What truly struck me with week 4 BCM206’s lecture, was how relevant the liquid labour market will be to me as a potential future journalist.
We have definitely moved from the hard, smoke-filled journalism of its origins.
GIF by Tayla Bosley
To a far more freelanced, individual journalism.
GIF by Tayla Bosley
Which makes working more convenient.
GIF by Tayla Bosley
But also potentially less stable.
“Journalists today have to fight with their employers to keep the little protections they still have, and do so in a cultural context of declining trust and credibility in the eyes of audiences.’
Dueze, 2009
This is what I fear with the rapid information network economy; a job where I become underpaid, undervalued, and underutilised… all for the sake of faster information.
For week three’s BCM206 post, I found myself thinking again and again about how the beginning of the personal computer in the 1980s sounded like the beginning of a science fiction novel.
The tropes, themes, and cultures associated with this technology boom really resonated with me, leading me to create this sound piece that compares and contrasts reality with science ‘fiction’.
The one thing that I found most interesting the BCM206 lecture this week was how some members of humanity will never truly grasp the power of the technology at their fingertips.
The one part that got to me was the anecdotes on people’s lack of understanding with the mechanics of the telegraph.
Image by Tayla Bosley
The woman who wanted to send soup to her son on the western front for example, resonated with me. Simply because I had to explain to my own grandmother that I can send her my holiday photos to her phone, and not have to physically print and send them to her.
The lack of physicality still remains a concept that is hard to grasp by some.
Sitting in a university classroom in 2017, with my phone in my hand and my tablet on the table, I can definitely say that my interaction with the first Godzilla film, Gojira was infinitely different to that of the original audience in 1954.
Being a 20-year-old woman that has lived in Australia her whole life, how I interpreted Godzilla would have also been different to those original Japanese viewers in the 50s. For one I had to experience the dialogue of the film through subtitles, and as accurate as they can be, there are always certain emotions, ideas, and expressions that simply get lost in translation.
Not to mention that I was on my phone the entire time.
Tweeting and reading subtitles simultaneously requires more brain power than i possess #digc330
The livetweeting of Godzilla by dozens of young university students must be a novel idea of @CL_Moore. This added yet another layer that distanced us from the original experience of Godzilla. It meant that I was busy trying to keep up with my fellow students’ hilarious tweets, rather than be submersed within the cinematic experience of the film.
"How are we going to deal with this Godzilla problem?" "LETS BLOW UP THE ENTIRE OCEAN" *all other oceanic lifeforms* what the fuck #digc330
This meant that I missed parts of dialogue of the film, and so had to rely on my own understanding of the film and its possible conventions to figure out what was happening.
However, as an Australian in 2017, I’m obviously lacking some of the cultural understandings that the original Japanese audience would have had access to in 1954.
I have watched a few black and white films in my time, but none were ever in a language other than English. I’ve also watched a few Godzilla films, but mostly modern ones that focus on action, and generally lack the overarching moral lesson that this original Godzilla was focused on.
I also fairly regularly watch subtitled animes, but even this cultural experience did not lend me any insight into what I was missing in those moments of dialogue.
#DIGC330 seems i can watch a subbed anime and sit on my phone bc i can expect whats happening. But have nothing to prepare me in #godzilla
So, due to my fairly large consumption of modern Japanese animated shows and films, I can simultaneously sit on my phone and watch a subbed anime, because I can easily comprehend the conventions and predictable patterns present in this medium.
But due to my lack of exposure to 1950s Japanese films conventions, I could not draw upon my own cultural or personal framework to comprehend what I was missing in those moments when I was looking at my phone and not the film.
Overall, watching the original Godzilla gave me the opportunity to reflect on where my personal framework lacks, and how I can continue to build my cultural experiences.
The following video was created for BCM207. In this subject we had to create an activism campaign, and then make a PSA style video for it.
Here is mine on raising awareness about dementia.
Contextual Essay:
The aim of this project was to raise awareness of the rising issue of dementia in Australia. Throughout the previous two assignments for this subject I have developed a deep understanding of dementia in Australia and how it is becoming a much larger problem with the aging population of this country (Thomsen, 2014).
As such the research for this project began with the first and second assignments, in preparation for this final assignment I simply further investigated some key facts and figures to include in my video.
The most important fact that I discovered was that 120 people with dementia go missing every year in Australia, and that they are usually missing for more than a day (Alzheimer’s Australia, 2017). This fact truly shocked me, and so I made it a focal point for my video.
I wanted the audience of this video to feel the same shock and worry for my dementia patient ‘Maureen’ as I felt in reading those facts.
Thus my idea was to make people emotive about this campaign, by making them worry about the perilous journey that ‘Maureen’ faces in her daily life.
My original idea was an entire point-of-view video of Maureen being lost in the streets. This is how the video begins, and I feel that it makes the viewer literally imagine themselves in her position, this includes the confusion and fear that a person with dementia would feel while lost.
However, while filming I felt that watching Maureen in the traffic, and then acting lost and scared also made a powerful point about being alone, and so incorporated this into my video.
Obviously the changes in music and colour act as a way to make the audience happy again, now that they know that Maureen is safe, this also further the power of the ’emBrace’, the tracking bracelet that is a major part of this activism campaign.
Although it wasn’t until the end of my editing of the video that I changed Maureen’s part into black and white. I’m glad that I did as once I experimented with it I realised that it furthered the sense of fear and confusion that I was trying to create.
I was also glad to discover the logo options in Final Cut Pro X, as I feel that my end screen, and call to action, appear more professional and real with the added ‘walking man’ logo.
Overall I am very pleased with this project. I feel that I incorporate enough facts and information to make the video an awareness campaign, and also that I made the audience worry enough about Maureen that they will be inspired to learn more about dementia, and potentially wish to act through donation to help the issue.
References:
“Alzheimer’s Australia | Key Facts And Statistics For Media”. Fightdementia.org.au. N.p., 2017. Web. 1 June 2017.
Thomsen, Simon. “It’s Missing Persons Week: Here Are Some Sobering Facts On People Who Go Missing”. Business Insider Australia. N.p., 2014. Web. 1 June 2017.
For the final BCM310 project I chose to do the digital artefact format of video. I believed at the beginning of this project that this would enable me the best use of the medium that I was researching; documentaries. I still hold this belief at the end of this project, as it enabled me to provide obvious examples to the research points and conclusions that I was making.
The purpose of this project began very differently to how it ended. My original idea was to ‘research how media changes society’, with specific examples from documentaries, and how they created social change.
Upon review of my project proposal this was deemed ‘too broad’, and as I began to research the topic, I realised this assessment to be only too true. I then had to narrow down my focus into something more manageable. Thus I began to investigate ‘how documentaries make people want to change the world’. This narrowed down my focus remarkably, as now I only had to research what aspects of documentaries can be attributed to inspiring people to want to make change.
I further narrowed my scope by only looking at ocean-based documentaries, as I was warned that to do another form of documentary may be jarring to the audience of the project. Furthermore this research within a single genre of documentary allowed me to more easily discover the patterns of production present in each film.
As such I discovered through secondary research and content analysis of the documentaries; Blackfish, The Cove, and A Plastic Ocean, that the three most obvious aspects of documentaries that are meant to create change by the audience are; empathy for animals, human fear for self, and confronting facts.
It is my understanding from this research, that upon seeing these three factors present in a documentary, certain people within an audience may feel inspired to create a change that helps rectify the issue presented. The issue of what change, or whether the audience acts on this change is irrelevant, only that they are inspired/motivated/want to.
From this research I put together a video that reveals this conclusion through clear examples from three ocean, oceanic-animal, documentaries.
The only con to this format was cutting down the extensive research I had done to a six minute video. I felt that I could have researched further, or explained more with more time, but I made my research as succinct as possible due to the constraints.
Other than that I feel that the format of video worked very well for this project, as the audience can feel the emotion present in the documentaries, and clearly understand the examples that back up my research.
Overall I enjoyed researching this topic, and creating the project. As I have experience with each other format made available to this task, I felt that this project enabled me to only further my video creation skills, which will certainly prove a valuable asset to my portfolio as I search for employment as a media producer.
