MI2 Self Assessment

I’m going to be honest here. I think that MI2 is an extremely valuable course — it forces us to look at the realities of the industry we hope to become a part of. The PNR and Career Portfolio are both crucial to us as graduating media students trying to break into the industry. However — I struggle to see any value at all in running a media industries seminar, and it’s a pity that that’s what my self-assessment must entirely revolve around.

I know this sounds blasphemous. I know that it’s meant to be a great opportunity to network with industry professionals and ask them insightful questions and impress them. But the course has doubled up. I’ve already talked to industry professionals for my PNR project — I’ve talked specifically to cinematographers about the exact questions that I’ve wanted to ask them about. By contrast, the MI2 seminar project is a watered down, group-oriented version of PNR where the guests are generic “filmmakers” and the questions are necessarily generalised to please a mass audience. At most, there will be one or two seminars that vaguely apply to your chosen field — the others do not relate at all and we must sit through them to satisfy course criteria. Further to this, much of the seminar project consists of making posters and catering, and these things are completely irrelevant to cinematography, filmmaking, and media in general. I knew from the start of this course that putting on a good MI2 “event” was low on my list of priorities. I feel that even if I’d poured my soul into the seminar project, flew Lars Von Trier, James Cameron, Christopher Doyle and Andrew Lesnie down to Melbourne to be part of the panel and asked them all a series of insightful questions, I’d walk away exactly the same. I wouldn’t be a better filmmaker, and I wouldn’t have a job. I might have had some nice tea and biscuits with some fancy filmmakers, and a few laughs along the way, but that’s not enough to justify the whole endeavour.
So. With that in mind, I guess I’ll now run through the gauntlet of obligatory self-assessment parameters:

Contribution and Collaboration

We had a really large group to work with. I think that this created a “diffusion of responsibility” effect where I could think “they can cope without me”. And everyone did. I’d like to think that I actively participated in discussions at the start of semester, about the potential directions we’d like to explore in our two seminar weeks. I often played the devil’s advocate and challenged ideas — this may make me seem like a bastard, but I think that it ultimately helps the group take shape. Without a critical voice, all ideas have equal weight and it’s harder to find a definite direction to follow. During mid-semester, I fell away from the group in order to shoot my PP2 project. All I can say is that at least I didn’t promise I’d be around. I didn’t disappoint anyone or let anyone down because I knew all of this would happen from the outset. And finally, during the actual seminars, I’ve tried to be a helpful contributor to the group. I’ve brought tables down for catering, I’ve gone to the techs to source gear and extra connection cables, and in week 9 I worked closely with another camera person to ensure that our video footage of the event matched up. I calibrated the cameras and made sure everything was in order, and then tried to film the event in a way that is engaging as possible.

Proactive Learning

In relation to the MI2 seminar events, my “proactive learning” was “zero”. And really, I don’t understand why proactive learning would be valuable in this context. I’m trying to be as proactive as possible in developing my PNR report. I’ve been on set as much as possible, talking to various departments about the future of filmmaking and whatever else — this is where I’ve focused all of my attention and I find it strange that I must now penalize myself because I was “proactive” in the wrong place. In terms of the seminar, I did what was required and used the rest of my energy on projects that seemed more valuable.

Participation

My participation has been decent. I’ve come to as many classes as possible (missed a few because of PP2 shooting), attended the external MI2 meetings that I’ve been aware of (there were a few that I had no idea were taking place). In class I’ve tried to give input and actively participate. And obviously I’ve turned up to both the actual seminar events and tried to be an active member of the group in facilitating said events.

Connections and Intersections

The value of the seminar series? Not much I’m afraid. I’ve tried to extrapolate some ideas from them as best I can (see my blog posts: Indie Online, The Write Way, Making it in Melbourne). But ultimately, I would have learned far more from working on any given film shoot, or talking to a DP in my own time with my own questions. Putting on a big show for other people with completely different (often incompatible) interests and aspirations seems irrelevant to me. The seminar project seemed to satisfy RMIT Media’s insatiable demand for group work, and relentless reflection at the end of said groupwork. This is frustrating because I already know (from the last 5 semesters of Media) that I’m perfectly capable of working well in groups, and to me, group work seemed utterly unnecessary in MI2. I feel that I could have benefited more from focusing all my efforts on the PNR rather than juggling the PNR with yet another “group-based learning” project. I did not have any personal revelations about myself or my career because of the MI2 seminars or because I had to collaborate in a group. I could fluff up something and make it seem like I had an epiphany, but what’s the point if it didn’t happen. I haven’t “discovered” anything. I find it irritating that the course guide presupposes that I *must* have had an earth-shattering moment of enlightment while putting together a seminar and watching 4 people talk to an audience about their media professions.

You’ll dismiss this as a rant. It is. But it’s also a summary of how I feel about the seminar process and this obsession with personal growth. When I learn something, I will happily blog about it. But I don’t feel that I have. MI2, as a subject, has been valuable. But in this post, I’m forced to talk specifically about the seminar, and hence I’m forced to say that I’ve learnt nothing.
Now, I’m going to give myself a 75, which is shocking, considering all that I’ve just said. It’s not because I’ve worked really hard, it’s just because I don’t think we should be assessing ourselves on the MI2 seminar at all. It would make much more sense to assess my work in MI2 holistically — and with that in mind: 75. D.

Bloody Sunday

This sunday is looking pretty bleak, and there’s no backup plan. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, our outdoor shooting day will feature the following: “Partly cloudy. Shower or two clearing. Min 12 Max 18″ with “Winds west to southwesterly averaging up to 35 km/h decreasing below 20 km/h during the afternoon”. Right. So that’s basically the worst possible scenario, apart from torrential rain or cyclones. The cold weather will cause our camera batteries to die faster, the “partly cloudy” will make lighting continuity extremely difficult, and the 35km/h winds will wreck our audio.. this will be interesting.

Social difference

Behold, my latest contribution to the Pool, a written piece (from http://pool.org.au/text/ndisarray/tribalism_and_the_other)

“We’re defined by difference. It’s the first rule of semiotics — the word “cat” develops its meaning as we understand that it’s “not dog”, “not rat”, “not bird”, etc. And in light of this system of negation and negative meaning, any sense of “togetherness” that we can collectively develop is fairly miraculous.
“We” come together from time to time, because that’s how togetherness works. When we’re faced with opposition, an “other” of some sort, seemingly unrelated people unite.. in the face of “terrorism”, or “the internet” or “adolescent depravity”. “Togetherness” cannot exist without “otherness”, and both are social tools that serve a social purpose.

Are we to celebrate tribalism? Human civilisation is itself a super-tribe of sorts.. and without tribes and societies, I wouldn’t be thinking these thoughts right now.. let alone publishing these thoughts to the internet. But I’m reluctant to embrace tribalism in its entirety.. We’re dying for purpose. We’re dying for a place to belong, a reason to live on this planet.. and because this “us and them” mentality *gives* us this sense of purpose and identity, it’s dangerous. Our logic is relentlessly binary, and every tribe excludes.. every tribe has an “other”. Jews, refugees, the young, the old, people who don’t barrack for an AFL team… I don’t know what to think. We define ourselves against what we are not.. we define our social groups and tribes in this same negative manner.. and this tension between “us” and “them” has driven the development of human civilisation over thousands of years. It’s incredible. We’ve come so far.

But perhaps we’ve reached a point where tribalism has taken us far enough. Is it possible to step back and acknowledge that social difference is both great and terrible?”

I’m quite pleased. Again, it’s not particularly positive, but it may stimulate some conversation.. I like playing devil’s advocate. And in this case, it’s more than an act.. I do believe that “tribes” are fairly problematic social structures. Go and argue with me. On Pool of course..

Discontent

There’s something wrong with this semester. We’re 4 weeks in. And it feels like all we’ve done is lie around in deck chairs on the beach while casually talking about the imminent nuclear war ahead. We’re about to get blitzkrieged by a vast array of assessment tasks, yet we’ve been ‘chillin’ and talkin’ Jenkins, etc. What have I learned in this semester? I’ve learned about what we’re meant to be doing in PP1, and how PP1 is marked. I’ve learned about what we’re meant to be doing in screen production, and how screen production is marked. I’ve learned about what we’re meant to be doing in Media Industries, and again, how we’re marked. Also we’ve come up with groups for PP1 and MI1. Groups in SPP are yet to be finalised and we’re still waiting on a mysterious set of scripts that will allow us to start planning/casting actors/finding locations. Why is this all so slow?

Guest lecturers in Media Industries seem to be sourced from the wrong faculties. We had an advertising/design person come in and talk about brainstorming and the creative process. Then we had an abysmal lecture on the ramifications of digital radio — again an extremely niche topic considering the broad spread of skills and aspirations of 3rd year media students. Similar sorts of things are happening in PP1, especially in the latest lecture on Blogging/reflection. I don’t think I learned anything about reflection. I learned that getting a PhD is about relabelling concepts that everyone’s already familiar with and placing them inside a flowchart that you hijacked from some other guy’s PhD. You then proceed to break your already simple concept down into 5 ‘stages’. Then you break each ‘stage’ down into 7 ‘phases’. Break each ‘phase’ down into 3 ‘elements’. Talk about all 105 “elements” (5x7x3= 105) ad nauseam and hopefully, you’ve written an exhaustive thesis on what is effectively one simple concept. Genius.

Whatever. I’ve gotten it out of my system now. All I can say is that I’m really looking forward to next semester.

Shock

It’s going to take me a great deal of rationalisation to transform PP1 into something I feel is worth doing. But I’m trying. Other people don’t seem as disturbed by PP1 as I am, and obviously different courses suit different people at uni. I liked IM1, I liked blogging, I liked many things that many students considered to be anathema. So if PP1 isn’t tailored to suit me, that’s the way it is, and some people are always going to feel like this in any given course.

Still… it’s a waste of everyone’s time if I dismiss PP1, so I’ve got to find a new way of looking at things. Here’s what I’m struggling with:

I’ve come out of 2nd year with a strong sense of what I want to do. Cinematography. And apparently that’s a very “old-world” position to occupy in this new wacked out world of convergent media forms. But I can’t help it, that’s what I like. I realise that I need to understand how convergent media is going to transorm the working environment that I’m attempting to break into, because film/tv is changing. But PP1 seems to assume that my *ultimate* media aspiration is to become a social media producer.. a pseudo-academic trailblazer who rides the bleeding edge of the hyper-digital mutant-media wave. And I don’t want this.

What happens to the camera operators, the sound mixers, the writers and directors.. what are they meant to do in PP1? In PP1, the emphasis seems to be on encouraging others to make media content. Marketing, promotion, viral communication, social modelling… Getting “the masses” to do something constructive and turning the Pool into a hive of youthful creativity. It’s frustrating… stepping back and hoping that random people online will play with us in this strange media playground that we’re setting up. Every semester, I want to make something that I’m proud of.. some aesthetically powerful piece of cinematography that I can add to my showreel… and now I’m going to wind up making bland documentaries about “my tribe”.. or viral meme videos.. and facebook pages. I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel flexible enough. Some people want to experiment with convergent spaces online, others do not, and it feels strange that suddenly all freedom is out the window and we are all drafted into working on something so specific and heavily marketing-esque.

Even Integrated Media allowed more freedom — I found that both semesters of IM augmented my knowledge of video codecs, compression, online distribution workflows and whatever else. I could take the course material and adapt it for my own purposes. Now I feel that what individual students *want* out of their Media course is being neglected. Some students at least.

“Josh, you’re being so backwards, complaining about new media when really you should be embracing it because it’s the future! You don’t want to die out, do you? Surely you want to be a new-media hipster, not an old-media dinosaur, right?”

I think this is a sneaky argument. As Jenkins says, media forms *adapt*, they do not die out. The means of *distributing* Film and Television content will almost certainly change dramatically, but this does not mean that film production itself will evaporate in wake of the new-media revolution. I think it’s fallacious to assume that everyone needs to become a producer of convergent media just because this is the new thing. We all need to *understand* it, yes, but we do not all need to become *makers* of it.

I guess I’m just surprised. I thought that PP1 would build on what I learned in TV1 and TV2 last year.. but no. It feels wholly detached. And I’ve got to come to grips with that.

“Your Tribe” is not “My Tribe”

People want freedom. People like all sorts of different things. And yes, because of this, people belong to ‘tribes’ of sorts. But the problem with “My Tribe”, as I currently see it, (hopefully my grim conceptions will change soon), is that people have no incentive to leave their actual tribes, to forsake their actual interests, in order to enter this contrived creative space that we are trying to construct. Let’s be cynical (ie realistic) here — what does “My Tribe” offer that other sites cannot? You make an account, you upload creative content, tag it, watch it, search for it, comment on it… sounds like pretty much every creative website I’ve ever heard of. Why leave YouTube, deviantart and Vimeo in order to make content for a site with a comparatively microscopic audience base? The ABC Pool website is competing with giants.. absolute mammoth websites, skyscrapers full of RAID servers and fibre-optics cabling. And as far as I can see, here are the benefits of the Pool, and by extension, the benefits of “My Tribe”:

It’s associated with the ABC, and some people may be interested in eventually working for the ABC, or at least may like the idea of their work being picked up by ABC.

The quality of Pool projects is potentially higher than the average YouTube video, as it currently attracts a different audience… not as many teenagers posting their hilarious skate videos online, etc. And most likely not as much uploading of copyrighted material, ie tv series, music videos, whatever else. Hence good material on Pool may be easier to find than it is on Youtube.

You can upload a variety of different materials. Radio projects, written projects, video projects, possibly interactive projects.. it can all go on Pool, whereas other creative sites often force you to stick with one media form. (something like deviantart is an exception to this however.. it allows for the submission of writing, still images, and now video..)

It’s an Australian website — Australians may be compelled to use Pool because of this commonality between Australian users. It’s slightly more likely that people will be able to physically meet each other/ collaborate each other if they’re all on the same continent I guess.

Is this enough? For some people, I guess it must be, as there *is* some activity going on at Pool, I’ll concede that. But that’s the point… Pool has a *niche* audience. And we’re trying to turn it into some kind of ‘mainstream’ website? Random people on facebook.. lawyers and doctors.. they’re just going to drop whatever they’re doing to make podcasts about what “my tribe” means to them? Of course not. The people who will like My Tribe are the people who are *already* making things, *already* expressing themselves online. They make awesome drawings on deviantart, or write fan-fiction in anime forums, or upload their videos to the infamous ‘tube of you’. And our task, as imaginary-online-media-producer-people, is to convince all of these people to come on board with a much weaker and smaller creative website? I just don’t see the incentive.

Not yet at least.

Dogma

Worked on an RMITV pilot today. No one there I knew.. I rocked up and started production with a group of complete strangers.. which is always an interesting experience. Everyone brings their own rules to the table, their own laws and standards that they work by. And in the first few hours of production, the laws need to be universalised (in theory). One person will gladly do what another person thinks is tacky, or dangerous, or inferior, depending on how they’ve learnt. People have these absolutes in their minds, and it’s contagious. If you’re new and you turn up to a shoot where people are spouting production-dogma, you’ll listen hard and follow suit. You can’t disagree.. god help you if you disagree. You’d be insane to disagree. Insane.

No. You would never run multiple lights with different colour temperatures simultaneously. You just wouldn’t. If one of them’s tungsten, they’ve all got to be tungsten. And if there’s even a hint of sunlight, you’d better gel all of your tungsten lights up to 5600K, because we wouldn’t want people to think that we’d used artificial light. God no.

No. You would never run two radio mics with a boom mic simultaneously. The ambience would be too different, you’d never be able to cut between the two channels. You’ve got to have all radio mics, or all boom. No compromises.

No. We can’t have shadow. Half of her face is brighter than the other side.. that just won’t do. Bring in five more redheads, and a blondie over this side, to counteract the shadows. Oh no. I see another shadow on the back wall. How about five more blondies over on that side? Yea. You’d never get away without five blondies on the right. Just open the aperture? You joking?

I don’t get it sometimes. The camera operator doesn’t want to go below F/9? What’s wrong with a wider aperture? We’re shooting the wide-angle shot and the subjects aren’t moving, so depth of field is not a problem.. why not open up? Why not switch off the sea of redheads that surround us and open the freaking iris..?

Dogma. If that’s the way you learnt.. that’s what you’ll do. There’s no standard for anything. Paul hates pans, Jeff likes zooms, I don’t like zooms, Greg hates redheads but likes Kinos, Gunther prefers incandescents to fluros in general…etc etc. Lots of standards, lots of potential for conflict.

Doesn’t sound like I had a good time on this shoot, does it?
Well… any shoot is a good experience in that you inevitably learn. And in this case, I’ve learned some things that I don’t like. One is the technique of blasting a scene with 500 lights and waging a war against even the tiniest of shadows. Everything becomes flat, everything becomes fake. And granted, we were shooting a TV show, and it’s obviously fake. But why emphasise it with a 3600-watt arsenal of tungsten-powered shadow-destroying incandescents? We’re not filming action sequences or sports TV.. we don’t need high shutter speeds or huge depths of field. Open the aperture and we could’ve ditched the blondie entirely.

I don’t like dogma. I’m sure I’ve got my own dogma, my own absolute rules.. but I don’t like them. I want to be open-minded and flexible. Why not try having a redhead on one side and an HMI on the other, without gelling one to match the other? Why not run the boom mic and the radio mics simultaneously? (we ended up doing this, and I think it was worth it. Yes, there will be a difference between the sonic qualities of radio and boom mics, but that’s outweighed by the safety of having a boom mic. No interference crackles, no clothing scrunches, etc. As a failsafe, it seems to work well.
And colour-temperature-wise, I’ve realised that we mixed colour temperatures on our TV1 film to great effect, I think. We had a tungsten key (warm white) in conjunction with a fluorescent light on the ceiling at maybe 3600, 4000K, somewhere in there. It’s softer, it’s a much colder white, but it makes the modeling much more interesting.. especially at the point where incandescent and fluorescent meet. And, catching a glimpse of an ABC interview earlier this evening, I was stunned by the quality of their shot, with radically different colour temperature on each side of the subject’s face. Looked great. So there.

Point is, be careful with dogma. It’s contagious, it makes other people paranoid/cautious, and inhibits everyone. Why not just experiment? Or open the freaking iris…

Don’t Panic

Good God. What have you done to the Slag Heap??

*monocle drops off*

I know, I know. It’s different. There weren’t many choices. I liked my old theme, but this one puts the link/categories in a more useful position, there on the right, and it also changes the font so everything’s a bit easier to read. The header image had to go, simply because the change in dimensions was too drastic. I may get into a habit of changing the header image on a regular basis, if I can be bothered.

But yes.. today marks a new stage in the development of the Slag Heap. I don’t like change, but here it is. (Also, I’ve overhauled my links and link categories. there are some really useful resources in there. enjoy.)

Fictional Artist’s Statement

“I see you all looking so happy. I see you lying on the beaches, underneath blue skies, full of life and sunshine. And I feel unwell. I know that you are hiding from the truth. My purpose as an artist — my purpose on this rotten earth — is to make you see: life is not like this. We are walking corpses; lustful apes with cars and guns. Nothing will become of this lurid farce of ours, only materialistic self-annihilation. There is no progress, only decay. The human being is a pitiful worm… his civilisation is the hideous cesspool in which he writhes and deceives himself, buried in utter filth.
And yet you are happy. This, you see, drives me as an artist. Confronted with the stupidly flawed nature of the human species, this wretched curse that is the human condition, I am compelled to show you where we are going. Human extinction… it is what I perceive to be all around us. From the very moment in which this universe was conceived, we were already extinct. It is written all over our disgusting bodies and vulgar brains, there is no escape. Revel in this sickness. This is what I ask of you. Your physical state is an affliction, death your only certainty.
And all of this is hidden. We know it, but we do not speak. My art is the unleashing of this hidden monster — truth— an acrid poison that eats through the soiled fabric of your very soul. And I ask you to face it.

My work cannot be placed in any box, it surpasses your mundane ‘categories’ and insipid ‘genre’ labels. It is baroque. It is hypersurreal. It is photomontage. It is everything and nothing. It is the apocalypse at 300 dots per inch.

You are all maggots devouring the sour, shrivelled apple that is our world. To view my exhibition is to visit the darkest place in this apple, the bitter core. Enter, and weep.”

It’s visual language. And i thought: why not make visual language fun?

I used to be more fun

Where are the pictures in this blog? And what about the incredible wit, cynicism and sarcasm? (yea.. incredible..) What has tv1 done to me?

This has become a mundane introspective blog.. very much like a diary that’s only vaguely relevant or interesting to the author. You’d have to work pretty hard to glean interesting pieces of information from my recent blogs.

Ever since finding out about the formal assessment criteria, and the four categories of blog post, the whole process of blogging seems more contrived. “Dear diary… etc”

Also there’s just too much work to sit here and make leisurely, interesting, picture-ful blogs. Which is a pity.. I enjoyed such blogs. I enjoyed the way The Slag Heap was something colourful and multifarious, with grand posts and sweeping ideas.

Now it’s more like an online shopping list. ‘Uhh.. theres too much work man and i dunno what to do and oh god. But we will get through, because i believe in myself and my team and i know we will get there. We need to do this, and this, and this.. and it will be hard, but i’ll have some weetbix and listen to Midnight Oil and we will get through it, gosh it’s so amazing.”

*shudder*

What have I become,
my sweetest friend…
Everyone I know, goes away, in the end.. (Trent Reznor wrote this song. NOT Johnny Cash. Jesus christ I hate it when people think it was Johnny Cash)

See that? That paragraph above? That’s spontaneity. That’s a line from a song that suddenly sprung to mind, and I decided to write it down. The above paragraph is what my blog has been lacking, as of late. It has no character… it’s faceless introspection.

‘But Josh, this is the purpose of your tv blog, you are to write down your most honest thoughts about the production process and reflect.’
No. Be quiet. That’s too mundane. It sounds strange perhaps, but giving my blogs character, giving my blogs images and sarcasm helps me to remember all the issues and problems that I discuss within that post. The pictures are visual cues, metaphors that in some way relate to what I am talking about. And in this way, I can scroll down through my blog, and at a glance, remember all the sorts of things that I’ve been thinking about over time.

It’s a good system. I want it to continue. I will try harder maybe.