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

I had a good reason to miss it! I was on a shoot today that wrapped at about 8 pm. I’m on sound again, and it’s really very stressful.

I was rather bummed at having to miss seeing everyone’s films completed. In the last few weeks, it seemed as if there was no shortage of Film-TV students to be found in the edit suites, either fine-tuning some already great works, or frantically making last minute alterations. As for ours, I hope it was well-recieved. I am proud of it in the end, even though we had technical difficulties along the way. It certainly hasn’t put me off making documentaries in the future, which is probably a triumph! I just need to learn to get over  my shyness and start approaching people if I know I have a good story.

Of course, Cassie, Celine and Alene were invaluable and great to work with (if we didn’t get ourselves sidetracked by youtube – a very real danger when you spend any length of time underground in the edit suites!). I hope I have the opportunity to work with them in the future.

As I didn’t get to see all the doco’s screened tonight, I’m going to talk about the two that I saw very close to completion, if not already completed (when I saw them last, both groups told me they need minor adjustments – I didn’t see how, but we’re all so picky about our own films.)

First is the documentary that I believe was officially titled ‘Karl’ by Lincoln, Jason, Kieran and Charles. The basic concept it looking at the story of Karl, who late in his life, decided he wanted to be an actor. Karl is such a character, that it’s hard not to love this film. The opening scene in which he plays different characters, all talking about himself, is hilarious, and even though it’s him, and he’s showing off his acting,  Excellent use of cutaway footage, nice clear sound – this is a really enjoyable short doco.

And then there is Mel, Alex, Maddie and co.’s doco about the group of deaf dancers (apologies that I cannot think of the name right now) – I think choosing to focus on three dancers for their story was a smart move – too many people and the film would have seemed crowded and less personal. The use of sound I figured would be very important from the start, and I completely agree with the choice to use subtitles rather than voice over. We watch the screen then, rather than listen, and we can still see the way they use their hands to talk, even though we’re still reading. The music was the perfect compliment.

Well, short reviews and a rather short post to wrap up Film-TV 2. I’m hoping I get a chance to watch many of the other films as well (so far I’ve only seen bits of others – not enough to do them justice, and even the two above I haven’t seen in a few days). And like I said above, I hope to be participating in more doco’s in the future!

Williams and Cothrel define online communities as ‘groups of people who engage in many-to-many interactions online’ and form ‘wherever people of common interests are able to interact’ (2000, p.81). It would seem simple enough therefore, to join and form our own. Over the past twelve weeks, we have delved into the world of social media, online communities and explored and developed our own participatory online projects. In developing the online magazine, Home Made Helpings, I have discovered a entirely new way of looking at social media and the way it can be used, especially in the sense of interacting and, even forming, online communities. I learnt a lot about the idea of the community in an online environment, and discovered that what most interested me about the project was how social and participatory strategies can be used to generate engagement and user contribution. By using different social media platforms, mainly through Twitter, I was able to observe how different online communities were formed, and attempted to tap into those communities using several strategies, and with varying degrees of success. It is the formation of online communities and how they operate that has interested me the most throughout this project, and the presence of these communities and spaces is what I intend to reflect upon in the following report.

My own role in this project, aside from contributing content to our Tumblr, was to seek out followers and interact with the food community via our Twitter account, and to post regular updates and tweet regularly, which I would try to do at least a couple of times a week. The tweets were designed to attract followers of a similar interest to our theme, and I would attempt to raise their profile by using trending hash tags, or creating my own. However, using trending hash tags, while having a higher probability of being seen, didn’t necessarily mean that we’d attract our target audience, and I soon stopped using the trending hash tags, and would simply use food related ones. Whenever a new article was posted on the Tumblr, I would link to it on the Twitter feed, and use food related hash tags in order to get people to follow the link. Some of what I did, similar to what was being done on the Facebook page, was to tweet people directly using ‘@’ mentions. I would either ask people if they would like to contribute to our Tumblr, or simply compliment them on their own Twitter account or blog, in an attempt to establish a dialogue with them.

Establishing connections in an already existing community was the hardest aspect of managing the twitter account. Whilst I had found a number of existing food communities with their own twitters accounts, their followers would sometimes number in the thousands. Tweeting them directly would often result in no response or re-tweet. I observed that while there were certain people that these food bloggers would seem to interact with on a regular basis, for the most part they would simply tweet their own content, or links to their own blog. A greater deal of success was reached by following and tweeting people who didn’t have such a large amount of followers. It seemed to me that, quite reasonably, those with a larger amount of followers and a very well established community, didn’t feel as great a need to interact and gain people’s attention, rather than those who, like us, were just starting out and keen to build up their own small community and online ties to different. people.

Frequency of the posts seemed, rather surprisingly to me at first, to have little effect on the number of followers that one could gain on Twitter. I believe it was less the number of the posts that counted, but the content that you linked to, or whether your tweets could be seen as interesting or funny. I know that a number of the accounts I followed would tweet incessantly, and often only links to a site where you could buy cookware or home wares or something along those lines. I originally thought that I had followed enough people to have a nicely diluted and varied twitter feed, but often times I could have many posts in a row from the one twitter user. Not only did I not appreciate this, finding it annoying, in the end I even stopped following certain people because I felt that they were spamming my twitter feed. Moving a conversation or interaction with someone from the physical world to the online world it seems, does not negate the fact that sometimes, people are annoying. I tried to make myself aware of these online ‘manners’ and would tweet only once or twice a day at most. It was for this reason (that of avoiding being a ’spammer’) that we made the decision not to link our Twitter and Facebook accounts, so that any tweet would automatically show up on our Facebook news feed. Having used both Twitter and Facebook for personal use, I feel that Twitter is more easily accessible and, being in a more open, public environment there is a tendency to tweet more than you post to Facebook. I also tried to time my tweets for when the other users would be most active, but seeing as half our followers were from the U.S or different time zones, and others were from Australia, it had the tendency to become slightly confusing.

It is difficult to judge the overall success of our project. The number of followers on both the Facebook and Twitter accounts was almost exactly the same throughout the twelve week run of Home Made Helpings, give or take a few, however user contribution, for the reasons I have outlined above, was rather low and we had much better success on that count on Facebook rather than Twitter (what we consider our biggest success came from an interview with a food blogger who we contacted via Facebook). Considering that this is the first time any of us had used social media in this way before (personal use of Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr aside – and none of us had used Tumblr before as a matter of fact), I feel satisfied with what we were able to accomplish, but I also understand that part of the real purpose of this project was to foster our understanding of how online communities operate and this experience was able to give me a good grounding and some first-hand knowledge of that. Looking back, I don’t think there is a lot we could have done extremely differently. I personally feel that it might have been beneficial for us if I had asked for people to re-tweet us. In identifying things important maintaining a healthy online community, Williams and Corthrel outline that community relations is one of the most important. As they put it, ‘…the main reason people participate in communities – online or otherwise – is to interact with other people. Where there is little or no face-to-face interaction, nurturing and strengthening connections can be a delicate balancing act.’ (2000, p.91). The connections we  forged during this project needed constant attention and ’strengthening’, otherwise they would have dropped off and not survived. I quickly learnt that if I wanted people to interact with me on Twitter, then I need to tweet at them again and again – but then the ‘delicate balancing act’ came in. I had to be mindful of what I saw as the line between establishing a connection with someone, and just plain out spamming them.

Overall, I am satisfied with my contribution to our social media experiment, as it were. I feel that it has been a valuable learning experience for me in terms of navigating the world of online communities. Online communities are forever prevalent, as ‘the thirst for making connections, for communication, is insatiable and that is why new communities form every day’ (Preece, p. 350) The most difficult part is determining what your audience, or targeted community members are looking for, but once we had a clearer idea of what we wanted to offer it became easier to interact, and sometimes even fun.

Preece, J 2001, ‘Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success’ Behavior and Information Technology Journal, vol.20, no.5, pp. 347-356

Williams, R & Cothrel, J (2000) ‘Four Smart Ways To Run Online Communities’ Sloan Management Review, p.81-91

Week 12 – We made it! 9 articles (and possibly one or two more coming out this week) and a couple of dozen of twitter and Facebook followers later, Home Made Helpings is wrapping up. We did our presentation today – four minutes can really fly by! It was good to reflect on how the focus of our project has changed, our successes, and things we could have done a little better. In terms of the content that we have up, and what we originally wanted, there isn’t a great deal of difference in what we ended up with. We wanted people to submit to us family recipes and memories from around the dinner table. We didn’t get a lot of memories per se, but we ended up focusing a lot more on the traditional/ethnic meals instead. As Michael said today in the presentation, most of our success came with one on one interactions – Anthony’s interview, Loan’s submissions from her friend Monika and even my interactions with the BakingDuet on Twitter (they’ve been working on a piece for us, but they did warn me they had to do it between their own uni/college work). The interaction may not have been exactly what we hoped for (the Twitter accounts we encountered especially, seemed to prefer posting their own content without retweeting or interacting with others).  The content we were able to produce though, I’m quite happy with – it’s varied (video, photo and text) and I think they’re quite engaging.

Woohoo! It’s not that I don’t like shooting (it’s probably my favourite part of the filmmaking process) but after recording sooo maaaanny interviews it’s a bit of a relief to be done!

But now it’s time to edit. Less woohoo.

After at least a week of capturing and trying to arrange footage into some semblance of a rough/fine cut, I am reminded that it was not my destiny to be an editor. Which is a shame when it comes to this point in our project, because as we were told by Liam, the editing process is really where a documentary comes together. I mean, sure, editing can be just as creative in a fiction film as well, and is an extremely important part of the process (bad editing can equal a bad film) but at least you’re not really trying to create a story in a fiction film. You already know where the plot is going, so you have some kind of inkling which way you will be editing. In documentary, you could very well still be working out what your story is – and we are (working out our story).

So remember when I was losing it the other day over the fact that the mixer wasn’t working for me? It turns out is was most likely the return settings on the camera. My group went out to record another interview with Simon (which I sadly couldn’t attend as it was very last minute and I had to be at Studio A), but unfortunately the sound is unusable for that – completely distorted and horrible sounding. It was the same thing I was hearing on the mixer the other day when I said ‘Stop! We can’t do this!’ but this time it wasn’t picking up on the mixer. The unfortunate thing was, Alene and I had tried to adjust the audio settings on the camera and nothing was happening. Maybe we were just noobs…oh well. For the other five interview, our sound is fine (Charlie’s is a bit soft, but I was being cautious and we can bump it up).

One thing I can say about this whole experience, is that it hasn’t put me off making any more documentaries. In fact, there is one that I want to try to make, but I need my own camera and sound gear first….

I’m not going to post my marks here you nosy people! You’d think the internet was a public place or something….

I will say that I think I gave myself a fairly reasonable mark, and that over the course of the semester I’ve been tracking pretty well in terms of contribution to the group and group project. I deserved what I gave myself.

When it came to assessing my peers – Carmen, Michael and Loan – I was more than happy with my group as a whole as well. They’ve all put in fantastic work to Home Made Helpings and I’m glad I had them as my group. One more post to go and we’ll have a completed magazine, and our project presentation is in next weeks lecture.

Woohoo! We’ve survived Integrated 2!

…oh wait, we still have an individual report to write….I’ll get right on that!!!

Okay, so I’ll give you a chronological order of events.

Friday afternoon – suddenly we realise we don’t have a car to pick up the tracks, dolly, dedo’s, kino, camera, mixer, shot bags and c-stand that we had booked. Eh oh. Frantic call to my mother (who is on holidays at the moment) and she came into the city with the hire car we currently drive after a tree fell on both of ours.

Saturday morning – My Dad took me and the equipment back into the city, and we parked in Franklin St (the closest parking we could get to RMIT, and it wasn’t that bad). Before I started to unload the equipment, I went up to Bld. 8, level 7, to check that my student card opened the studio we had booked to film our interviews/performative  b-roll footage. We had filled in the forms and had our security access updated a couple of weeks earlier, and received the confirmation email. Our cards should have opened the doors. They did not. I texted Cassie, Alene and Celine and we agreed that we should move the equipment to building 9 while we worked out what to do. Quick call to Liam and he tells us to call security to let us in, which is what we did. Then the epic journey that was moving the equipment from one building to another began. Only three of us could do it, because one of us at least had to remain in the studio at all times, or we wouldn’t be able to get back in.

So, after the drama of getting the equipment in and set up, by one o’clock (ish) we were able to start shooting b-roll footage. It went pretty smoothly after that. All of our interviews were scheduled for Sunday. We wrapped around four, moved the equipment to Alene’s car (who lives right near uni) and left, agreeing to meet at ten the next morning.

Sunday – we get the security to let us in, and move the equipment up in quick and orderly fashion. We set up the tracks and the dolly (very exciting and we got some nice looking footage), and in the morning we got two really good interviews. We then broke for lunch, and basically just relaxed a bit. The day was going smoothly.

Spoke too soon.

After lunch and around three, our next interviewee showed up. I connected the mixer to the camera, same as the morning, put the headphones on, and all I could hear, was horrible, horrible static. I had not been freaked out like that for ages! I asked for the second cable, to connect to the mike, but it didn’t change a thing. It wasn’t just happening on the camera return, because when changed the setting I could still hear static. I changed the batteries, still nothing. We tried everything we could think of, even running the mike straight into the camera, but we weren’t picking anything up and couldn’t adjust the audio settings for some reason. Whether the technology failed us, or we somehow failed at technology, I don’t know. This morning we told the techs about it, and they checked the mixer, and it sounded fine. Which is what happened yesterday really. I did nothing different in the afternoon to what I had done in the morning, and good sound failed us. I also knew that if we recorded the interview anyway, it wouldn’t do us any good. It wasn’t the headphone jack. A few weeks ago we took the camera and mixer out to record b-roll around the city, and I heard the same static. At the time I put it down to the headphone connection, because there was no indication on the audio levels that there was a problem, but when we digitised that footage, we had the same static on tape.

GRRRRR!

But, things happen, so we got any kind of cutaways we could of our last two interviewees. We are strongly considering the possibility of simply recording an audio interview with them rather than getting the camera out again. Thankfully, our two morning interviews are perfectly fine and usable. We played them back (yes, we know playing them back isn’t recommended but we had to check) and they sound fine.

If, when we digitise them tomorrow, the opposite is revealed, I may just break something.

If your cuts are jarring, first thing to check is the audio. Cutting a second before the visual cut to lead us into the scene can be a big help.