Posts Tagged ‘reflection’

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Final blog report for Media Industries

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Role

My role in the project is cooperating with April and get the Chinese film industry part done. Our group allocated jobs equally to the each member, me and April are responsible for all the researches of Chinese film industry. At first, April found some information about the Hong Kong film industry and I responsible for finding interviewees for our interview. I also wrote up interview questions and sent them to the contacts I found on university websites. Since none of the professors/lecturers replied our message, we decided to change it to mainland China instead of Hong Kong. April asked all her friends working in media companies to complete out interview and I’m responsible for translating Chinese into English, as well as contextualising them into blog posts. I think my role within my part is more for leading directions and making decisions like when we should change strategies and how to organise the works. While within the whole group, my role is more of a supportive role. I helped for shootings, I did all the tasks required, I attended meetings and given out feedback. One of the problems is not active enough. I think our group does not have a sufficient method regard to communicating and discussing, therefore it was a bit hard for me to keep updating and exchanging thoughts with each other. Especially when we were deciding the research topic, I don’t think we have communicated enough before the decision. In this case I’m looking more to talking with others and adding more ideas to shape a better idea.

Progress

As I mentioned in my posts before, our group had been changing the research topic. Therefore I’ve been changing my strategies as well. At the first time while we are still doing the cultural differences in films, my plan for it is analysing Crouching tiger and hidden dragon as the case study. April and I have already gathered few information on it. Then we change it to the Hong Kong film industry. We plan to source our information from friends, websites and interviews. Unfortunately, the plan doesn’t go with the reality. Firstly, we don’t have any friends has ever worked in the film industry, or even the media industry in Hong Kong; We tried to conduct a few interviews within Melbourne, but all the interviewees refused us saying they don’t have enough knowledge of the industry. Then I tried to look up something on the Internet; except a few websites about the supporting organizations, there are nothing much reflecting how the industry looks like and the roles within. Then I came up the idea of finding contacts form the university media departments. I looked up a few universities and marked down the related professors/lecturers. We have sent out 9-10 emails to those professionals but only one replied, saying he’s not able to answer our question because he doesn’t have experience in Hong Kong film industry. As a result, we have to give up on this topic due to no sources at all. The alternative ways is on our friends. Since April had finished her internship in mainland China, she has some networks in the field and able to do the interview for us. We gathered almost 15 interviews from April’s network and able to find something really useful. In my perspective, the strength is quick reaction and able to come up with a back-up plan immediately; the weakness will be lack of organising, trusted too much in planning and not thinking careful enough. To improve this I should came up with a diverse methods regards to researching, gathering information and analysing problems.

Strategies

The collaboration strategies have always been sending mails through Facebook and group meeting. I don’t find it sufficient enough for discussing problems especially for a big project like this. When everyone’s working on the same project, there will be chances where the works got overlapped and changing ideas on the project. I don’t think we have deal with this well and we definitely lack of communication throughout the project. Likewise, the group meetings are not always on time for changes and it always comes after the decisions. While I’m working with April, we can contact each other easily, but not to other group members. We only meet as a group during tutorial or after we finished our parts of research. My learning strategies were looking for information in English and articles in scholar. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t working well since the information can not give me enough views on the industry. Therefore I changed my target at looking up the Chinese websites for relevant information. In China, it doesn’t have Google scholar to provide you academic references. I found most of my information on the government website, which is an authentic source. I found the relevant regulations, backgrounds and introduction to some significant companies in Chinese websites. The only problem is to translate them into English which is time consuming. Thus, I found some similar English information about Chinese film industry and combine them in order to help my translating process. I think this can help me translate in a more correct way and more professional.

Problems

The most problematic thing is changing topics and deciding a topic so late. I have mentioned this a few times before; our research topic is slowing down our working process and stops us from doing some real work. We are sort of restricted in the thought of we must do something about the film industry or the films. In this case, we have been amended our concepts around ‘film’ for several times. Thus we need to re-write our plan; look at different sources and all of the works are useless if the topic is not set. Another great difficulty to us is not reply and refusing from all the potential interviewees from either Hong Kong and in Melbourne. I have never expected that no one would provide information to us. This is the first time for me feeling so frustrating for conducting interviews. After this experience, I realised that we can’t expect everything goes on plan and a back up plan is always useful. The other problem I met is the research topic itself. Industry skills are something abstract, uncertain and vary under different circumstances. To research skills, it’s hard to find any academic sources on it. Skills are from real experience therefore we mainly focus on interviews see if we can get helpful tips for the graduates. All we can analyse is the background and how may the skills adapted from it. But for the findings in the interviews, we can just sum them up and presented as the result.

Connections and Intersections

In my point of view, the value of the course is to help me face the real world and get things done by using my ability. I realised that networking is extremely important if you want to achieve something, especially in the media industry. Good networking means more chances and helps. There are things turning you down but I should adapt it immediately and came up with another plan. I think this is one of the essential for media students as well. The industry is always changing and full of uncertainties, I should get used to sudden changes and unknown incidents, always prepared myself to deal with these things. For group interactions, I think it’s way not enough for most of the time. As a group, we should keep updating our ideas, exchanging our thoughts and reporting our progress for better organisation and management. The experience taught me that there should be roles for each group member. Someone need to be the leader in directing the project aim, someone need to be updating information between members and someone need to check if anything missed or uncover. If every member knows exactly what is he/she responsible for, the group work will be more efficient.

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Final for SMP

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Except uploading a few posts on Pool and helping my friends with a few technical issues, I barely did anything as a social media producer. Though, I reasons for this. My tute-specific activity was trouble-shooting and making tutorial clips for the new users in Pool and My Tribe. As I mentioned in the post before, there is a detailed instruction on Pool showing the steps on how to upload/download/share contents on Pool. In this case, I don’t feel any need to make similar tutorial clips which might confuse the new users. While the making of series clips is also time-consuming, there isn’t a reason to waste time on this. I also failed my personal community building task as I argued in the other post. Due to I’m an international student, I don’t have a reasonably large network in Australia. The friends I know are my classmates (who already participated in My Tribe), and my other network is back to China. According to my job plan, I supposed to ask fan communities to participate in My Tribe. There are a few facts stopping them to contribute on My Tribe. Firstly, most of the Chinese do not feel easy to create contents in English. Even though English is one of the must-learn course in China, it’s their second language and they might not able to express what they want freely and fluently. Secondly, most of the fan communities in China are for singer/actor/bands/celebrities. China does not apply its copyright law strictly like Australia, therefore the materials that the fans have are always piracy stuffs or with copyright. While Pool belongs to ABC National with detail declaration on the works uploaded, Chinese fans might have the problem to get sharable contents and upload it to Pool. Thirdly, China has a great censorship system over Internet; foreign social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are banned. As a result, no Chinese contributor can access any updates or news about My Tribe. In my perspective, language, intellectual property rights and censorship laws are the main barriers for Chinese communities to participate in My Tribe. I did not do well as a community mentor in Pool. First reason for this is I did not dedicate enough time browsing through Pool and make comments. Secondly, I have doubts about the topic My Tribe and I don’t know what kind of reaction is appropriate. Sometimes I saw some images on My Tribe; they didn’t make enough sense for me to figure out their topics/themes. There isn’t an obvious standard for My Tribe; I think anything can be classified as parts of one’s life. Without a standard of a bench mark, I could not give out my opinion easily if that would be a misunderstanding of others’ work. I tried to upload some contents to My Tribe, but it wasn’t working well. It was a series image of beaches in Australia and I named them the beaches I loved. Then I received an email from Kyla saying that they are not specific enough for My Tribe. The reason why I post them up is because they are part of my life, my place to spend time and I hope those who like beach will response to me as well. There are confusions towards My Tribe as the theme. I thought things I like are part of My Tribe while in fact it’s not. I should have explained myself better since pictures do not necessarily say a thousand words.

To be a Social Media Producer, one should have good communication skills in order to recruit, express and contribute. In my perspective, social media producer is not only the one producing the media, but also the one promoting/letting others to know what the media is. Social media producer should have the passion in working on the social networking platform; love to make friends; be a leader/guidance for other people; able to come up with things to interest people; always care about what’s going on within the community; interact with contributors and encourage them to work their best. Though, social media might be more aggressive than this if under a commercial context. I realised that social media producer like us/or in ABC National are more gentle, honest and encouraging. In my opinion, if you are working for the commercial-aimed social media website, you need to be aggressive on contents, tricks and promotion methods. This would be quite different from our roles. I guess this kind of social media producers will create a more sensitive/specific topic which can be associated with most of the public. They tend to attract people to join, to pay attention to their website in order to earn visibility and reputation. As a result they are able to get advertisement and generate profit. The differences between the aims of the social media producers distinguish us from businessmen.

I would give myself 68 out of 100 according to my performance over the semester. Even though I failed many tasks, I tried to find out the reasons behind it and reflect on it. I also tried hard to follow my job plan but it was not working much for me. After consulting with tutor, I took the advices and thought about my ideas. What I could do best was clearing my clouds on the topic at the very beginning. Rather than making a perfect plan, I should have taken the action earlier and try things out.

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After presentation

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

I guess our presentation wasn’t most attractive one or the most interesting one. Our problems are lack of interactive, compact information, boring presentation and hard to maintain interests.

The reasons for this are:

  • Due to our research information and area, we don\t have enough visual material to support our results. Although we have some visual interviews with directors/producers, we don’t think its necessary showing since they are just part of the research, we need to give out the backgrounds of everything before introducing the video. In this case we won’t be having enough time to cover other parts. Likewise, the interviews about Chinese film industry are email interviews, it’s impossible to just read out or show out the long paragraph without summarising.

 

  • Our research project is aimed to be a career guideline for graduates who want to expand their career to overseas. It is hard to turn a guideline into something vivid enough for presentation. It doesn’t mean that we can’t. We can make our guideline into a short drama, making the guideline into a script. Rather than making up case study with two fictional character and read it out, it will be more fun to see them alive. However, this is very time-consuming and we can never get it done before the presentation. On another hand, it might not worth it to make something big for just a presentation.

 

  • Time management is weak for us especially we are reading so much information within 20 minutes. We had rehearsed and timed before the presentation, we realised that we barely have time to finish everything. We meant to show our blog, which is the final object to present our research; or make a PowerPoint with images or some motions along with the readings. As a result, we didn’t get to show our blog and we only have limited time to finish our readings.

 

  • Not enough preparation for the presentation. I admitted that we didn’t put enough effort at preparing the presentation. Since we have difficulties in confirming our topic and getting interviewees for the Chinese film industry part, our progress is slow and we wasted a lot of time. When we finally got most of our research done, we only have time to organise the information and make them into points. We did our best to turn them into a case study, which might be more interesting to listen. All of our points are our research conclusions, which are more concise in the SWOT analyse.

We have achieved that presenting our findings to the peers, but we definitely lack of creativity and preparation regarding to the form of presentation. I believe that the blog will be easier for everyone to read and find our useful information at working in the film industry either China or Australia. Or, just a glance at what they might look like comparing to your own point of view.

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Something about Advanced skill workshop

Friday, May 28th, 2010

The workshop I attended was directing. I have learned a lot from the workshop about how to direct, what to direct and how to interact with the actors.

Firstly I learned how to analyze the script; make sure you get the right theme and make it outstanding; break down the script into act, sequences, scenes and bits; draw out the ‘drama’ (conflict) of the story; write back-story of the characters and figure our the character and characteristics of the actors. I have recognized that, scripting is very important for the first step of shooting. As a director, you need to know exactly what you are doing /dealing with and get yourself prepared. The theme is the spine of the film; therefore you should know it well and arrange other supportive details around the theme. Building up the characteristic of the actor leads to a better expression/acting. Even though it is not shown on the screen, it will help the actor to act naturally and in purpose. Breaking down the script into small parts can help you arrange the shooting and give you a clue of how should you narrate your film.

Secondly I learned how to direct the actors to act and what should I do for rehearsal. As a director, you are the one to define everything in the script; you should have an image of what needs to be look like in what ways. This applies to the actors as well; the director should know what kind of performance you want, what kind of things you want the actors to express and lead them to the right emotion. How to lead the actors into the situation you want needs skills. There is a difference between action verb and result acting. Action verb is the director telling the actors what to do in action, for example, ‘you feel hungry now and you walk quickly to the fridge for food’. In this case, the actor will follow your order to achieve what you want them to do. Result acting can make the actor act naturally rather than following the order. The example of result acting will be ‘you haven’t eaten for the whole day, you are starving and you see the fridge, what will you do’? These two similar expression leads to different kinds of acting. Result acting can leave some imagination for the actors and let them perform freely, that can make the acting more vivid and brings out the character of the actor. What to do on set and rehearsal is an important part before the shoot. While the actors are rehearsing, the crew needs to rehearse as well. During the acting, director should work with the camera operator for articulating the camera positions, angles and frames. The best way is to map everything as the rehearsal goes, for example the location and heights of the cameras. Once you finish this, you can focus on directing the actors rather than working on where to put the equipments. What I learned from the workshop is, you can do a ‘start-stop’ rehearsal to help you block the scene. You can call stop at any moment and everyone freezes, then you can adjust whatever you want until you are satisfied, call start to continue the rehearsal. The other thing that deserves attention is the making of shot list. During the rehearsal, how many shots, the master shot and the droppable shots should be listed.

Thirdly, when everything is settled for the shooting, it’s time to focus on the performance of the actors. There are a few skills about directing better performance. The most important/effective one will be giving objectives to each actor/actress, in order to make them have more natural reaction in the film. For example, before every scene the director should give each actor an objective, things like the purpose of the action they will take, why they are in the situation and etc. These skills answer most of my questions while I was directing for the short film project before. Back to that time it was my first time as a director, I didn’t know how to deal with the actors and what should I do exactly. Now I know how to work properly on set and how to interact with actors. The workshop has provided me a lot of methods to solve my problems, for instance, I was shooting my movies at night and the actors were getting tired and losing their attention, which slow our progress and they wasn’t acting good. I didn’t know what to do as director since they were volunteering for me and I can’t shout at them. One of the skills I learned is playing games with the crew to draw their focus back. Maybe this is not much of a technical aspect of learning, it is still a very useful tips and I can always apply it in my workplace.

For the Prod! Studio, we will make three clips next semester. In this case I will have many chances to work with actors or be a director. I will certainly make use of what I have learned from the workshop. When I write my script, I will write it in a way that can make my directing easier and more specific. Overall, I found the workshop is absolutely amazing and helpful.

Self-assessment: (The mark I gave myself is 8)

• Quality of the writing and responses to the online video
evaluation questions.

The writing and response to the online videos is not that satisfied for me. I couldn’t find any extra introduction of the videos I chose. I think because the videos are short and with little budget, they are not like the other films that gives out detail information of behind the scene stories.

• Overall critique in relation to thinking about the notion of
online video aesthetics.

I think the videos I chose have given me quite a few ideas on the format I will use for my videos. As I talked about in my posts, I summarised the characteristics of the videos in order to give myself a concept of online videos. I also reflected from the formats of the video and associate them with my future plans.

• The quality of the writing and the evaluations made between
the workshop and the studio.

I think the quality of the writing and the evaluations made between the workshop and the studio is quite good. I talked about what I learnt in detail, as well as reflecting on the knowledge. The writing reflects my thoughts during the studio and the summary of the techniques. But one of the weaknesses in the writing is not enough connections drew between the workshop and the studio. The reason for this might be the duration of the studio is quite short; I haven’t generated enough thoughts about my ideas on the online videos. Likewise, directing is more about things on set and interacting with the actors. For the studio, it was still at the stage of pre-production and needed more time to work out the procedure and schedule. 

• Participation in workshop critiques and discussions.

First of all, I attended all the workshops. Secondly, I actively participate in the tasks and rehearsals. Even though I didn’t speak a lot during the workshop, I listened carefully and react to what had been taught. During the rehearsals of individual groups, I tried to finish my task as well as remembering what the teacher said. I have learned a lot with the skills being taught, compared with my experience while I was director last semester. I found solutions and lots of tips from the workshop which should be helpful to my future directing role. 

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Reality doesn’t go with the plan 2

Monday, May 10th, 2010

My second part of the SMP plan is finding contributor from my ste target groups. There are a few facts that made me failed this plan; since I’m an international student, I  have a restricted social network in Australia, I planed to find my target group back to China where I’m more familiar with sourcing people. Likewise, my target groups are fan clubs because they are more likely to contribute and share with other people about what they like.  Problems rises in this case:

  • As most of Chinese do not use English as their first language, they will have problem if they want to contribute contents on My Tribe. This links to the geographical limits on the My Tribe projects as well as the Pool. Social networking websites like Facebook, even though it is from America, it’s also available in different languages includes Chinese, Korean and etc.
  • The nature of Pool itself has restricted a certain contents to be uploaded like fan-made videos which has pirated images or audio sources. It is very different in the backgrounds of China and Australia. Australia, especially ABC national radio are very strict to intellectual property rights. We can see this in the process of uploading contents on Pool, there are 5 steps if you want to upload stuffs, you have to state clearly who owns the rights of the contents and if they are usable.  This restrictions seem normal and essential for Australian or content-sharing websites, but there is a different situation in China. China does not have enough completed and strict policies regards to the sharing and using of the intellectual properties. From my perspective and my experience, most of the copy rights contents can be found easily on social networking websites and online sharing websites. People tend to use it or share it with no concerns to the copy rights. For a fan community specifically, they always based their work on copy right visual sources and audio as well. Even though they want to participate and contribute to Pool, they still don’t have the right to publish their works.
  • China is a communism country, they have censorship over most of the media like films, television and Internet.  Accessing to Facebook, Twitter, and some blogging websites are prohibited in China. Therefore Chinese Internet users have their own social networking websites like Kaixin001 or Renren (A similar version of Facebook).

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Reality doesn’t go with the plan

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Reflecting on my job plan, my SMP role doesn’t quite work for me. I set up an account for answering questions as a part of trouble shooting, I posted it on the My Tribe forum but seems that no one ever noticed it. I also ‘plan’ to made some video tutorial clips in order to help the new user of Pool to upload/download contents on My Tribe, but I found it quite difficult to made series of clips by myself and it’s really time consuming. In this case, I am totally stuck with my SMP task and don’t know what else can I do.

As a reflecting process, I try to sum up why did I fail the task in a few points (inspired by the oen to one consulting):

  • I believe that many people had difficulties in some way of dealing the technical issues when they tried to use Pool, cuz I helped out some of my friends for the uploading problems. The reason why no one emails me problems could be, they don’t even know there is someone to help them with the problems. There is a communication error happening to my role within the SMP team. I couldn’t find a proper place/platform to announce my email to everybody, since I can’t insert whatever I want on the My Tribe page in Pool. I put it as a topic in the My Tribe forum, but again, no one uses the forum or maybe no one really cares. This made me think about the purpose of My Tribe, the sources of the contributors and their purpose of contributing. Let’s say if it’s a group for a celebrity and the members are fans, or whoever has an interest of the celebrity; they tend to follow what’s going on in the group, they share news/information about the celebrity, they gossip together and they always updated their knowledge around the topic. If the contributors have a force to make them join the group, they will naturally keep an eye on what is happening. Say if the contributors of the My Tribe group are fans of ‘my tribe ‘, they will seek ways to get the update news about ‘my tribe’ and has a bigger chance to notice that I put up a topic about trouble shooting in the forum.
  • The unnecessarily of making tutorial clips failed my plan again. This is because Pool itself as a large and formal website, it has a comprehensive system regarding to the technology problems with contributing contents. I have searched through the Pool website, it has quite a few pages about how you upload different contents, what are the requirements and is restricted, detail explanation/guideline about all the possible issues you might come up with if you are a new user. In this case, I can’t find any reason to make the tutorial clips and double things up.

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Important background

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

After watching other groups’ doco, they really impressed me. Also, I realized a really important element in the shooting, the background.

Since most of the docos are interviews, where people standing in front of the camera, talking, i think the background is visually very important. And not only background, but the framing as well. I wanna talk about the visual construction of the doco, in our projects and others.

In our project, honestly i think the background is very bad, the framing is not well considered and the lighting is not god enough. Why I think it’s bad? Firstly when we came to editing, visually it looks really flat. I think it’s because the lighting is so even, there is no back lighting and looks very yellowish. Maybe it’s the screen problem, the picture quality looks very bad and lack of definitions… Some framings are strange, the talking room was too much, and the frame is not tied enough and there is no point to spot the subject. While in other part our interviewee was sitting in front of his bar, and the sun shine was on his left eye, which looks very dramatic and strange. Behind him was the glasses and mirror, which is very distracting and not clear. In my opinion, I think the background should be better considered cause our footages are almost about him talking to the camera. Maybe we could get him sitting closer to the book shelf, then take a middle close up, get rid of other things, hv a clearer background, also, make him sit up straight. Actually for the bar scene, it would be better if he leaning on the kitchen or the desk of the bar, rather than him sitting in the bar looks like a bar tender. And the one shooting outdoor is not quite necessary, since we couldn’t control the lighting and the atmosphere soundscape, I think it’s better to pick a indoor location.

I also found the other ways to make the picture look better. In one of the groups in our tute, I really like their background for interviews, the pure colour is clear, sharp and focus more on the subject. The lighting is good as well, the interviwees didnt merge with the background and given a bit 3D. The framing is good, the shifting of middle close up, close ups and wide shots were natural and fresh. When I was doing camera work for the other group, which is mainly focus on the interviewee talking, I chose a stable style. Our interviewee was sitting at a table in the restaurant with a clear background, the mainly light is the light of the restaurant, and I added a table lamp as the fill. When I tried to do the white balance, it became very bluish, therefore I left it as it is. The framing is middle-close up, while he was talking, I zoom in to his hands or the paper on the table slowly, trying to make it steady. While we came to the editing, the picture looks good, becuase there isn’t much distractions at the back and the interviewee was in focus.

I believe that, for a mature production, every detail should be in the concerned and need to be given meanings. Once you decided the style and what you want to focus on in you interview, then you should consider how to make your topic or your idea stands out.

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Our mobile version and the final

Friday, October 16th, 2009


Play Quicktime version



Play Quicktime version

The first one is the three minutes one and the second one id the 30 seconds one mobile version.

For the first one, I’m overall satisfied with the production, it reflects most of our ideas and the rough concept of the story. We made pretty much all the sets, designed the arrangement of the forests.making a fine one is a lot harder than I thought because you need to generate many effects, sets, other avatars and many footage to articulate the story. We choose to make things out of the simple objects, and pick the most important pilot to shoot. The story is clear in a fairy tale format, two children going for an adventure and met a witch. The ending was the climax and unexpected. Although we did not provide much details for the story, I think it’s still easy to understand. Most of the things are original and our selling point is ordinary but surprised. We found some great sets for fantasy witch environment, which is very great. Likewise, some camera angles are very good like the spinning angles and bird view. The changing environment set also help a lot to make the creepy witch-like atmosphere.

The mobile version is a bit rough and abstract. Originally our idea was making it into the memories of witches with chanting and whispers. Now it becomes the unknown trip of the two children. I think the new one is more like a trailer, or a hook for the audience, what are the two children doing and where are they going. Since we edit it from the three minutes version, there is no extra shooting on it. Though, the voice-over and the soundscape for the whole is very good.

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