Saw Monsters Vs Aliens last week.

What a load of crap!

Never again Dreamworks, NEVER AGAIN!.

Latest Time-lapse video

Finally started to rain up in Gloucester NSW.

I was there over Easter and took some time lapse of the early morning mist rising up off the hills.
Also got a sun set and a couple of horses managed to walk into frame.

Gloucester farm time-lapse

Emotional noise

Traffic is royally screwing this city . Can't wait for the weather to cool down so i can walk to school

Sooooo nice to be doing something a bit more technical for the last couple of weeks. Less digging around in my emotional physique.
I'm stoked to be finally doing Audio as my video work up till now has been lacking without it.
That said, I'm also happy I wasn't in the first group to do Emotional Noise as some of the equipment they were supposed to use hadn't arrived at the school.

Started the week with our new teacher comparing the soundtrack of the original King Kong with the Pete Jackson remake.
then had a look at the opening sequence of Punch Drunk Love
I have to see this movie. It looks (heh,) sounds amazing.

2nd day
We all spent a day being taught how to use ProTools which is software for editing audio
Was a bit boring, but vital as most of us knew nothing about audio editing software.

The school is discovering that you can't get people to do basic audio/visual work without those students having some sort of familiarity with the software used to create these things.
AFTRS quickly organized Photoshop classes a few weeks back, when it became apparent that most students doing Image (refer to my previous post) didn't have the 'skills' to do basic photo editing with the software.
We're the first audio class to have a day devoted to Protools so that we will be equipped in some sort of basic fashion, to manipulate the audio that we will be capturing tomorrow.

3rd day
We get our hands on audio recording equipment. It's been six weeks and finally I can ‘check out’ and use the capturing devices such as microphones. Feel sorry for the poor buggers who have to wait nine weeks just to earn the right to use the mikes.
it’s no wonder most of the kids can't post their work on the net cause their using copyrighted audio.

We spent the morning learning how to use the little solid state audio recorders, then split into pairs, and spent the afternoon schlepping around the city recording sounds.
My partner and I ended up out at Bondi beach where we discovered that wind noise was a major problem with the onshore breeze that was sweeping up the beach.
We retreated to the suburban streets back off the main strip.

What is the deal with Sony???
Only one of the kits has decent headphones in it???
This is as bad as only having ten wide angle adapters for the thirty cameras available to the Foundation students.
Why can't Sony get their shit together?
It's not like any of this equipment is even Pro-sumer.

Forth day
was all about voice.
We did some interesting exercises where we all sat in a circle and played with our voices (chanting and such like.)

We're pretty lucky in foundation in that we get to be taught by professionals in all sorts of creative fields
We even get to be addressed by non-creative such as box office marketing.
The school is attempting to build artists that are 'cross discipline.'
People that can shoot, and edit, and lay down audio, and write, and what ever.
At worst, we are supposed to be able to communicate intelligently with a wide verity of specialists.

Second week
Learnt about temp tracks
Since the music is usually the last thing to be added to a flick. These music tracks are used as placeholders until bespoke music can be composed.

Tom Ellard who used to be an 'out there' electronic artist is now teaching.
We spent the morning discussing memes and V-jaying.

He made a comment about how pirating was killing the music industry.
Record companies are dieing, but this industry is a distribution industry, not a creative one.
In my opinion, Artists will still be exercising their creativity, but getting that art to the audience will change.
He talked of ‘paying ones dues’ in the old days. Artists still need to ‘pay your dues’ online. What makes people think that posting ones work on the net leads to instant fame and fortune?
A relationship still needs to be built with ones audience.

Online distribution is still too novel a concept to make any decisions over. What I do know is that there are a whole lot o Marketroids, A&R turkeys, and middle management that will be looking for new jobs soon.

cut up the samples that we collected last week and built soundscapes.
This is mine…

Emo soundscape exercise