elementaries, such as identifying a character with a single word of description. ‘Action’ would refer to the aforementioned character, and therefore play a part in the larger narrative. Barthes was able to employ his structuralist theories in breaking down the essential functioning mechanisms of bourgeois culture.

Of course, the life and theories of Roland Barthes would be too extensive for a single blog post, but these were points that grabbed my attention the most.

For more information, good references and resources include:

Roland Barthes, Graham, Allen. London: Routledge, 2003
Roland Barthes, Wasserman, George R. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981
Erratic Impact
Wikipedia
From Work To Text
The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
Roland Barthes and Cultures of Vision
Roland Barthes: Mythologies
La Culture En Question: Roland Barthes (By Tony McNeill)
Athenaeum Library of Philosophy
Third Factory

My mum has taken to sending me forwarded emails from my aunts and uncles (read: SPAM). Two years ago, she barely knew how to turn on a computer. One year ago, she called me long-distance for help because she didn’t know how to reply to emails or type faster than three words per minute. Naturally, the next step of one’s internet career usually involves discovering the delights of email forwards from your favourite buddies. At this stage of one’s net life lyf, this tends to seem like a good idea.

As such, one insists on becoming trigger-happy with one’s new best friend – the forward button, much to the distress of the rest of the world. It doesn’t occur to you that your daughter, husband, friends, cousins and pretty much everyone else in the human race has already received that touching “true” story about God and encountered the generous Nigerian who wants to transfer millions of dollars into your bank account about… oh, just six squillion times or so.

What is most disturbing about these emails, however, is not the tired content, but the horror of discovering that some of my middle-aged Aunts and Uncles have decided netspeak is a good idea. I quote a particular relative in his 40s/50s who shall remain unnamed:

“sis’ n bros, hope u lyk tis forward! i found it veri funni. read tis n tell me wat u tink.
as 4 nxt fri’s dinner, plz refer 2 my last email. kthnx.”

I can never look him in the eye ever again.

Dear Middle-Aged Relatives,
I hope this finds you well. Taking into account your collective impressive scholarly achievements in the academic field, I would like to kindly point out:

1) Contrary to popular belief, capital letters really ARE a good idea.

NOTE TO SELF: It’s all about time frames. The object with the shorter time frame gets pasted into the object with the longer time frame, NOT the other way round.

- Read more information/ research. Read, read, read, repeat.
- Close reading of the text (details).
- Share what one discovers.
- Brainstorming (when reading, what sort of images/sounds come to mind).
- Use of blog to test/explore ideas, develop them and further our knowledge with additional research based on ideas generated.
- Compile list of words that one doesn’t understand and find out about some of the theoretical terms.
- Summary of essay/ reader’s guide (look for these in the library [philosophy/post-modernism/post-structuralism] or internet).
- Analysis of it via a secondary source.
- Google the essay
- Wikipedia
- Library
- Identify key points
- Glossary (Highlight terms one doesn’t understand and then find definitions for them)
- Who is Roland?

TASK: Pick one of the above and contribute it to the class via blogging.

I’ll be researching Roland and finding out who he is and what he has theorized through his works.
- Biographical information.
- Statements about his work/ thoughts about his philosophies.

SITES/ RESOURCES FOR ESSAY:

del.icio.us
citeUlike

- Tags going to be used to collect and share information on del.icio.us.

The Mafia in Melbourne, Australia, can possibly be traced back to the Painters and Dockers Union – a trade union that existed up till 1993 when it was deregistered under much talk of criminal activity. Officially however, records state that it was deregistered due to a lack of membership (below 1000 members). Besides having a Mafia-like structure, the union was also associated with the drug trade of numerous illegal substances, including heroin and cocaine, that entered Melbourne through the port they controlled.

Factions that have been linked to the mob include The Painters & Dockers, The Moran Family, The Carlton Crew, The Honoured Society, The Williams Family and the Nik Radev Gang.

Between 16th January 1998 and 7th February 2006, a total of 29 criminal figures connected with the Melbourne Mafia were murdered in what has now been referred to as the Melbourne Gangland Wars. Retribution was sought and the killings escalated as the various mob factions engaged in a power struggle for control.

Currently, most of these crimes have remained unsolved though they are under investigation by the Operation Purana taskforce which was set up by the Victorian police force to deal with the gangland murders. These investigations have been hampered by “Omerta” – a strict code of silence upheld by Mafia members. As such, very often, after a Mafia killing, the people involved will conveniently fail to remember seeing or hearing anything, much less confirm the existence of the Mafia itself.

Oh the 6th February 2006, Mario Condello, a key figure in the Melbourne Mafiosi, was murdered, sparking off much speculation about a possible resurgence in the gangland killings.

In True Lies: Documentary Studies, we’ve been learning heaps about the different modes of documentaries as outlined by Bill Nichols – namely, expository, observational, interactive and reflexive.

The reflexive mode, in particular, interests me, perhaps due to the documentary titled Fog Of War (about ex-US Defence Secretary, McNamara) that we watched during one of the screenings. It was perhaps, the most intriguing of all the docos we watched this semester (or at least it was to me). One scene in particular, presented an infamous historical event as an abstract concept instead of merely showing archived footage, which I believe provoked more thought than it would have otherwise. We see numbers in McNamara’s own handwriting flying off a page and dropping like bombs on Japan, thus presenting the idea that these numbers were just as responsible for the deaths of the Japanese as the actual bombs. As Allan James Thomas said in the lecture, it revealed something that one couldn’t have shown otherwise.

Special effects and manipulations aren’t ordinarily seen in most documentaries but in this case, it worked. I really like how the reflexive mode challenges how anything could possibly adequate enough to capture the truth on camera, especially since in most other modes, we are often presented something in a straightforward fashion – as if this IS the truth and we have no other option but to accept it. These other modes don’t display the effect of the camera crew’s presence on the subjects, or how the circumstances of the filming process might have influenced people’s answers and behaviour. Yet, while watching it, the audience is tempted to take for granted that what they see is the absolute truth, just because it is a documentary – “It’s not a fictitious scripted movie, so it must be true!” (not to say that some documentaries aren’t scripted, of course, or that all elements are necessarily non-fictitious).

What I found especially amusing was how the documentary was filmed (for the most part) in utter seriousness, quite as if they were presenting nothing but the truth, yet, they would include elements that questioned the validity of it all. Right at the start, the words “The following views and commentaries expressed herein are for entertainment purposes only” flashed across the screen. Whether or not this was a legal requirement or done intentionally to provoke thought, I have no idea. However, the fact that it was presented in such an attention-grabbing fashion rather than subtly made me assume it was the latter.

So far, for our Mafia TV doco, we seem to be headed down a reflexive documentary path based on our preliminary plans thus far. We’re aiming to do something a little more unconventional that does not necessarily adhere to all the traditional aesthetics of a documentary. For starters, we are hoping to include animation, caricatures as well as our own version of “Whack A Mole” that I don’t want to blab too much about for now, as it’s not completely fleshed out yet. However, I’m excited about it!

Need to locate an artist who can do the caricatures for us at little to no cost (given our non-existant budget) and within our time frame. Tough? Probably…

As my mind is currently at a blank, trying to think about what to film for this week’s vlog assignment, I thought I’d jot down a few things about what makes a good vlog before attempting to translate that into a visual video medium.

1. An interesting subject. This was pretty much the first thing that sprang to mind. I mean, if you were going to do a 10 minute expository vlog on a piece of tissue paper, who’d want to watch that? Unless, you know… you found some way to draw visual/aural/thought-provoking semiotic connections between the tissue and farcical comedy, existentialism, the meaning of God or your own fascinating life. Actually, I am beginning to regret bagging out the tissue idea. I think it has potential. But the point is, a vlog has to be about something interesting enough to watch, in order to hold the viewer’s attention.

2. Awareness of audience. I think, just like a regular blog post, a vlogger needs to be aware of the fact that they have an audience. There is a huge difference between writing for yourself and writing for others, no matter which medium one is writing in. When writing solely for yourself, perhaps one might be inclined to be more raw and truthful as there is no fear of being judged. One might also be inclined to be more lazy. Who’s going to actually SEE the piece, right? However, when vlogging for an audience, the vlogger needs to keep in mind while making a vlog, that there needs to be some exposition at times, to give their readers/viewers some idea of what is actually going on. The presence of an audience also necessitates the presentation of information in a way that makes sense not only to the vlogger, but to everyone else.

3. Awareness of medium. In order to make a good vlog, the vlogger needs to be fully aware of the medium they are working with. There is a substantial difference between READING a blog and WATCHING a vlog. Personally, I feel that with reading, one feels inclined to be alot more literal, in order to adequately and efficiently present whatever it is that one is trying to say. Video, on the other hand, allows for a bit more abstraction and I feel more inclined to display information in a way that allows the viewer to take what they want the most out of it, and interpret it in their own way. Text posts usually require the reader to read the entire post, digesting every word so as to understand the full story. With video, very often, there might be things shown on screen along the peripheral of the actual subject matter – things in the background happening, that the viewer might or might not notice. It is likely that often, due to peripheral/background details, each viewer comes out of the vlog with a slightly different experience. Text and Video also both afford the writer different advantages to each medium, and writers need to discover these for themselves and apply them to their full potential.

4. Length and size. A blog post might ramble on for quite some time if the writer feels the need to, and this is all rather fine and dandy. However, with a vlog, long extended videos will take ages to download, and possibly cause the file to be of a ridiculous size. While there are many on the internet who are quite willing to wait hours and hours on end for a movie to be downloaded on Limewire or Kazaa (am in no way condoning piracy, and am merely stating the fact that it exists, if anyone from the Australian Film Commission or Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft is reading this!), the same cannot be said of most people who read blogs and vlogs, who have come to expect a certain sense of immediacy when it comes to the receipt of information.

5. Shots. One needs to keep in mind that in general, after exporting your video to Quicktime, reducing it to 320 x 240 pixels in size, and setting the resolution to medium-low, there will obviously be constraints on the style of filming as you are shooting your blog. Long shots in general won’t work too well, as the distance will make details incredibly difficult to decipher on screen. I reckon close-ups/mid-shots of a subject would work best in most cases.

6. Sound. While not always necessary, sound adds a whole new dimension to the visual aspect of a vlog. It can work if used effectively, though I find that occasionally, very badly added sound just detracts from the subject and makes me want to stop watching the video. Sound (especially speech) should be at least somewhat clear, otherwise, viewers will be spending all their time straining to hear what’s going on, and if they don’t succeed, they’ll probably give up on the vlog and move on.

7. Metadata. Accompanying metadata (images, text, other media forms) to contextualize the vlog can often be helpful. A good program to help add metadata to Quicktime is METADATA HOOTENANNY. The link can be found in Adrian’s blog HERE.

8. (N)etiquette. A vlog in either poster movie format, or a Quicktime video with a controller, should generally not be set to “auto-play”. For one, there might be other videos on the same page of the blog and playing all of them together would be a disaster (unless you were deliberately going for some wacky spatial montage). Also, it is common (n)etiquette to allow viewers the choice of choosing when to start the video, rather than forcing them to be confronted with it the minute they arrive at your page.

9. Spontaneity & Personality. I think that while most vlogs are somewhat pre-planned, there should nevertheless remain at least a small element of spontaneity and immediacy to the video – as if it were shot without having had everything planned from A-Z. Stuff that looks too highly plotted out can be just as entertaining, but personally, I would rather go watch a movie or short film. A vlog can be a voyeuristic peek into the life and mind of another human, and therefore, an element of reality (e.g. things happening naturally and spontaneously as they happen, like they would in real life) is often appreciated as opposed to something entirely scripted and contrived. Of course, there are exceptions to this, depending on what the vlogger is attempting to show and demonstrate, and I suppose I’m referring more to “diary-like” posts about the vlogger’s personal life. Nevertheless, no matter what the subject matter, I believe that what makes a vlog interesting is the vlogger’s own personality. This should be injected into every vlog, irregardless of subject matter, because even if it is a vlog on, for example, politics, it is the vlogger’s personality that makes it different from simply tuning in and watching the news on BBC or CNN.

10. Experimental Journey. I believe a good vlog is an experimental journey for both the vlogger and the viewer. A vlog should go SOMEWHERE, yet, the vlogger should feel free to experiment and develop their own style as they are working within their own personal space on the web. While the destination (subject matter) is often the point of the vlog in the first place, the journey to get there is often what makes the destination all the more interesting. Viewers visit vlogs and blogs wanting to be taken on this journey, and it’s up to the vlogger to dance them through it!