Filed under: media industries 2, reflection, seminar | Tags: documentary, final, reflection, self assessment, seminar
Contribution and Collaboration
My contribution to the seminar was that of post-production, where it was Eric and my job to edit the seminar footage as well as consult with the steering committee. This role was mainly a 2-way collaboration, with little to no issues along the way as Eric and I worked well together to formulate the highlight video. We worked together in that I would formulate the structure and he would do the technical aspects of putting it together so our skills worked well together in terms of complimenting each other. Due to the nature of my role being within the post-production section, which I could only really contribute to after the seminar was over I also helped out in some of the pre-seminar tasks. This included coming up with a set of questions with Gabriel and Ruby prior to the event and also talking through with Candice the questions, once both our host and back-up host were ill. Therefore, the major problem that arose through the process of hosting our seminar was our two hosts becoming ill and not being able to attend the seminar. This required a great deal of team work in terms of going through the questions and key topics with Candice as well as being on top of all the other elements that had to go into play to put together a great seminar.
Refer to: https://hannahfilmtv.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/editing-seminar-footage/
Proactive Learning
My proactive learning came in the form of going to see documentaries and also attending a masterclass on documentary filmmaking. I felt that I made a conscious effort to immerse myself in the field of documentary, which really helped when it came to formulating questions as I already had formulated some through my reflection on documentaries. In reflecting on the documentaries that I had seen as well as the masterclass allowed me to be more aware and also more involved in putting this documentary seminar in place as I felt that I already had key knowledge in terms of what made and didn’t make a documentary work. This also became incredibly important when it came to formulating the highlights video as I could dissect what was important in terms of relaying this to an audience. In conjunction I felt that I technically learnt some new skills in editing with Eric, the more you do something, the more you learn and I felt that this was clearly evident through this collaboration.
Participation
Most of our group collaboration and participation was done through a Facebook conversation in conjunction with our weekly class meetings prior to our seminar. In these collaborative environments it was difficult to participate fully due to the scale of the group and having all different members working in different areas. I was able to participate more when we broke up into our separate groups. In our separate groups participation was easier and there was a better dialogue happening between each of the groups, which worked a lot better. In terms of my own levels of participation I felt that I always made a conscious effort to respond to facebook conversations if appropriate and attend most of the editing sessions with Eric. However,I felt that I could have participated more in the final editing of our highlights video. Whilst I participated with Eric in the earlier editing sessions it got increasingly harder to make times that both of us could edit. I felt that I could have made a more conscious effort to finalise the edit with him.
Refer to: https://hannahfilmtv.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/is-this-reel-life/
Connections and intersections
One of the most valuable things I learnt through putting together this seminar series is how happy people are to talk about what the are passionate about and that networking is one of the most valuable things to take out of this course. Being able to approach people, even if it is simply via an email can be really difficult and daunting, yet really there are a lot of people that are willing to help you out. In conjunction to this it is really obvious to me that the value of the seminar series, is that you learn a lot from a practical perspective the ins and outs of documentary, not just in terms of content, but how to realistically apply what we have learnt in subjects such as ‘True Lies’ and ‘TV2’ within an industry-based context. For instance, some of Dennis Smith’s real documentary scenarios allowed you an in-depth perspective on what it’s like to deal with difficult subject matters and how to ethically approach documentary scenarios. What I have learnt about myself is that I still find it incredibly difficult to network, to approach people and to be confident about what I am interested in and I think this seminar series along with my own Personal Networking Report have encouraged me to become more sure of myself and confident in the skills that I have learnt throughout this course. However, at the same time I have also figured out that my previous career interest in being a Project Manager is not really what I want to do anymore, because I feel I don’t have that extroverted quality in terms of contacting and speaking to people, which is needed for this role.
Overall, I found the process of putting a seminar together quite challenging, yet extremely rewarding, mainly due to the content delivered by our fantastic guests. In our hosts both not being able to make it I felt that I learnt a lot about not getting flustered and the importance of being really organised to put swift actions in place to resolve the issue. This ability to resolve an issue comes not only from yourself but from good collaboration between yourself and your group members.
The guests made this seminar is all I can say. I thought that the guests were the most distinctive of any of the other seminars- they were funny, swore and definitely had some insightful, metaphoric, philosophical and poetic things to say about how sound works. What I thought failed in terms of the seminar was a structure, it seemed a bit all over the place, and the questions were rather vague at times. I think the seminar would have worked a lot better if the seminar was better structured and then the questions would be more driven. However, this was saved by the content of the seminar guests and their insights into sound and the industry.
Overall, the guests were very insightful in terms of what they had to say. One of the most useful insights for me was in terms of the strong connection between sound design and film in terms of the livelihood of sound designers. If the film industry gets money stripped away from it so does the necessity to have sound designers. What had becomes so apparent throughout all the seminars is that the idea of having a single role is much in the past and that to get a job you really have to be multi-skilled and flexible because employers want people that can do multiple jobs not just one to save them money. Whilst the panel painted a pretty dire picture of the Australian film industry they pointed out the plus side of working in post production where you don’t have to have face-to-face meetings but can correspond via email and forward the content back and forth between borders. This is incredibly convenient for production companies because it allows the film to be finished quicker due to the 24 hour work cycle of having people work on the other side of the world. It saves them both time and money and can be very beneficial for cultivating international networking.
I really thought this was a lovely point to make and transcends through all industry work becoming relevant, even if you don’t have a huge interest in sound production. Again I think this was another highlight of the seminar as the guests content was not limited to people that were just interested in sound but for those that were interested in other fields because there is such a huge link between sound design and film. Even though the Q&A section highlighted something that we didn’t want to hear through the fish and chip analogy that pretty much every distinctly creative idea that you have will just be copied and become mainstream the seminar held itself through its guest’s insights. And to finish off on a slightly technical note I really thought this group would have benefited from checking all their sound properly first because the animation they showed just after the break was barely audible, which defeats the purpose of showing it in the first place. Otherwise this group did really well and I congratulate them on their distinctive guests.
Filed under: media industries 2 | Tags: distribution, marketing, seminar
Whilst this seminar had some great guests and great information about Australian distributing and marketing I felt that the feel was a bit awkward and there wasn’t the same chemistry seen between the guests, that we experienced in the previous seminars. I don’t know if this was because I wasn’t hugely interested in the seminar theme or because the guests just didn’t gel together. I’m really not sure how to explain it, it just felt a bit dull and the questions felt a bit repetitive or misunderstood by the guests. In conjunction I think a lot of the audience were interested in making films and the process of getting their films distributed, whereas the seminar mainly focused on getting into the distribution business, which could have been why it got a bit repetitive.
However, the content of the seminar was really good in terms of understanding how the distribution industry works and what has been the changing trends in terms of distribution from the past to the present and then into the future from the perspective of small and big films. In fact there was a lot of emphasis put on this idea of change and how integral it is for people within the distribution industry to be able to adapt and predict what changes are coming, especially with the rise of digital technologies and online distribution channels. These changes in terms of online distribution are seen as a good thing in terms of smaller budget films in that these films have more opportunities in terms of non-theatrical realises. However, I felt throughout most panel guests there was still a big emphasis on getting your films to the theatres, and that this still has remained dominant despite audience drops. This digitalisation has had the biggest effect on the distribution industry, where due to the costs of camera equipment decreasing there has been a huge influx of content, which has resulted in a diversification of the industry. The tip that the guests gave in terms of this was that not all films are suitable for theatrical distribution and when making a film you really need to think about the best way in which your film will succeed.
It is all about word-of-mouth in the distribution industry, that is what is so important, word-of-mouth within the industry and also with audiences. This is also heavily impacted by digitalisation,which puts word-of-mouth into the public domain and can be both good and bad for the film being released.
KEY ADVICE FROM THE PANEL:
-there are a lot of expenses, you need money behind you when you begin.
-start small.
-watch a lot of films and know where you want to go with it.
-view everything as a commercial product.
-observe and learn from the best.
-know what you’re good and bad at.
Overall, I thought the seminar was very informative if not slightly repetitive, yet I thought the host did a great job in including all guests in the conversation and I felt that every guest said their bit. I also thought the selection of guests was really fabulous. Overall, I think this group did a good job in hosting a great seminar.
I’ve decided to be a bit adventurous in terms of creating my own showreel website and want to craft it from scratch using Dreamweaver. I really want my website to be a reflection of me and I’m really interested in design at the moment and therefore want to have a really well designed page that doesn’t just look like everyone else’s. Whilst looking for people to interview for my personal networking report I took in what their website looked like and decided that in terms of my own preference I really like simple websites that don’t have too much going on and are really accessible in terms of finding information. One of my favourites was Christopher Fulham’s who is an experimental new media artist his website is simple yet distinctive and showcases his work without really giving too much away. His site has images from his key works as a selected works option that you can flick through from the home page and then has specific pages that link to other info such as bio, etc. With our own websites they have to have a lot more info than Christopher’s, but what I don’t want to do is overload people with too much information. Therefore, in conjunction with my website I am going to set up a vimeo page with the full-length versions of all my video works. These will be housed separately with a link on the actual site. I got this idea from Closer Productions website when I was researching doco people for our seminar in which they have little icons in the top corner of their page for their twitter, facebook and vimeo accounts. I will do something similar on mine.
In terms of the design of my website I realised that I needed to figure out how to use Dreamweaver and have been going through quite a dense tutorial. This hasn’t been too difficult as I remember some html from previous studies and Dreamweaver is actually a lot easier. Going through the tutorial is really helpful as it tells you actually how to do things and because I’ve already had a little bit of experience I have been able learn it all quite quickly. I have gone through two sections with a sample website, which I should be able to build the majority of my website from and when I want to do the other details will move onto the next steps. The hardest thing with building a website is making sure the layout is right, adding content is quite easy it’s all about setting up those foundation blocks, such as spacing and how it is all going to look on your screen.
What I am going to do is to start drawing up a paper version of my website, either by hand or using photoshop. I really want to be able to visualise how I want it to look and I think it’s really important to have a really nicely designed website, considering we all are media practitioners.
Today was the television seminar, which was really great. I’m not really into a career in television, and was pleasantly surprised by how informative and insightful this seminar was. I really enjoyed the format of the seminar, which was entertaining in terms of it replicating a typical television hosting show and thought the introduction videos were well made, as well as funny in terms of introducing the guests. Whilst the second section of the seminar was really great and informative with the panel and allowed interaction and discussion between guests I found the individual interviews for the first half didn’t work that well, this was because it dragged out the life of the guest in two much detail and didn’t really draw on things that were relevant for us to know about as media students entering the industry. I think this section should have been a lot quicker in terms of giving a quick background on the guest for no more than really ten minutes each, just for the audience to get a bit of contextualisation before it went into the panel discussion.
The panel discussion after the break was really well done and the questions really hit the spot in terms of gauging the television industry in Australia from guests that have worked in quite different areas being music, comedy and childrens, therefore they really painted the picture of how the industry functions. What I learnt in this section was:
a) there is a really big tension between creative and network, where in Australia the role of creative is greatly over-powered by executive producers and networks. Australia sees creative as a interchangeable role and not overly important, especially in consideration to HBO, which has an extremely high creative aspect. Therefore in order for television to be a lot better in Australia there needs to be more respect and time given to production quality from a creative perspective. The industry seems to care too much on not hurting anyones feelings and being internationally successful that creative dies due to this.
b) the television media landscape has considerably changed, where the emphasis has switched from BIG comedy shows to BIG reality shows. This means that all the money goes to those reality shows and has a massive impact on other types of shows, which shrink. Therefore a lot of outsourcing takes place in order to make small budget productions that the television stations don’t really care about as they make the majority of their money from these BIGGER shows.
c) the future of Australian television will require hybrid products, with a massive emphasis on digital culture. The Australian television industry is not seen as big innovators and therefore it is up to us to bring innovation in terms of hybrid products to the industry.
d) multi-channeling is not really a good thing as it means less money into individual shows, where the production values of the television shows drop and don’t stand out distinctively. This is especially the case with ABC3 where there is a lot of same-same children’s programming that doesn’t break anything in terms of innovation.
Overall, the seminar was quite shattering for people that would want to enter the industry, where it seemed the overall mood was that it’s a very difficult industry that is not overly rewarding as you have to do a lot of not-so-pleasant jobs in-between. The future seems to lie in the form of digital hybrid television programs and there was a lot of emphasis on not specialising yourself to one distinct role as it is more important to know a little bit about everything so you can adapt to different roles.
As for the seminar itself I thought there was not enough food and hydration. I think the group should have put more thought and provided more for the audience. Yet, I think they did an excellent job in terms of keeping the seminar entertaining, having insightful guests and just putting on a good show in terms of their audiovisual work. The first section of the seminar should have been shorter, but the panel and Q&A section at the end was great and extremely informative.
Filed under: media industries 2 | Tags: editing, overview, post-production, seminar
Eric and my job as post-production team was to edit the footage from the seminar into a short (under 10 minute) highlight video. This ended up being a lot more difficult than expected because it is hard to make short snippets of good words of wisdom into something that has structure and makes sense, especially since our guests rambled quite a bit and their stories were long. Our approach to editing was to go through all the footage pick the best bits and then form the structure from there. What we regarded as the best bits were moments that we could apply ourselves, so in a way tangible tips, advice or stories that were new, innovative and interesting, and also things that we could apply ourselves to our own practice.
When we had all our bits and pieces of highlights what we realised was that whilst Dennis and Steve fed off each other with things generally on documentary a lot of Natalie’s stuff was particularly related to her Tote documentary, therefore we realised that we could structure it around Dennis and Steve’s advice with Natalie’s words as examples of that advice or general documentary information.
This still didn’t quite work, because whilst we mapped out some key theoretical groups such as: the ideas, subject and filmmaker relationships and funding they all didn’t quite join together, and it seemed very disjointed. Therefore what we decided to do was to form the content around 10 tips to documentary filmmaking in which we would introduce text and voiceover to give the footage some shape. The tips were quite easy to come by because all guests had something to give in terms of advice for budding documentary filmmakers and therefore we used to text to form a tip in short term and then for them to elaborate vocally on that tip. In which we would add some more text to re-phrase the tip after they had elaborated.
We used voice-over to tie the seminar together into a narrative and to introduce new themes as the occured through the piece. We kept the voice-over to a minimum, yet we wanted to provide context in terms of what the seminar was about and also to give the video some rounding with a beginning and concluding voice just to make it a bit more circular for whoever is viewing it.
I forgot how much I enjoyed editing, because I find it a really creative time, where your footage can turn as you find more threads and themes in the words given to you. Therefore, even though we weren’t editing anything spectacular you can make it better and more thought provoking in terms of how you place things together and then by adding small things such as text, voice0ver and also some of the clips from the trailers of our guests to add a new visual dimension and give the viewing something stimulating to view whilst hearing words that relate to those words.
Overall, I enjoyed this role as part of the seminar team and even though I’m not really keen on the super technical elements of editing I like thinking about editing and how everything relates and then how it could all work together to create something sensical.
After an incredibly unlucky start with both our host and back-up host both being sick I think our seminar went rather well, our guests were great and I really learnt a lot about documentary practice. It was great to get a different perspective from people who actually work within the documentary industry in Australia and have incredible insight into the process of documentary production and what documentaries are made up of.
Our seminar was good because our guests had a lot to say which was awesome, the worst thing would have been if our hosts got up and had nothing to say, it was almost that our guests had too much to say, which was also good as they were willing to go into a lot of detail about the documentary process. I also think there was good chemistry between our guests, especially Dennis and Steve because they had a lot of the same opinions about documentary and therefore could feed off each other throughout the seminar and create a conversation. Sometimes it was hard to include Natalie in conversation but Candice did a great job at focusing questions at Natalie to create a larger discussion through all three guests. I give Candice massive applause because she had to take the hosting job at such late notice and she managed to do a great job, even though some of her questions weren’t fantastically executed the guests were able to draw from the questions and we covered all the topics we wanted to cover in our notes.
Some feedback from after the presentation was that the skype meeting with Matt Bate was too long and I have to agree as it sucked up the time we wanted to spend on funding and the production side of documentary filmmaking. It also sucked up the time we wanted to spend on the Q&A, where I think we will lose marks on in the peer assessment I don’t think we really gave our audience enough time to ask questions, which was a shame as I think people were still keen to ask questions when it all wrapped up. I think if they skype meeting was perhaps 5-7 minutes it would have been better shortening the longer answers and keeping it snappy.
In terms of the content I really got a lot out of the seminar, especially in terms of this whole idea of ‘shape,’ where a documentary can really be interestingly about anything, yet what makes it interesting is how it is shaped and what part of the story is grasped and what is at the core of the story. I think this made documentaries really poetic and made me feel really confident about making documentaries. In fact, the overall experience of the seminar was really optimistic, in terms of both developing ideas and funding. I was really inspired by Natalie’s story because she literally scrapped money together and got funding right at the end and has made a documentary that has had a lot of success, so that’s pretty awesome. Another thing that I thought was really intriguing was how you get your subject to open up to you and different techniques to use, such as getting someone else to ask the questions, acting dumb or just taking your subject aside and getting them to open up like that. I think that getting ideas of tangible things to do is really good because having a really good subject is one thing and having them open up in front of a camera is another, so I thought that was really interesting.
Overall, under the world being against us circumstances our seminar went really well and Candice did really well at last-minute hosting and that’s super awesome. Next time I would have made sure that every person in our group knew the guests so that it didn’t seem so rushed, and that we could all confidently take on hosting.
Hannah's media/film/tv blog 