Reflective Blog 1

A new semester, a new start! :)

Having formed my own group with Leonard, Yiying, Clare and Bree, I had some concerns as ours is the biggest group, and naturally, more will be expected from us, but I hope that we will be able to rise up to the occasion and give our very best to our short documentary. If we all contribute and do what we have to, I am sure that we will be able to come up with a spectacular end product! Yeah! :)

Individual Objectives:

Personally, I am hoping to submit our short documentary to a film festival to get some exposure, it will be a major step at taking a shot into the film industry and I really hope that it will go well because I thought of the storyboard and have a clear direction for this documentary. Hence, my hopes for this project is relatively high. :)

By the end of this course, I hope to have expanded my knowledge of what a documentary is and how to make a documentary. I also hope to improve my skills as a director as I hope to be able to direct films in the future. I also hope to improve my technical knowledge in terms of camera handling, sound engineering and post-production editing.

Another thing that I hope to accomplish is that I hope to build up my contacts in the media industry here so that if I am to pursue a career here after I graduate, I will be able to tap into my network and search for a job opening from there.

Idea for the film:

What I have thought up of is that because of the beauty and mystery the building seems to hold, we will take the film from top to bottom to give audiences a feel of what the building is like and we will then uncover some of the 'secrets' of the building by focussing on two or three of the studios within the building that captures our attention.

I have thought of an alternate storyline for the documentary. Although the Nicholas Building is quite old, there are surveillance cameras all around. We can interview the security guards to see if they captured anything interesting on tape or even 'ghostly encounters' that the guards have heard or seen of during their shift or on tape. This will make for quite an interesting documentary or even a mockumentary. :)

Progress so far:

After consulting with Christina, she has given the green light to use the storyboard that I have conjured up after touring the building. Clare has got permission from the management of the Nicholas Building to film at their open house and this is really important as some other groups faced a problem with wanting to film their subject matter.

We managed to obtain the right to film as we promised them that we will come with a sort of promotional video for the Nicholas Building to use in future. This I find is simply being realistic, we cannot expect people to simply help us for free, most of the time, people will only help each other for mutual benefits. Although I know that it might be hard to work in the time of coming up with a promotional video for them, I hope that we will be able to integrate it into our documentary.

We will be filming on both days of their open house, the 19th and 20th of this month from 4pm onwards. What we have decided to do, is that we will get some interviews done with the people at the open house, most likely the tenants of the place as they will have their own stories to tell about the building.

From there, if we chance upon any interesting stories, we will either shift our focus on that or we might integrate their points of interest into the documentary. You never know what stories you will hear from the interview, after all, humans are the most interesting creatures that one can ever encounter and every single person has his/her story to tell!

Documentaries are powerful, simply because they are not scripted from imagination, but happened in real life! As Shakespeare has written, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Final Blog Post for Media Industries 1

Time flies and I have now come to the end of the semester with reflections on my time spent in the Media Industries 1 course. Initially, we planned to do a research on "The rise of Asian cinema in Australia." However, after much discussion with Geoff and Christina, we decided to do a study on the "Growth of Asian cinema in Melbourne." Much work was put into the completion of the project and although there were many obstacles that we faced, we managed to finish it and come up with a good presentation that showcased what we learnt from the project.

I shall now go into the details of what I have learnt from this course in this reflective journal.

ROLE - For my role, I contacted the different cinemas, television stations as well as key people to try and find out their take on whether there has been a rise in the airring Asian films here and why this was so. Over time my position and function of contacting the relevant parties evolved and I became point of contact for the relevant parties and my group and I became the interviewer of the team as well. Whenever we conducted video interviews, I had to ask the questions and translate them if they were not in english so that it was easier for the majority to understand. Before these interviews, I had to think up of what questions to ask and if there were any key questions that we needed to ask so as to get answers for our research.

When it came to writting the final report and collating our information, I was assigned to proof read the report and making sure that everything was in order. After rehearsing for the presentation, I was chosen to do the introduction and conclusion as my group members said that I can project my voice well and speak well. :) Hence, from simply being a point of contact in the group, I was the interviewer and editor for the final report.

PROGRESS - During our research, like mentioned from the earlier blog post, I was not familiar with the media industry in Melbourne as well as the research methods that were used. Through the duration of the project, I managed to find out more about the general scene of how the media industry in Melbourne operated and was able to use the many research tools that was available to us in RMIT. The databases were very helpful and we got relevant data from the library.

Therefore, from being ignorant about Melbourne's media industry and the research methods that were available, I managed to find out what is the media scene here about as well as know how to utilize the research database in school effectively.

STRATEGIES - At first, we wanted to conduct a survey as well and have a quantitative research. However, we decided to interview the relevant people to have a qualitative approach to the research. I think the choice to make it a qualitative research was a good one as this project was on how we could use it for our future jobs. By interviewing people in the industry, we were networking and not simply taking statistics.

In the beginning, we tried dividing the work out specifically, but as time went on we realised that some of our parts intertwined and it would be better if we collaborated to prevent doing double the work when it would be more efficient to work together. Initially, we did not set any deadlines for when we had to submit our individual parts. We later found that this could not work as we were not able to get our parts up by the next meeting. Hence, we set deadlines for when we needed to get our parts up and collate them. This worked much better and we got things done much faster.

PROBLEMS - I faced obstacles like there was no reply from most of them at all after I tried to e-mail them multiple times. Even when I called, they would tell me to wait for their reply, but in the end, I never heard from them again. This problem is the one that got to me for my role in the beginning as well as shown here.

http://revelationsofazombie.blogspot.com/2010/04/media-industries-1-indivdual-progress.html

Though we could not get companies like Hoyts to respond, we managed to get the distributor of Asian films there to talk to us about the Asian film scene in Melbourne. I also managed to contact SBS's Head of Audience Research to tell me more about the Asian film scene here. The interview can be seen here.

http://asianfilmsinaustralia.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/interview-leah-hooper-head-of-audience-reserach-for-foxtel/

The key is to not stop after some failures, but pressing in and being more determined to overcome them. One more problem that we faced was that as all the final projects were cramped up within the same time frame, we needed to prioritise our time to be able to get the report done. It helped me with my time management skills and on handling the stress of doing all the major projects at once.

CONNECTIONS AND INTERSECTIONS - The value of this course is that it is so broad and we are forced to conceive of a topic that can encompass any aspect of the media and conduct a study on it. This is similar ot what is in the working world as in life, we do not get clear directions all the time, our bosses can sometimes throw things our way that are vague and have no specifications and we are expected to solve them. This course helped improve my problem solving skills by making me perservere on and not giving up in the event of a failure, it has also helped me to learn how to work with people from a different cultural background as we all have our different work styles.

I have managed to make some connections with people in the media industry like the Asian film distributor and the head of SBS's audience research department. This is helpful to me as in the media industry, it is usually not about WHAT you know, but WHO you know that will have you clinch the relevant job as people are more inclined to working with someone whom they already know as opposed to a stranger. As I am interested in working the the film industry, I am sure this will indirectly give me a leg up when I am finding a job in the future.

Content Producer Assignment Final Blog Post

When we first started out with our Content Producer groups, we started out clueless as to how we can come up with a project to link up with My Tribe. We thought through numerous ideas, we came up with a plan for producing a short film showing the different tribes that are out there, like bands, football, costume players and more. However, we realised that it was not easy to get hold of many groups of people to film.

In one of the earlier meetings that only Emily and I were at, I came up with the idea of each gathering different forms of media that the different tribes had and posting them up on a website to showcase what the life of their tribe was like. We later worked on it to come up with the final project title of Why Not Worship which can be seen below,

http://whynotworship.tumblr.com/

I came up with eight different poems that was posted up. However, as we were short on space that was needed for the other tribes, my poems were merged into those of a similar category. I went to Scotts Church for an audio recording of the choir on a Sunday morning, this turned out beautifully and I couldn't have hoped for more. I combined my audio piece with the poems that I wrote on religion. I wrote poems on fashion, football, music, bands and gaming as well. All these can be seen in the website.

Things I have learnt:

As I was more focused on doing the SMP project, I did not focus on this as much as I would have liked and this is a waste as I would have been able to do so much more for this project if I had devoted more time to this instead on the SMP job. This is something that I have learnt in terms of time allocation. Getting the group to contribute material on the tribes that they are covering was quite a challenge, but I think that this might be due to majority giving more attention to their individual SMP jobs and hence, not being able to devote more time to our content producing project. However, during the later part of the semester, we managed to pull up our socks and work more actively on our content producing as our SMP projects ended earlier.

Self assessment:

Although more could have been done for our final project, I am please with the contributions that each of us had spent time and effort doing despite all the other essays and final projects that coincided around the same time frame.

The first criteria that our group had for our individual assessment was attendence at meetings, this I fulfilled by attending all the meetings and contributed actively on a constant basis by giving ideas on what to do and how to go about doing them. The final idea of the different tribes' pieces is one of the ideas that I came up with.

Furthermore, I encouraged the team members when they felt that we were not doing smoothly and constantly tried, together with Emily, to get the group to meet more often to discuss and collate our ideas.

When we allocated our tasks, I did my part by taking time during the weekends to go to the different churches to see which church's choir would be good for a sound recording for the project. I also took a time to think up of poems that would go well with all the other contributions of my other groupmates and wrote them. I managed to set deadlines for the stages in our project and managed to meet them.

Finally, we managed to meet up and edit through the website together and making sure all went well for the presentation and presented with Gab at the final event.

For this project, I will give myself 84% for the effort and time that was put in. :)

Self Assessment for PP2.

In the blink of an eye, a semester has come to a close. I attended the Directing class by Stephen Amis. We went through the techniques of how to properly direct the actors and actresses on-screen movement, which is also known as 'Blocking' which I will talk about later.

During the first lesson, we went through his background in directing and the Dos and Don'ts if we want to become a director. We should never become the Assistant Director, instead, we should just get out there and direct films of our own to build up our portfolio. We also talked about the different film festivals like the St Kilda Film Festival that we can send our films to in order to get noticed.

For the second and last lesson, we learnt how to direct our talents in the film, where we want them to be, how we want them to act and much more. We set up a camera and lighting for the scene and filmed it. We later played back to see what was good and what mistakes were made. However, due to time constraints, not all the groups were able to act out the plot that we thought up of, which was a waste.

In conclusion, the lesson was useful, but more time should have been allocated to it. As I am an international student, I am constantly trying to establish my network with the people who are in the media industry here so as to broaden my experience and perspective and how things are done here.

SMP Final Blog Post.

1. Summary and evaluation of activities as a Social Media Producer.

During my time as a Social Media Producer, I have done a spectrum of activities that ties in with my role.


Firstly, for my tutorial, I have taken upon the role of a Tute Liaison, this requires me to attend meetings outside of the normal tutorial time and meet up with the other liaisons from the Online Feature tute, the Facebook tute, the 360 Broadcast tute and the Pool tute. What I will do is to update them of what is happening within my own tute; the Federation Square tute, as well as inquire what the other groups are doing for their respective areas. An example of what goes on can be referred to my blog post as it was my turn to take down notes:

http://revelationsofazombie.blogspot.com/2010/05/last-tute-liaison-meeting-notes.html

Secondly, I was also part of the Events group for my tute and was made to handle the final proceedings of the event at Federation Square. We had meetings to discuss the runnings of the event and took part in planning on how to arrange for the event at Federation Square. I took part actively by being one of the emcees, next to Brodie on the night of the event. I was a little nervous as it was my first time appearing on a public event in a foreign country, but I am glad that things turned out well. Here is a link showing me and Brodie on stage during the My Tribe, Federation Square event:


http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=109208215792097&comments=

Next, for my plans on getting my friends to post up their works, for my group that writes poetry and short stories, although I have continually tried to get them to post up some of their works, they kept putting it off and even until now, they have not posted anything up. It is very hard to try to get them to post something without sounding pushy at times. It is the same for my friends who do cosplay. They have not posted up any pictures. Even for my plan to involve my polytechnic back home, I never got any reply from them and hence that avenue had to be dropped.


In an attempt to get my friends to post up their works online, I have taken it upon myself to post up my own works online to try to motivate them to post up some stuff online. I have a total of 19 posts up on the Pool website. They are a combination of 3 poems, 5 pictures on Cosplay, 4 pictures of Muay Thai aka Thai Boxing, and 7 pictures of my different tribes that I belong to. These are all done in a desperate attempt to get my friends to post their works up on Pool. Here are the links to all my posts on Pool:

1. http://www.pool.org.au/text/nivlac/ode_to_g

2. http://www.pool.org.au/text/nivlac/angry_chair

3. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/behind_the_scenes

4. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/muay_thai

5. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/treasure_what_is_important

6. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/cosplay

7. http://www.pool.org.au/text/nivlac/divine_insanity

8. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/tastes_of_home

9. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/glare_of_killing_intent

10. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/the_calm_before_the_storm

11. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/brains_and_brawns

12. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/trying_to_cosplay

13. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/the_lich_king

14. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/naruto_attack

15. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/final_fantasy

16. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/the_night_sky_back_home

17. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/take_me_away

18. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/lie_back_and_relax

19. http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/couple_toilets

Although none of my friends posted up their works on Pool, I managed to get some of the people on Pool to comment on my works that I have posted up on Pool and I have replied to them, hence I feel that I have done my part as an Social Media Producer. Being a good Social Media Producer to me, means that even if results are not what I expected, I continue to push on and contribute in my won way whatever I can do. Here is a link on one of my posts with lots of comments and feedbacks:

http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/cosplay

For my PP1 group project, we thought up of creating a social media platform using Tumblr to gather pictures, audio, visual and written works of the different things that people are very interested in. Spending time, effort and money into their 'object of worship'. As many people have their own Tribes, they have different things that they 'worship' within their Tribe as well. For example, a Tribe of Footie fans might worship a particular Football club. Music enthusiasts might worship a particular band, and more.

I have recorded sounds from churches as that is the most direct form of worship and have come up with many different poems revolving around the things that people worship as will be seen in the presentation later in the weeks. Here is the link to the page:

http://whynotworship.tumblr.com/

2. What I have learnt about the role of a Social Media Producer.

First of all, the job of a Social Media Producer is more challenging than I initially thought it was. First you have to think of what social media platforms there are in order to reach your target audience. Tools like Facebook, Twitter, blog sites and more can be used to interact and reach out to your target audience.

Currently, Facebook seems to be the easiest, cheapest and most effective way of reaching out to most audiences due to the sheer amount of people who have a Facebook account. There are no fees needed to set up an account and most of the people who use Facebook might stumble upon the page.

When it comes to rallying the crowd, it can get frustrating at times when you do not see anyone posting up things despite repeated sincere requests for them to get something up. This is definitely a problem that many fellow Social Media Producers face when they are trying to get feedback or contributions from people and they simply do not bother or keep on procrastinating.

3. Self assessment for my Social Media Producer task.

In light of what I have done and learnt for this task, my individual assessment mark will be 91/100.

Last Tute Liaison Meeting Notes

Here are the notes for the last Tute Liaison meeting on 27/5/10. This meeting is about what the various tutes can do or are doing for My Tribe at Federation Square on the 28/5/10.

Online Feature tute:

- Nothing to update for this week, pretty much done for PP1.

Facebook tute:

- Have a last minute shoutout for the event tomorrow on facebook.
- Continue promoting My Tribe on facebook.

Federation Square tute:

- Calvin (me) and Brodie are the emcees for tomorrow's event and will give a short introduction before screening the package.
- We will be shifting the audio equipment to Federation Square by a vehicle.

General feedback:

- Facebook will have after launch events to follow up from the event at Federation Square
- There were comments from other tutes that the comments on the Facebook page seemed kind of 'fake'
- Stacey will get onto the pair in charge of Facebook and get them to improve the quality of the facebook shoutouts.

FIN

Postings on Pool!

Have not been updating as I have been sick for the past few weeks... I suspect my body is adjusting to the weather, hope I make a full recovery because I need to complete my projects...

It is nearing the end of the semester and although I have a lot to write on, here is a short post of what I have done these few weeks. Will post up my thoughts later...

1) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/tastes_of_home

2) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/glare_of_killing_intent

3) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/the_calm_before_the_storm

4) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/brains_and_brawns

5) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/trying_to_cosplay

6) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/the_lich_king

7) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/naruto_attack

8) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/final_fantasy

9) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/the_night_sky_back_home

10) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/take_me_away

11) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/lie_back_and_relax

12) http://www.pool.org.au/image/nivlac/couple_toilets

Yup, hopefully these posts will motivate my friends to post up SOMETHING, ANYTHING on Pool...