Enchanted Ground 3: locative media

I live at a student housing place called RMIT village which has around 450 people living in it and has many communal areas like the TV lounge, swimming pool, gym etc. Last month on a Monday night I was sitting alone in the TV lounge just changing channels to see which movies were they playing on Foxtel when a Chinese girl called Sam came and sat next to me. I finally chose to watch Avengers 2. I had already seen it before so I asked her if she want to change it. She said she was just bored and just wanted someone to talk to. So we started talking. She told me she’s studying social sciences. She got quite excited to find out what I was studying. She said film making is something she has always wanted to do as a hobby. Her favourite director is Chris Nolan, whom I’m a big fan of. She told me to show her my work so I just showed her some of the stuff I had on Google drive on my phone. She actually asked me if I wanted to work on a short film during the holidays. She had a couple of ideas in mind and told she knows how to operate a DSLR. That’s about it. She was more in to coming up with ideas and scripting. We exchanged contact details and we do chat quite often and we’re planning to do something short and simple soon for a start. Glad I met her. Her command over English is quite good compared to other Asian students. I think it will be good to collaborate with her.

Wall of salvation 3: flipped lecture – Soundcloud

Enchanted Ground 2: Search Engine Optimisation

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It basically helps your website or blog to rank higher and more visible to people in search engines. There are many ways to improve the SEO of your site. Some of the important components are:

Keywords: You should know about the keywords that people usually use to search while creating your content and every page should be built around those keywords which are important or significant to your site or blog. Search engines give you suggestions of popular words when you’re typing. You can use Google Keyword Planner, a tool which will help you with popular keywords.

Image tags: You must tag your images. If there are none, Google does not know how to identify the image. For WordPress, you can use Yoast, a plugin that reminds you to label your images. With tags, Google will know what the image is, how to index it, where to store it and when to bring it up in a search.

Meta description: This is a sentence which is right below your URL on the search page. This is a description of the page which should be interesting and attention grabbing. Use call-to-action words such as “learn” and “visit” to engage people and encourage them to find out why the information on your page is important to them.

Backlinks: Make sure that the links add value to your readers’ lives. You can never have too many backlinks for an article. You will build high traffic that will help you rise up in the results.

Reflection of digital story

 

Our digital story is called Breaking barriers. It is a short interview based documentary which shows the issues faced by Chinese students when they come to Melbourne, like communication barrier, culture shock or just getting along with the local people. It is a light hearted film with a positive message. It is based on two interviews. One of a local student and the other one of a Chinese student. They both share their views and tell their experiences. In between the interviews, we’ve included some footage and pictures related to the topic.

 

To start off, we’re only two people in the group, Liang and I. It didn’t really matter because we had similar ideas for the digital story so decided to work together. So we had a couple of meetings before the proposal submission to come up with a proper storyline and structure for the film. At that time our topic was a little different. It was focusing on two Asian people and one local and the duration was around three minutes. Also our social media strategy was not very specific. When we got the feedback for the proposal, Jenny told us to make it simpler, shorter and come up with a better social media strategy. So we changed our topic a little bit (to what it is now) to make it more specific and that way we were able to cut down our duration as well and make our social media strategy better. The next step was to lock down our interviewees. Liang was a big help in this. One of her housemates was a local student and she had a Chinese friend who’s studying at RMIT. Both of them agreed to be interviewed. We wrote a set of questions we were going to ask them and sent it to them beforehand so they could prepare for it. We hired the equipment and were all ready for the shoot. This was our pre production.

 

We took Liang’s housemate Jess’s interview first. She’s studying bachelor of arts at Latrobe and she was quite confident in answering all the questions and her interactions with Chinese people. We shot it in her backyard. I was on camera. Liang did the audio. One issue we faced was the changing sunlight but we somehow went through it.

 

We shot Vincent’s interview the next day. He is Liang’s friend and from China. He was a little camera shy and was having a little trouble communicating and expressing himself in front of the camera. We had to take several retakes and the end result was good. He invited us to his apartment. The lighting was good. Liang and I did the same roles as the last interview. We copied the footage in Liang’s laptop and returned the equipment. For the b-roll footage we used our own dslr and mobile cameras and some footage of the city we had shot earlier.

 

 

For promotion, we made a Facebook page with some pictures and posts, since FB is a global platform. However, it is banned in China so uploaded the video on a Chinese video site called Tudeo as well since Chinese people are our main target. Apart from that we uploaded it on Youtube too.

 

 

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/breakingbarriersfilm/

Tuduo video link: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/l3SsDIaj8Ck/

I edited the digital story. It did not take much time since it was supposed to be short and simple. The only trouble I had was to make sure its not repititive or a drag. It switches between both the subjects frequently and the things they are saying are related to each other. There is b-roll footage and pictures in between the interviews. For the rough cut, I only put in some pictures as b-roll and the interview cuts were not that crisp. I fixed that for the final cut and put a background music to give it a better feel. The name ‘Breaking barriers’ was actually finalized at the very end since we had several names in mind.

Bridge-less river 1: apps

Apps have become such an important part of our lives these days. Whether they are mobile or computer apps. We can never really imagine life without Whatsapp, Skype, FB, Twitter, Snapchat and Uber etc. They make our lives so much easier and convenient. I mean there is an app for literally every single thing today, whether it’s dating, job hunting, video editing, transport timings and of course GPS. I use a lot of them as well.

 

For this task I have to pitch in an idea for my own app. The app I would like to develop is called Crickaroo. I know the name is a little cheesy but that is the best I could come up with right now. Anyways, this app is all about the game of cricket. I’m literally the biggest fan of cricket and I follow each and every match and story happening in the cricketing world. In my home country, Pakistan, the people are very much emotional about it and it has a huge following, around 10-20 times more than people in Victoria follow AFL. After coming here, I could not meet many people who like cricket. Most of them don’t even know their team won the world cup last year. Coming back to my app, it will post real time live scores, latest news and updates about all the happenings. This is just the beginning. The real USP of this app is that it is more of a social media platform for cricket lovers from around the world. When you select a country and city you’re currently in, it shows you all the cricket lovers and players nearby and gives you a chance to connect to them. It will have groups like Facebook, where people can discuss, plan to meet up to watch a match or plan to play a match. This is what I miss the most about home. I used to play cricket with my friends all the time. I really can’t find much people over here who would like to play cricket instead of AFL. Also, you select your home team or team you support and the app will give you all the updates about it and give you the chance to connect to it’s fans near the place you live. For example I would love to meet Pakistani cricket team supporters here and go watch cricket matches with them when our team is playing.

The question arises, how is this app different and are there any similar apps in the market already. There sure are some. ESPNCricinfo is there for latest scores and news, Facebook is there to connect and then there’s Meetup to organize hangouts or meetings. My app is different because it has all the qualities of the above mentioned app in regards to cricket and it is very specific. So you will not find people who are looking for dates and stuff on here. There are some weaknesses as well. Cricket is not really a global sport yet. It is popular in around 10-12 countries only yet. Also, this app requires a lot of work and time to become mainstream. Not your regular app like Tinder which got popular very quickly. One more thing, the person you’re connecting to might be someone you were not expecting to be, i.e. a fake, a scammer or a predator. I can overcome these weaknesses or at least try to. As far as cricket not being a global sport is concerned, it is actually the second most popular sport after football (soccer) in the world and as far as I know, it is growing. Even a baseball playing nation like USA has a team now. Everything takes time and you need to be patient. As far as connecting with people is concerned, bad stuff happens a lot on social media. For this app, you will need to verify yourself by submitting a copy of your ID that you are a real and genuine person and if you indulge in something wrong or harm anyone, action will be taken against you.

Wall of Salvation 1: infographic

Peer feedback

I saw several projects of my peers. All of them were great and I mostly saw their rough cuts so all of  them had their strengths and some loopholes in them. I’ll review some of them.

Anurit’s group – A maze of Anarchy

This was my favourite out of all the digital stories I’ve watched so far. It is basically an interactive digital story trailer shot in noir theme around the RMIT city campus. It is about some detective trying solve the mystery of a killer. The black and white effect looks great and blends well with the theme. The camera work is great. Good closeups capture the face expressions and other details. Also a lot of panning and other camera movements have been used. The background score and effects are good as well. The interactivity part is the best. It keeps you engaged till the end and you’re curious as to what the next decision would lead to, however they can do much more with interactivity by integrating social media into it somehow. Editing could have been better. It’s too long for a trailer and it becomes a drag after a point.

Mark’s group – International students in Melbourne

Overall this film looks great especially the visuals, the aerial shots of Melbourne, the time lapses and other elements like the use of statistics. The interviews are very well shot as well. Really like the overall feel. The things I have a problem with are that almost all of the b-roll footage of the city and even of Sydney is not shot by themselves and taken off the internet so they might face copyright issues. Also there’s issues with the audio especially at the start. The editing could have been better and the overall length can be shortened by removing some unnecessary stuff.

Karina’s group – A real day dream

Very interesting concept. It’s about how your dreams influence your future decisions. I did not see the whole of it. Just saw a little part of it since I came a little late to class that day. It has a cultural theme, and the part I saw had the issue of language barrier where the Chinese girl was having trouble trying to comprehend what the guy was saying. It makes you smile but also highlights a major issue. The camera work is simple. The things I did not like about it were the editing, could have been tighter, the audio was the biggest issue. They might have to work hard on it.

Julian’s group – Something about food

They basically showed several minutes of footage shot at Queen Victoria Market of food, veggies and fruits. I didn’t really understand what their concept was. They said they were going to edit it and shoot some other stuff as well. I think they want to show the different kinds of food according to different cultures that are available here in Melbourne. It was just raw footage so I cannot really comment on what I liked or disliked but from what I understood about the concept, it was good and based on the multicultural theme that all of us are working on. So best of luck to them.

 

Programming concepts 2

Before doing the snowflake task, I literally had no idea of programming whatsoever and like everyone else, I thought it was boring and time consuming but I had a good time doing this. The 20 lessons taught me a lot. I think everyone should have this basic knowledge. To be honest, the whole exercise was fun for me because we just had to give the commands and it was generating the coding by itself for example move forward by 200 pixels, turn right/left by 90 degrees. However the most interesting part was the repeat command for me which would allow us to repeat any command or a set of commands by 1,2,3,5,7 and so on times. This saves you a lot of time. If we do it manually, it would take us days to do it. You just give the computer a command and it will do it instantly for you. Another great command is the loop command which makes a loop of any of the above mentioned commands and keeps playing it again and again like you do it in sound editing software like Adobe Audition for an audio track or a layer in After effects. Also there was commands to change the colour as well. Making your own snowflake in the final lesson was fun. I decided to make a simple one which is more close to reality. Didn’t change it’s colour and gave it a rugged look. Overall this exercise was interesting and there was a lot to learn.

Programming concepts 1

Doubting castle 4: practice-led research

practiceOur digital story is a short interview based documentary about Chinese students and the troubles they face when they come to Australia like cultural shock, language barrier and mixing around with people. The idea is quite simple but we did face quite a lot of problems while making it.

 

1. The first major issue was related to our proposal. It was our own mistake actually. We are just two people in the group and we decided to make a 3 minute documentary with 3 to 4 interviews with the topic of difficulties faced by Asian people (students and workers) when they come to Australia. The feedback we got was that we had to be more specific to make our film short. This topic was quite vast at this includes food, culture, religion, language and also aspects of student life and work life. According to the short documentary guideline paper developed by  the makers of Jutta Ravn (2000): the most important quality in the making of a film. […] just as important as clarification, I think, is the need to simplify.
2. Another problem we faced was developing questions for the Chinese subject in a way that we are not being rude or disrespectful towards him and politely ask him about his struggles and difficulties. You have to make sure your interviewees are comfortable with the wordings you use to ask your questions and it is not disrespectful in any way. So what we did was that we sat down with him and explained him the concept of the film and took some of his suggestions as well. Also I found some interesting tips for interviewing on the Wild class room documentary interview page which says: Remain flexible during your interview and let the person being interviewed go where they want. Pay attention to their emotions as the story unfolds and when you see new information appear that deserves attention, shift gears and refocus your questions on the heart of the story.
3. Last but not the least we had some issues during production which pretty much everyone has every now and then related to audio and lighting. One of the interviews was shot outdoors and we could constantly hear noises in between of traffic or some machinery in between. We had to take some retakes. Also the sunlight kept changing literally every 5 minutes because of the cloud which were moving quite fast. So there were some major delays in between. We managed to go through it somehow and the end result was great. According to this article by Arthur Aiello, clouds act as diffusers when they come in between the sun and they soften and spread the light to give a balanced light effect.

 

References:

Guidelines for producing a short documentary:

http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_13/section_5/artc1A.html

The Wild Classroom:

http://www.thewildclassroom.com/wildfilmschool/gettingstarted/interviewquestions.html

Article by Arthur Aiello on Videomaker site:

https://www.videomaker.com/article/c10/7501-getting-started-shooting-on-sunny-days