CMP REPORT

Collaboration. A fancy sounding word; but is it as fancy as it sounds? Yes, indeed; for me.

A zap back into time and I picture myself sitting in a morning session of an intensive for a course called Collaborative Media Project. Excited at the thought that we’ll be working with each other on a variety of projects, I looked forward to the experience. However, the one thing that troubled me was to think of a concept that I’d like to be the main driver of. While others approached me with their concepts, to receive suggestions and feedback, I couldn’t think of a concept that was strong enough; strong enough to convince people to get them on board with me.

After a great thinking process and consumption of nearly 4 coffees, I felt I had finally hit jackpot with an idea! As an international student in Melbourne, I have always wanted to bring forth student experiences and stories through a video blog format. I found this to be the best opportunity to set the ball rolling. Titled ‘Happyness’, I aspired to produce a video blog styled documentary which followed the lives of international students residing in Melbourne and their idea of happiness; in search of answers to the main issue being – How does one measure happiness – Is it by fulfilling your aspirations? Or is it by being content with what you have? I bounced this idea with Meg and Florence initially, and they found it be an interesting topic. However, I still wasn’t too convinced about the idea since this was just a thought and executing it was a far fetched desire.
I put forth this idea in my Learning Contract. Little did I know, that this would exist just in text!
A month into the course, everyone around me seemed to have taken off with their individual projects while I just sat and pondered instead of acting upon the execution of my idea.

One fine autumn morning, one coffee down, I was hit by yet another idea! I was about a week away from going back home to India to attend my cousin’s wedding. While the excitement of being part of the grand celebrations was seeping in, I had this desire to capture the myriad colours of an Indian wedding. After bouncing off the idea with Patrick and Michael, I felt determined and excited to pull it off. While the initial idea was to cover the story of the bride and groom about their pre wedding jitters and the distinct cultures that they belong to; once I landed in the wedding house, I knew this was never going to happen thanks to the chaos and madness involved in the wedding preparations.

Armed with my Canon 550D, I was present at every ritual, every ceremony ready to capture every single moment. While B roll shots weren’t the problem, the real challenge was to find interesting people who would say interesting things about an Indian wedding. I began to take bytes from family and friends about the couple but eventually started covering opinions on the marriage of distinct cultures and the predominance of rituals and traditions in the Indian society. While I got a mixture of outlooks on the same, I looked forward to compiling this into one amazing video. One of the major setbacks however while filming on location, was the poor audio quality. I prayed that it would be rectified in post production.

Back in Melbourne with some 4 hours of footage, the next step was to pull out rushes that could actually be used. After segregating my rushes into B rolls and bytes, I roped in our class’ Batman – Alex; to help me out with the postproduction. What happened next was the best cultural collaboration ever! As I acquainted Alex with the various Indian rituals and Bollywood songs, we came up with a structure for the movie and titled it ‘A Knotty Affair’ which was most wonderfully designed by Angela Cho Hee Kim. While we had our post production in full swing, Maria popped into the edit suite and made an amazing suggestion of plugging in ‘A Knotty Affair’ on the Humblebeings Facebook page. She wanted to promote the story of the married couple belonging from distinct cultures, who stood by each other and convinced their families; thus uniting one and all by the power of love. The suggestion was brilliant and the result was a cross collaboration. By the end of the production, we had Alex humming Bollywood songs and speaking in an Indian accent!

Moving on from A Knotty Affair, one of the earliest projects on which I was taken on board was Women Go Surfing. I was excited to be a part of this project right from the time Meg had proposed the idea of sharing stories of women surfers in countries where surfing is still a not so popular sport. ‘The Goa Hippy Tribe’ was a point of reference, on the grounds of which we aimed to build an online community of women surfers from across the globe. While I was primarily assigned to be the camera operator for interviews, I did try to involve myself with the social media activity too. While I found it really difficult to touch base with women surfers in India; I did manage to rope in my friend Bhagyashree, an international student from India who was a newbie on the waves. She was delighted at the thought of sharing her surfing experience with me, which I’ve recorded and shared on the Facebook page. While the initial idea was to prepare a doco of all the interviews we’d get on board, we realised that by the end of the semester, the page was a doco in itself. Through this page,we have built an ever growing online community of novice women surfers who promote not just surfing as a sport but also women’s liberation. Working on this all girl team, has been by far the cleanest all girl collaboration ever! No catty fights, no dramas, only girl power!

In Alex’s directorial venture – Inscription, I carried out the role of Production Designer. Propping up the gaming zone of a uni cafetaria and transforming it into a hipster restaurant is no easy task especially when you have to make do with available resources and a zero budget. Alex, the sorted man that he is, briefed me about the look and feel that he desired with the help a graphical diagram, making life easy. I brought in colourful tumblers and cutlery from home, stole my roommate’s fake diamond ring (with her permission ofcourse) and added a plant here and a light there to get the desired set layout. While my work was done pre shoot, I stuck around to lend a helping hand to Alex, keeping a tab on continuity and the actors lines.

When it came it lending a hand in filming Maria’s and Sakshi’s conversation for Humblebeings, I was more than happy to do so. I had now begun to love the camera, exploring it’s capabilities. While I took to the camera with utmost ease, I had to calm the ladies down each time they moved out of the frame while engaged in candid conversation. I took off from the conventional style of keeping a set frame for interviews and focused on capturing the facial expressions and gestures by zooming in and out on the two chicas. Maria gave me the freedom to experiment with this shoot style, helping me build my confidence in recording informal interviews.

Just In Case has been one of my favourite projects that I’ve worked on during my entire Master’s course. As the camera operator, I learnt a lot from Yuri who tripled up as the Actor, Director and Directory of Photography on set. Since it was my first shot at filming a fiction film, Yuri explained his desired shots with utmost patience. The greatest challenge for me while filming, was to control my laughter. We had to retake a shot nearly ten times because each time Yuri burst into his comical actions, I would burst into laughter. The scene in which Yuri is dressed as the old flower lady was the most memorable part of the movie for me, as I just couldn’t stand still or stop myself from laughing.

I was roped in initially as the actress for The Coin. However due to date issues,(yes, now I’m talking like a star);-p I couldn’t make it to the screen. Jokes apart, since I wasn’t going to be in Melbourne during the scheduled shoot dates, CiCi took on the actor’s role. YoYo was kind enough to offer me the role of procuring sound effects and background scores for the film. Sound plays an integral part in every horror film and hitting the right note was of utmost importance. I jumped at the opportunity and most willingly agreed to help out in the sound design of The Coin. Shakun and myself, skimmed through almost every free sound website on the world wide web and shared our discoveries with Yoyo and her team of editors. The most eminent trait of a good director is to be sure and firm about what he wants and that reflected in Yoyo’s choices. She knew what she wanted and hence wouldn’t settle for just any random sound. I loved this dedication that she had towards her creative baby.

One of the earliest projects that I worked on was the Urban Eco Symposium 2015. Though I joined the duo of Alex and Lucille pretty late as they were done with pre production and a had already shot the B rolls, they were very kind enough to take me on their team and most willingly took my help for sound recording for the interview shoot. While I had never operated a boom mic before, I realised that sound recording is no easy task, especially since you have to be still making sure that no ruffling of wires or movement is recorded in the audio. It looks easy, but it’s no child’s play.

In a nutshell, collaboration has been a great experience for me. Through this process, I’ve learnt to accept others suggestions and incorporate it in order to achieve the best results. A major reason for me to choose to study in Melbourne, is the cultural diversity it offers. I’ve always wanted to work in a multi cultural environment and my classroom has provided me the best learning ground to do so. Diverse ideas, working styles, attitudes and opinions have definitely contributed towards making me industry ready once I’m out of uni, out in the open. Thanks to the numerous opportunities offered to me by classmates to operate the camera for their projects, I’ve begun to love videography and shall continue experimenting with the medium. This course has helped me come out of my comfort zone, out of my shell and has helped me develop the necessary technical skills and people skills for the media world. I’ve loved every role undertaken in the projects I’ve worked on and feel blessed to have great, understanding colleagues. This course has made this semester a fruitful and enjoyable one that has created lifelong memories!

PIM PORTFOLIO

They say ‘Do not judge a book by it’s cover.’ I found this saying absolutely spot on for describing my experience during the Post Industrial Media course. Since this course required us to produce videos on a mobile/smartphone I knew that it would be a cakewalk because of the pre conceived knowledge and experience of creating content on a mobile phone. I assumed that since it’s a smartphone generated video, the aesthetics or technical specifications like colour, sound, visual effects, transitions etc won’t be much of a focus. However, that bubble was going to burst. Come the intensives and there I was sitting in the most anxious state of mind, wondering if I were in the right class!

The world of mobile videography is much deeper than you can perceive. It’s evolving every second, bringing forth a plethora of ideas, visuals and content created by not just qualified filmmakers but by anyone ranging from a toddler to a ninety (or even more) year old! The intensives were a window to the expanse of the new media world.

After skimming through a wide range of MINA films in our first intensive, Yuri and myself settled on Lisbon. Live to be our case study. After penning down several affordances that we observed from watching the case study; we mutually agreed upon ‘companion’ to be our affordance. In our understanding we observed that in the travelogue Lisbon.Live, though the traveller is exploring Lisbon by himself; he isn’t alone. His phone, through which he captures the visuals and sounds of Lisbon serves as his companion. With the first task done, the challenge had just begun! Now that we had an affordance in place, the thought of developing 3 sketches on the same, sent me into a frenzy.

With a meagre timeframe of 24 hours, I found it quite challenging to think of concepts for my sketches. With the aim of meeting the deadline, I did not focus on the visual quality or aesthetics of the sketches. I just picked up my phone and shot my first sketch of me holding my friend’s hand as we walked. This being my first sketch, was highly literal in every context to our affordance of companion. The following two sketches were not so literal but weren’t ‘wow’ either. ‘You’ll never walk alone’ is Liverpool Football Club’s anthem. Drawing a relation to this slogan and companionship, I produced my second sketch. The final sketch for Project 2 was based on Siri suggesting me places to eat. When it came to presenting our sketches in the studio, I was highly nervous because it had been ages since I had given a presentation. However, Yuri’s comic timing and witty humour, sailed us through the presentation. Delighted with the fact that we were done with Project 2, little did I know that this was just the beginning.

In the studio that followed the week after, we were introduced to the practice of writing reflections on the issues that we faced in the studio. At first, I didn’t really understand as to how this practice would be beneficial to us, but as I started documenting the issues I faced in the studio and outlining a plan to tackle them and overcome them, I realised that these reflections serve as a diary for myself, helping me gauge my progress through the course. The 4 R’s of Reporting, Relating, Reasoning and Reconstructing were instrumental in structuring my weekly reflections.

The next challenge in line was the execution of the Project 3 tasks. While it was a group assessment, each of us (Yuri, Cho Hee Kim Angela and me) had to produce 5 sketches each based on the criteria outlined in the Project 3 brief. This assessment focused on exploring experimental techniques offered by plugging in video and sound enhancing features offered by smartphone applications and desktop editing softwares. As we divided the tasks amongst the three of us, based on our personal interests, I ended up with the most challenging tasks in my kitty – produce two sketches using a new, unexplored technique. I am no pro at using the features offered by smartphone applications, I therefore found this a difficult hurdle to overcome. I got myself familiarised with Vine only after enrolling in this course which speaks enough about my knowledge about new media.
While this assessment required us to use mobile phone video editing apps, it was my first attempt at downloading such an application on my phone and experimenting with it. The Useful Tools list in the Mobile Videography blog, helped me look at different apps enlisted there, thereafter which I settled for Splice. I found myself liking the usability of the Splice app. It was easy to operate and provided great results. When it came to producing sketches with new, unexplored techniques, I did a bit of research on the internet, looking for ideas that were still evolving in the new media domain. While skimming through the App store on my iPhone, I came across an interesting app called JamCam. I hadn’t come across any other app that offered the feature of recording not just video but also the song you are currently listening to on your phone, into the video. Another exciting app called Hyperlapse from Instagram, hooked me onto the fast moving imagery it created. I looked forward to creating my sketches with the help of these two nouveau apps. I found myself enjoying this process, excited at the achievement of amazing visuals. Never had I dreamt that my iPhone 4 could produce such spectacular results.

When it came to explaining the concept of these sketches, by making a reference to my affordance of companion, I fell short of words and thought that the game is over for me and that I’d have to re do my sketches all over again. However, the fourth R of Reconstructing, learnt while documenting my reflections in this course, gave me the cue to put my act together. All wasn’t lost yet. I jotted down pointers on how my phone is a companion to me and made those references while explaining the concepts of the sketches in my blog posts. With every passing studio, I began to develop a deeper fascination for the medium. I began to understand my chosen affordance of companion better and believed that the ‘Selfie’ sketch explained and supported my affordance most appropriately.

Building on the front camera feature of the ‘Selfie’ concept, I felt positive about producing a video work on the same lines. I was clear in my head that I wanted to experiment with this aspect offered by a smartphone, however I found it challenging to think of an idea that would support this shoot style. Since I would be present in the visuals throughout, I felt that I could incorporate another character’s point of view towards me, which would be served by the front camera on my phone. Since almost every girl has a soft corner for soft toys, I imagined my phone to be a teddy bear that I find on the street. I shot random visuals as I walked on the street. I love Melbourne by night, and hence tried to bring in the various lights that fascinated me. Though I had my visuals ready to be presented for iteration 2, I still didn’t have a soundscape in place since I was still unsure if I wanted the teddy bear to talk out loud about his emotions or if I wanted to display his myriad moods by plugging in the JamCam feature of changing songs with changing moods.

The most constructive feedback that I received in the final studio session, helped me develop my final video work. Moving on from the fiction based plot and linear sequence of events, I replaced the Teddy with my own phone which would complement my frontal camera shoot style. Once I decided to incorporate that inclusion, I restructured the entire video work and titled it ‘You Complete Me’. The visuals shot entirely on the front camera of my iPhone 4, I added drop of water to create the outstanding blurry, out of focus effect. I love writing poems, and so plugged in a few lines that speak about how my phone completes me.

This course has helped me develop not just my mobile video producing skills but has also contributed towards developing my thinking process. Coming from a television background, I’ve always thought that mobile videography is no rocket science. It is only after delving deep into the actualities and functionality of the smartphone, have I actually understood the importance of this ever evolving medium. Pitching an idea through sketches was an absolute winner for me. Documenting my learnings through reflections was another helpful practice. Above all, I started appreciating my iPhone 4. People prefer high end camera phones that offer sharp clarity in pictures. Myself, on the other hand, explored the simplicity of the iPhone 4.

Thus, do not judge a smartphone by it’s cover. Within it lies a treasure trove of opportunities and challenges that has the potential to create something magical!

You Complete Me

You Complete Me is a heartfelt dedication to my iPhone 4. It is only during the Post Industrial Media course did I make the most optimum use of my phone and realise it’s true value and importance in my life.

Post the feedback received during the last studio session on my Iteration of the final video work, I was determined to produce a video work that would be more than a work of art, I wanted it to be something that I could relate to, something that I could call ‘myself’. Moving on from the initial idea of showcasing the interior state of a teddy bear, I plugged in the suggestion of using my own phone instead of a teddybear.

As I happen to drop my phone on a busy street, the joy of finding it again gives me a feeling that I’ve found myself. As I walk through Melbourne’s bustling colorful streets at night, I’ve captured the dazzle on my front camera. Lending a blurry, artistic effect is a drop of water and the mist of a rainy day. While my emotions towards my phone are conveyed through the poem I’ve penned down, the tone of the video is set with the acoustic track procured on freesound.org. Working on the lines of my affordance of ‘companion’, I’ve made sure that I’ve shot the entire video on my front camera, emphasizing on the fact that the front camera feature of a smartphone backs up as your companion to record yourself. Hyperlapse from Instagram, paces up the visuals adding to the buzzing city effect. The compilation of visuals, addition of transitions, voiceover recoding, music plug ins, credit titles were executed on Adobe Premier Pro.

To sum it up, You Complete Me is a true reflection on how dependant I am on my phone, just as I am on my companion. I’ve tried to reflect this in the overall packaging and delivery of the videowork – right from the shoot style, to the voiceover, to the soothing soundtrack.

Here’s a link to my Report, illustrating my ideas behind this videowork.

PIM Iteration#2 – TEDHEAD

Moving on from the sketches developed in the initial stages of the Post Industrial Media course, I had to literally scratch my brain to think about what I’d want to produce as my final MINA film.

I was sure that I wanted to propel my ideas based on the ‘front camera’ feature of a mobile phone that would reflect in the shoot style of my production. The most eminent functionality of the front camera is the self shoot experience that it offers. Based on this, I tried to think of various concepts for the video that would complement this shoot style. The front camera feature of a mobile phone functions as a companion, helping you shoot yourself without the help of another person.

As I sat in my room, amidst my family of soft toys, I began to think about their point of view towards the world; towards me. Who knew if they felt the same way as we did, thought as we did, but kept things to themselves, like we do? I wanted to convey this ‘interior state’ of a soft toy through a ‘point of view’ styled video. I imagined the video to have a story line starting with me finding a teddy bear abandoned on the street. I pick it up and walk on. However, I hadn’t thought about the structure of the soundscape of the video. The initial idea, was to plug in a ‘voiceover’ of the teddy bear’s mental state – his happiness of being accepted by someone. After a further contemplation, I scrapped the idea thinking of it to be a very ‘done to death’ deal. The idea that followed suit, was to incorporate the functionality of the ‘JamCam’ app which embeds the music you are listening to, into the video you are capturing. Probably, the songs that I keep listening to could reflect the fluctuating moods of the teddy bear. I’m still not convinced enough to execute this, and hence haven’t incorporated any sound in my video.

The iPhone 4 does surprise me sometimes with its ability to create magic even without fancy video enhancing features. A drop of rain on the front camera gave me an amazing ‘foggy’ effect. The Hyperlapse from Instagram app gave me the fast moving effect. I compiled all the visuals captured but couldn’t flesh out a soundscape. At this stage, it’s just an initial attempt to achieving a better, much refined production.