An RMIT media student reflecting and blogging on her experiences at uni, on making and learning.

There is a web series on Youtube called Kids React, by the FineBros. Every week they’ll show a group of kids (regulars on the show) a viral video/youtube star and ask for their reactions. Besides that most of them, including six year old Morgan

Morgan from Kids React

are absolutely adorable, and they often give hilarious answers to the questions, the FineBros. like to ask for viewer interaction and involvement. The videos will often end with plugs from the kids saying ‘Thanks for watching, tell me what I should watch next!” They’ll be left suggestions in the comments, with the duo will then screenshot and include in the opening to the videos, as if to say – thanks for the suggestions, we took them on board. Videos the kids are shown are suggested by the viewers (age appropriate of course). It’s a neat system, and we’re trying to achieve something similar with our Tumblr magazine.

Ethical issues in documentary. This is what makes it such a difficult subject for me. There is a very fine line between telling someone’s story, and exploiting them to make a good documentary/piece of entertainment. The student short ‘Elvis’ from a few years ago I felt crossed that line. They chose to follow an Elvis impersonator who performed at the markets (can’t remember which ones? someone remind me?). It becomes clear in the documentary that he has some kind of mental/social problem, but at times the documentary feels like its exploiting this fact. There were moments where we laughed at ‘Elvis’, then immediately felt uncomfortable afterwards.

I can understand how it would be easy to lose sight of whats ethical and what isn’t in the editing suites – hours spent down there at a time, you tend to lose focus and in the end just want to produce something, but we must try to not let this happen. We need to keep focus all the time, and constantly consider issues as we see them. It’s perfectly possible to come up with a good documentary without being exploitative.

So last week was our chance to go out and be strictly observational. Our group decided since it was a spring day (well, felt as much like spring as it could get in August), we’d go out to the grassy spot near Pearson and Murphy’s cafe and film around there – people relaxing on a spring afternoon was the idea. Unfortunately, when we got there the sun was hiding behind the buildings at it wasn’t as sunny as we imagined it. We filmed what we could though. Celine went and uploaded it the next day, and edited her own version. Alene and I went in the day after that and edited together, not knowing Celine had done her own. From the footage, it was interesting to see the two very different results. Alene and I left music out, and tried our hand at colour correcting (well, Alene did. I sat there and cheered her on). It didn’t quite work the way we wanted, but it doesn’t look too bad. We also tried to find a story in ours, and focused on the shot we had of one man, by himself, drinking his coffee while looking at the groups of people lounging on the grass. We kept returning from the laughing people to him, and called it coffee for one.

That video can be found here.

Celine went with our original intentions however – she focused on a lazy afternoon in spring time, didn’t colour correct, and added some light, calming music to give it that extra touch of warmth and happiness.  It’s slow paced and relaxed.

Hers can be viewed here.

(I’m having trouble embedding in my posts, in case you couldn’t tell)

It’s up on our Tumblr now. This one has some slight audience involvement! We responded to a request to make a certain recipe, and posted the results. Keeping with the theme of family meals and traditions I talked about how I associate potatoes (this is a potato recipe) with my Oma’s Potato Salad that I looked forward to on Christmas’, the way only Oma can make it, and I asked for people to submit their comments and feedback. Seeing as we had two text based pieces, I decided to go with another video/photo piece with a voice over commentary/narration.

We’ve got  23 followers as I post this. I’m trying to keep interest in our page up with hash tags, and by retweeting other people.  I got very excited when I saw we had been retweeted, but then I realised that it was me that had done that on my personal account. Oh well, maybe some of the followers on my account will pick us up as well.

You can view the video here. Embedding problems abound with this blog.

…which is good, because we wanted to do something different.

The lecture yesterday showed us two different methods of tackling a similar subject. Housing Problems from 1935 and Blight from the mid-nineties both look at old, decrepit buildings. Housing Problems is very much in the expository style that was the standard for the decade it was made in – these houses are decaying slums, these images prove it. A single, steady voice over, with little emotion, totally serious. Blight, however, is quite performative and abstract. It doesn’t make use of standard interviews or observational techniques. It’s creative (and kind of hard to describe, but I found a nice little piece on it here). The point being made is that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to what is most commonly seen as the documentary style (observational footage, interviews, voice over etc.) We can be playful with it if we want to. Coming out of the True Lies cinema studies course, this was an easy concept/idea for me to grasp.

For ourselves, we want our documentary to take on performative aspects, and are going to use a poem to help us structure it – it will act as the backbone for the documentary in a way. We will also be recording interviews with people, covering all bases in a way. I’m hoping a soundscape will play a big part in creating the mood/feel of the documentary. Our group particularly loved ‘Drinking For England’ which was also shown in the lecture, and is an example of a documentary musical. I had no idea such a thing existed, but what an entirely fascinating way of creating a a doco – and of course, it is a doco – the people singing helped to write songs about their own lives. It would have people engaged, whatever else they may think about it at the time!

Well…we are moving along with this project. Sometime this week, hopefully Thursday or Friday, I’ll be trying my hand at a potato ghost recipe that one of the ‘fans’ on Facebook asked us to attempt. I’ve done a shout out on the twitter account, asking what peoples favourite potato recipe was, or what their family’s traditionally did with potatoes, and I’ll work something in about that hopefully! We have two articles down on our Tumblr, so technically we have six more to go, though I have a feeling we might end up with nine or even ten.

Michaels going to try and interview someone from Facebook who has liked our page – he has his own page about his Italian grandmother’s home recipes, and it fits in with our theme perfectly! It would give us a nice variety of articles to include. The tumblr is looking great, by the way, thanks being to Carmen, and Loan’s article on a traditional Vietnamese dish came out a treat!

I’ve been trying to develop some dialogues with people who have followed us on Twitter. One lady, a self-professed cheese lover, started following us and I noticed she had posted a link to an article about  making cheese at home. I got very excited and asked whether she had attempted it herself. No reply as yet, but I had hoped she might have been able to contribute pictures or something similar for another article. I have had great success with the cupcake duo however! (Well, I christened them the cupcake duo, their name is actually theBakingDuet). They replied to my tweet when I suggested the post some pictures to our Facebook wall of meals that mean something special to them, and they said they’d be sure to do so. If they remember, that’d be great, but if they don’t I guess I tried. I don’t want to spam them about it – there is that fine line between trying to start a conversation, and being incredibly annoying. I know that when I like pages on Facebook, I almost immediately hid them from my newsfeed because they post useless crap that I do’t want to see – I just like the name of your page because it was funny for goodness sake!

…and sound in general. Sound recording seems to be something that I’m falling into at uni and outside of uni. I did some work experience with a sound recordist a month or two back, who had over thirty years experience. I was boom op on a short film with him and generally helped him out and he chatted away about his equipment and general sound recording tips and advice. I had a lot of fun. I’m working on sound again in a couple of weeks for a web series. Someone from uni suggested that I’d like to work on sound to the producer and she contacted me. I’m a little nervous about it. I know there is someone else working on sound with me, but I’m not sure if I’m expected to do the actual recording or boom operator or both. I know what equipment they’ll be using, and they don’t look they difficult – there are tutorials on youtube anyway.

Sound can do amazing things – evoke emotion and mood, and depth to a film. Music is a big part of that. I’m thinking this time around for the sound design, I might try my hand at composing something simple on piano, or ask my piano tutor to help me with it, as he sometimes composes for student films. We thought it would even be nice to include a strain from a classic Australian song such as ‘Waltzing Matilda’ or ‘I Am Australian’, seeing as the documentary is about Australianess, in a way. I will have to check copyright on these however.

I mentioned in my sound design notes that I’m taking inspiration from the Social Network. This is the piece I had in mind.

Hand Covers Bruise

(still unable to embed, goddamit)

After last weeks tute, we went out and filmed this (embedding hates me, the link will take you through).

In the tute we had watched some of Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Bob Dylan, and were told to pay particular attention to how the interviews with Dylan had been edited. One of the things that struck us were the different frames/shots of Dylan. Obviously Scorsese wouldn’t cut and ask Dylan to wait while he reframed – the way that was most likely done was the camera operator reframed while the question was being asked. The questions were cut and the cuts covered with cutaways to archival footage or photographs.

Now, we don’t have so many cutaways – we have some, but others we did have we decided not to use because we didn’t like them, or they didn’t fit with the story etc. So a lot of our cuts aren’t hidden. I don’t think that detracts from the piece however, and I like the way Alene filmed it. I’m not so much a fan of my sound though. We couldn’t get to the location we originally wanted, so we settled for the ‘breakout space’ on level 3 of building 9. There was a hum there (maybe from some computers or air conditioning, I’m not quite sure) but I couldn’t keep from picking it up on the recorder. Now our short has a hum. Music made it more noticeable, so no music this time around. Thankfully, I think it works without music – everything we could find made it sound very melodramatic.

Just a very quick post – I’m not going to reveal what marks I gave myself, and what I gave my group members. I will say that I’m quite happy with my group, and I think Michael, Carmen and Loan are doing great jobs. I’m glad to be working with them.

As for myself, I think I’m travelling (*gasp* travelling – on the road!) okay at the moment. I personally feel that I need to put more effort into this blog and reflection. I think I’m working well with my group – hopefully I’m pulling weight as well.

We had a lecture via skype – SKYPE! If it wasn’t actually skype then it performed the same function. I’ve never really used it much myself – once last semester we tried to do a group meeting via skype, and it was a bit of a fiasco. It was decided face to face meetings were the go. Other times has been to talk to my cousin in Sweden, but that’s not often. I mostly talk to her on Facebook, we skype if there’s a few family members present. Oh well, social media expands yet again…back to the lecture.

John Hutchinson, ABC Pool’s community editor, spoke to us from Sydney about his career in online media, and gave us some valuable advice to boot. When you’re trying to form a community, like we are, its important to make connections, to understand people.

“You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

In terms of twitter, I took this to mean – ‘Hey, I’ll follow you, if you follow me back!’ On Twitter, I’ve not simply been asking for followers, I’ve been following people, and retweeting their tweets, mentioning them in ‘@’ posts, and trying to start conversations with people. Michaels been doing a similar thing with our Facebook page, recently giving a shout out to a page that looks at home-cooked Italian recipes that ‘Grandma used to make’. That guy now has us listed under his like section.

Some of the more specific advice John gave us about Twitter included ‘engaging with followers through conversation’ (check – though I’m still trying to take these convo’s a bit further); crafty hashtags (if that means using trending hashtags customised to reflect our topic, sneakily promoting our own page, then check); retweets (I’ve already talked about that – check!)

I was called up to ask John a question – I can’t remember now exactly what I asked, but I do remember him telling me to look for people with similar interests to us – that is, home-cooking – and follow them and engage with them. I was secretly pleased when I realised I’d already been doing that to an extent. Getting that advice from a professional must mean I’m on the right track.