Limits of blogging

 

photo: redbackweb

 

Here’s an interesting entry about ‘testing the limits of blogging’. Stephanie Trigg posts a draft version of her paper seeking feedback and ideas from colleagues and fellow bloggers.

What a good way to do this sort of work …

Beyond?

As we were talking about different communities, and have produced documentaries about communities, sometimes with the aim of exploring new possibilities for connection, I thought I’d mention one way by which the sort of work I did in my project could (theoretically speaking) link with other users. I included links to the indolentdandy hyperlocal sources for several inner-city suburbs into my doco blog.

The sentiment of these sites appealed, and seemed relevant to what I was doing:

Place remains important. While we communicate online we also live real physical lives in real environments. News about the streets and suburbs near our homes and our places of work and leisure is relevant to us. Focused, relevant online news and information about places is often referred to as hyperlocal news. Blogs and other online forms of non commercial, user generated or citizen journalist content have emerged as an alternate source to commercial media for hyperlocal news and information.

Hyperlocal sites function as online local newspapers or community guides. By collaborating, multiple contributors build a body of expert information and opinion about local issues. The site becomes a source of this information and a place to voice opinions about local topics, like a ‘virtual town square’.

The entries are quite eclectic, and it would be possible to contribute new content, or start another project for a different suburb …

Other random thoughts

 

sodasnap postcard (photo: redbackweb)

I’ve mentioned the doco-making process, so I thought I’d say something about other things we were doing this semester.

I enjoyed the course content, lectures, readings, and thinking about social media in terms of communities, various relationships, changing identities. What was also great was that the content wasn’t presented in a strictly academic way (I mean, it was academic, but it wasn’t ‘stuffy’). Links with film examples, music, literature, etc, were stimulating. This blog, too, provided us with a space to reflect on all of this.

It was interesting and informative to think about social media in terms of real spaces with amazing potentials, constantly changing and evolving. I think I’ll occasionally read an odd book or article just to keep up with some aspects of this area in some way. As for engaging in social media, I was already a keen user of several platforms, and will continue to engage with whatever strikes my fancy (and hopefully with a more astute awareness regarding the underlying meaning and implications of all of this).

I wanted to mention one detail I didn’t get a chance to blog about: I think it was in Dean’s lecture that we talked about digital objects replacing tangible objects while not replacing our basic need to collect and remember the content and symbols contained in them. I find this to be very true. I regularly communicate with people who live in various places overseas, and sending digital objects becomes really meaningful in those circumstances. Keeping up via photographs that are never printed but frequently looked at is a real human experience.

One thing I’ve noticed is that social media, I think, has in a way relaxed the style of our communication. Not only is it possible to increase frequency and access of contacts, but we often talk in a less restrained way. Where once people wrote more formal letters and postcards, and even emails, we can now be much more casual, immediate. In that sense (although this may be stretching it in some respects), our digital communication is in a way closer to a conversation than a written medium …

Anyway, these are just some random thoughts.

Another random piece of information I thought I’d mention is that I really wanted to include a weather pixie (speaking of digital objects) into my doco blog, which I thought would add another local detail into the story, and after playing around with this, and asking for some wordpress assistance, it looked as if the template I selected didn’t support sidebar widgets. (Maybe there’s a solution, I’d need to look into this again.) Pity, because the weather pixie I had in mind comes with a black cat that occasionally walks into the image, but mostly the pixie is there all by herself. The FAQ on the weatherpixie site explains this as ‘cats are like that’.

Some thoughts

 

photo: redbackweb

I’ve had a chance to see the docos listed on Jenny’s blog. They are great. It’s really interesting to see what the media people have done. The idea of having a documentary within Google maps is just amazing (the short movies are fantastic, there’s a lot of careful structuring of the content, wow!). I also really like the editing and camera work in the bike polo doco. The Queen’s doco is very interesting too, I’ve watched all three videos. It’ll be good to see more of them …

As for my own doco process, it’s been an interesting journey. I actually had no idea that the making of a media product would be an important component of this subject (I thought we would be mainly theorising about social media), so I really had to figure out quite a lot of things during the production process. I work in publishing, shaping and making publications, and so I think that doing something like this is in a way a natural alliance, although, as Dean knows, I struggled with some aspects of it (the ‘talent’ as raw material thing). Once I got over that, it was mainly about collecting the material and refining the concept. 

I think I understood the idea of what an online documentary can be (and it’s a sophisticated concept). I’m pleased we didn’t do websites, because what we’ve done here is much more fluid and flexible. It allows people to interpret it as they see it, and so everyone’s produced something different, and that’s much more interesting.

With the nitty-gritty of my own project: I wasn’t really into the social realism thing, and I think that my topic presented some difficulties. Timewise it required a lot of ‘talent liaison’ (to invent a new term) and background negotiations, but then people doing a more unified community might have had similar challenges. In order to tell my (in a way rather fictional) story, I had to really search and sift through the material, and putting this together was quite time consuming. There were many visits to different places, a lot of conversations, a lot of ground-level work, but then this is probably always the case.

The actual production and post-production: in general I think I planned my tasks and time quite well, but I found audio editing harder than expected, and because I work and had limited time on the weekends, this caused some delays. (I generally found that doing this sort of project was much more time consuming than writing an academic essay.)

I mentioned that for me personally, when presented with a tight time frame in which to produce the audio segments, GarageBand ended up not being as intuitive as Audacity (even though I’m a complete Mac freak). Looking at my learning contract I boldly said I’d do audio production. I’m now amazed at this. The LC is in effect a production brief. I work with print production briefs every day. I know what a brief is. And so, here I was, I didn’t even have recording equipment, I’d never recorded an interview, I’d never edited an audio file, and I was going to produce podcasts. I guess I wanted to get into this media making thing in a ‘proper’ sort of way. Actually, I wanted to be able to have the people talking directly, at least (and I felt that filming them would turn my doco into a Magda Szubanski sketch, given my video making skills, which I choose to exercise only on my kids).

With the audio production, I definitely should have done extensive testing ahead of time, but I took the audio trip assuming I’d learn it easily on the run (and in the end I mastered the software in time for the submission deadline, which was a relief).

I enjoyed interviewing people. Talking to people was easy. I got some really good and lengthy interviews. I wanted these interviews to come across as conversations that wouldn’t be too structured and my raw files have that flavour. I wanted the doco to be a narrative, and I hope I’ve achieved that.

With the editing side of things, I really enjoyed that part. I usually work with text and some images, and mostly print, so choosing content for the audio grabs for the final version was great, as was deciding what images to put in.

I met some really interesting people doing this, I had my digital camera in my bag at the ready, and used it a lot.

I actually found the process quite intellectually involving. That may not be so evident from the final product, but being engaged in producing a piece of media, in considering how the material can be presented in various social software, is quite absorbing.

In the end I guess this is what ‘action research’ is all about. It’s different from just downloading articles, writing and applying theories. In that sense it’s been good to have had an opportunity to experience doing this sort of work, if only in a small way.

Finished projects

It was really good to see the completed projects in last night’s tute. Everyone has put so much thought and effort into them, and they are all so different. I was really impressed. I don’t know if anyone is reading anyone else’s blog entries, but it would be nice to have links to all the projects, perhaps via the teaching blogs. I’d certainly look again.

Done

Link to my documentary Cafes Are City Havens is here.

A few more visuals to add, and stuff to check, but otherwise it’s done. Phew.

Giving it a final shape

I’ve been editing and shaping the final version of the doco material. A lot has landed on the edit room floor. I’m trying to reference the material to the general idea I’m exploring (while not being too literal, controlling or didactic). I’m not yet ready, and I’ll be fiddling with it until the last moment, I’m sure.

I’ll have to redo all of my audio grabs. Something has happened to the size of the file when it was uploaded to the storage site and I’ve lost 2 seconds or so from the end of each interview. As the content of the audio segments is tightly controlled, and they are very short, I think I’ll be able to solve this by inserting 2 or so seconds of silence at the end of each file. (I have one interview I’m still trying to piece together, and the sound isn’t very good, but I think that’ll be ok once I’ve touched it up in audacity a bit more.)

The overall architecture fits in with what I was trying to do with this, I think. 

I’ll make a link to this blog when the project emerges out of its ‘draft in progress’ stage …

Talking bits

After a solid day’s work (and quite a few hours of background reading and testing before today), I think I have harnessed the audio content of my documentary. Knowing that all the elements are there is very important, as each detail has an impact on the general structure and balance of the piece (less audio, more text and pictures; more audio, less text).

I rarely have the luxury of dedicating an entire day to one activity, and not being a media production person, this required gaining some new skills. I’m pleased it’s done before the weekend, and I can now tweak the details and create links.

In the end I personally found GarageBand useless for audio editing (it didn’t appear intuitive at all), so I downloaded Audacity (which to me looks much more logical and straight-forward). I also realised I had to download another program to let it export audio into mp3s. 

With uploading to audio storing sites, I tried youtube, but it wants a video file format (and I wasn’t going to start looking into iMovie as well, and anyway I wanted just audio with no other effects); quicktime wouldn’t upload. So I scrapped that and went with archive.org.

Archive.org accepts quicktime, but also mp3 (which creates a smaller file), so it’s all there now, and sounds ok, I think. I now have to link the interviews to the doco blog, but I imagine I shouldn’t have any problems with this.

I’m happy with the quality of the sound in all instances except for one interview, but I think I can improve that in Audacity. (There’s background noise, but this was deliberate anyway.) One interview was recorded using a dictaphone, after which I bought an edirol solid state recorder (no time to run to rmit and hire and return equipment). It’s a neat (and expensive) machine; and it’s easy to use. I’m certainly happy to have produced reasonable sound. (I had a lot of trouble early on trying to use a mobile phone to record sound, and I don’t think it would have been adequate for these sorts of interviews anyway.)

With the audio segments, they are very short, just bites that illustrate the topic. Initially I thought I would edit myself out completely, but I’ve left my voice in a few segments, as I wanted to stress the conversational nature of the materials, and the general narrative approach.

Still more to do, but hopefully, I shouldn’t have any major glitches from this point on.

Blog into book

Here’s an interesting segment from the Age article about how a blog has become a book (at least one fraction of it):

Christian Lander is living an internet-age fairytale. In January last year, the 30-year-old PhD dropout was working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles. He started a blog, Stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, to amuse a couple of friends. In March, with up to 1 million people a day visiting the site, he scored a book deal and by July Stuff White People Like was on The New York Times best-sellers list. He’s in Sydney on his third book tour, while a sitcom based on the idea is in development.

I had a look at the blog Stuff White People Like, it’s quite humorous (and there’s an entry on the shift from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook, which is quite amusing).

That was a nice interlude, but now back to editing …

Just checking (not sure about this)