Pitch ya stories.

This lecture, we learnt about picture stories. How they are everywhere, and have been since yonks ago. Graffiti is a picture story, as are French cave paintings from 15 000 B.C, and even grainy photos of a 3-year-old me looking demonesque in my hideously unflattering togs.

 HOT.

I didn’t really find it surprising that the first photo in a newspaper was an advertisement, or that “faux-tography” – pretty self explanatory – is abundant too. I’m now considering hiring a crack team of makeup artists to fix me before I leave the house, and to run in front of me with electric fans wherever I go. I don’t think it’s too much to ask in such modern times.

Taken from the short film Evolution, a Dove advertisement. Find it HERE.

I was already aware that framing, focus, angle, point of view, exposure and timing are essential in capturing both effective photographs and film, with the added dimension of sound for video (needless to say, my analytical essay on the filming techniques of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was fairly depressing).

We were also presented with footage of Hitler, in which he stated:

            “We want to see no more class divisions.”

Soz Addy, you’re doing it wrong.

By and large, I’m still on the fence about photojournalism. While I appreciate see the appeal, I don’t think even amazing photos can fully translate a story. No matter how stirring your Kodak moment of a bunch of distraught relatives at a funeral is, if you caption it with, “Family devastated at their horribly unattractive genes” it’s going to lose its meaning. Text has that influence. Good images are often dependant on good writing, while effective text can exist alone, I believe.

D'oh, I have no life.

It has reached the point where my media use is, in one word, shameful. What starts as watching a spot of telly and checking my Facebook ends in 195 minutes of checking everyone's Facebook and 290 minutes of lackluster home videos and teen wizard films.

During last week's JOUR1111 lecture, I was hanging onto every word of our guest speaker Skye Doherty, agreeing how groovy text is and losing myself in the frantic world of newspapers. And yet even that very night, I meandered on home to observe overweight people eating and jiggling and I loved every minute of it.

The inverted pyramid model. Also represents the quality of my media use; where the top represents most important, and the bottom least, I generally sit just under the lowermost point.

We were informed how text is fast, flexible and allows complete control, not dissimilar to a snazzy running shoe. Text dominates online, and the addition of hypertext allows multiple online platforms and the opportunity to explore, aggregating aspects of the story into other web features. Text is emails, blogs, Facebook, comments and Twitterfeeds. I guess this means I'm exposed to a hell of a lot of text.

While sitting on Facebook for hours is in poor form, this headline is anything but. Take note though: clever headlines might make your story difficult to locate in a web search.

I expected my media use to be incessant, as there's not a minute I'm not engaging myself somehow, but the quality of it is embarrassing.

"Yes, I'm really enjoying journalism, loving lectures and studying heaps!" I blurt out to friends, failing to mention how I spent the previous night playing Simpsons on my GameBoy and religiously checking my PayPal.

I like to glamorise myself as a prod-user, accessing the features of Web 3.0 by targeting individual demographics on my sub-par Tumblr. My week 3 JOUR1111 lecture left me with the knowledge to include keywords, links and metadata in my online content to specifically zone in on such audiences. I was also advised that excerpts, or tid-bits of your story that summarise it in an incredibly interesting and alluring way, can be helpful for gaining readership to your story. RSS feeds and Twitter only fuel this popularity contest. 

 A prime example of a head-cocking snippet. Can you resist to click?!

Although at this point, the most I can hope for is that we don't get marked down for spending most of our waking hours hovering in front of a glowing screen.