#session6

Working on the differences between Youtube, the greatest American video-sharing website and Youku, its counterpart in China, I immediately noticed different features about their homepage. While the first one has the menu bar on the left side of the page (it seems more arranged), the second one has his menu under the header. The first visual impact brought me to think Youtube as more clean and professional in his design. It seems that the top banner of Youku, in my opinion, fills the homepage too much and the menu, in that position, is not intuitive. Finding a way to understand the website’s text wasn’t so easy for me since, even with Google Translate, everything was very hardly accessible.

For what concerns the videos I found in these platforms, I should analyze different aspects: if you are looking for high quality videos, you’ll be able to find them in each website, but I noticed that there are many more low quality video recorded by no professional people on Youtube than on Youku where, on the other hand, I found everything very designed and well built, and I couldn’t find anything amateur. This could be related to the amount of advertise on Youku, more than Youtube. It seems like if not everyone can afford (or deserves) to upload contents. Both of them has a large number of views and subscribers.

Here’s the link of the videosI watched: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX11yw6YL1w Youku: https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTkyMzY5OTA0OA==.html?spm=a2h0k.11417342.soresults.dtitlebut

For the second task, I made a video related to the Art of Cinema doing a montage of films I love. I found out the colour of these movie and how they are used to excite people.

The art skills I am presenting will be Camera skills. We had a very thorough session on learning how to operate a camera, and both Scarlett and I are confident in our knowledge enough to do a short presentation to an audience on how to operate a camera. It is not difficult to learn the basics of recording on a camera, but there are innumerable ways and things to do to make your shot exactly how it was wanted.

I will work with Scarlett to showcase the camera skills we have learnt over the past few weeks.We will stand i front of and audience with a camera and tripod, and give a short demonstration on how to operate them. At two points during the weeks, Scarlett and I met separately and talked about how we would present at the showcase.We discussed which bits of information each of us would present. We also changed some of the initial details of our plan.

I am going to make it very interactive to ensure that the audience will be engaged. We will ask the audience questions about what we have taught them, this will be to motivate them to retain the information, while stimulating their brains. This will make the presentation more fun and interesting for the audience. If everyone in the audience was engaged and asked questions, and seemed to genuinely enjoyed it, that would show us that our showcase was successful, and hopefully they would have learnt something.

We made sure that the audience was engaged.We talked directly to them, and asked questions about what we taught them.We felt that we were confident ad assured.

 It didn’t go directly to plan, because under the pressure off presenting to a live audience, some things were forgotten and the atmosphere at times was slightly awkward.Next time I would have a full practise of our presentation to get rid of any possible nerves, and it would help prepare me for the real thing, because I would have a solid base from which to build embellishment up from to make it interesting for the audience to watch.

The audience member that were asked responded that they believed that it was a very informative presentation, and they were surprised that we were able to convey the information so clearly and easily.They liked it that we asked questions about what they had learnt.It was noted that Scarlett and I had made an effort to engage the audience. In particular, Bryony liked that it was interactive, because she could try things out, which made her more comfortable. Noor liked the detailed explanation, and for one of the instructors; Rozi, the accuracy was noticeable, and she thought it was “Great that you’d remembered all those things”.

Scarlett and Planning our arts skills share. We eventually decided on Camera skills.

3rd April 2018

This session was the penultimate session. The aim was to record the rest of the bass tracks and start vocal recordings. The vocalist’s insufficiency of learning his lines made this session less practical than intended. The aim was to record all vocals for all three tracks (“Interlude” does not have lyrics and is purely instrumental) in the remaining time after the bass was recorded, but the vocalist still had not written parts for two songs. 

The bass was recorded identically to the bass in the previous session. I tried routing a DI box again, but as the bass guitar was the same as the last session the results were the same. I carried on to mic the bass guitar up the same way, but because I was in a different studio, I used a different amp. This amp was a 1x12 and wasn’t as desirable as the 4x12 Ashdown I used in the previous sessions, but due to time restraints and restricted studio time, I had to do my best with what was available to me. I decided to record the bass into a compressor and use desk EQ to improve the sound, which helped massively in getting a good sound.

For vocals, I was torn between using a Neumann U47 FET and a Shure SM7B. As the vocals contained shouting and aggression, I was unsure whether it would be wise to use the U47 FET as it was a condenser and it may be too fragile for such vocal augmentation, hence why the dynamic SM7B was the other option. However, I was advised by my project supervisor to use it as in his experience, it could handle it. Therefore, I got both microphones out and tried them. Both microphones were very good, but the U47 had that little more clarity and was preferred. I added a little desk EQ and the vocals were recorded. 

As mentioned, the vocalist did not know half of his lyrics, so most of the session was a case of him remembering/writing vocals for the tracks. My naivety is shown as I presumed that after over a month of production the lyrics would be ready for the studio, but they were not. This meant only one track could be recorded, leaving the other two without vocals with no studio bookings left.