My Media Summer

During the summer consumers view a lot of different and unique media content; my experience wasn't much different. Over the break I looked at several media formats that I normally would on a regular basis, including: film, TV, music and video games.

1# image from the animated short from the Ghibli museum.
2# image from studio Ghibli's Porco Rosso.

Studio Ghibli: 

In Japan (where I visited this summer) I went to the Studio Ghibli museum, which is an animation studio based in Japan. There i was able to watch an animated short in preparation, meaning the short was fully animated but the sound and voice acting weren't finished for production. This led to all the audio for the piece being done by the animator just using his voice, meaning all the sound effects were organic with claps, speech and noises produced by one man. This gave insight into the animation and voice acting process Studio Ghibli use, and when watching their finished movies once returning home, I found that some of the sound effects were once again done by voice, such as the plane in Porco Rosso.

Rap against Rock: 

A different form of media I used over the break was music, including two new albums that I really enjoyed. Kamikaze by Eminem and Pray For The Wicked by Panic! At The Disco. Two very different genres, but both equally enjoyable. Kamikaze's songs are simply a retaliation against the negative reactions Eminem got on his previous album, however it does have some songs with more unique themes of love and break up, Good Guy and Tragic Endings. Eminem's rapping is paired with female vocalists in both of these, reminiscent of a lot of his older music which I really liked when I was younger, such as Need me (Feat. Pink). The other album I've enjoyed this summer, Pray For The Wicked, is a very different genre to Kamikaze. Where one is rap, the other is more along the lines of Pop-Rock. Both albums however are very fast paced in the majority of the songs, which is probably while i like to listen to them while I work or draw as I feel like I work to the pace of the music.

Summer Games:

When I had free time during the summer i would often play on my Xbox, my brother's PlayStation or my Game Boy. On these devices I a lot of three games in particular. The first one I played and completed in the first week of the summer, due to how addictive it was, was Detroit: Become human, on PlayStation. Its a story based game where you play as three unique androids each with different motives to either escape, kill or save humanity from an android uprising and it's your choice what each characters motives are and how the end will end is based on your actions. The animation and cinematography of the game is incredible. All the characters are real life actors in CGI suits so that their movements and expressions appeared on the screen hyper realistically. The controls were clean and their reaction time normal as expected, which is needed for the many quick time events in the game. The narrative of the game hooks you in completely since you're so involved in what happens and when characters die, you feel the guilt and will happily replay whole levels to save your favourite side characters, (which I had to do several times.) It's a multi-stranded narrative, swapping point of view between a female android called Kara who kidnaps a human child from her abusive father to save the child and becomes a mother figure, a servant android who's framed for murdering his master, thus seeks revenge on mankind, giving you the option of destroying humanity, or peacefully revolting and finally a detective android, called Connor, used by the police force to find 'deviants' (rogue androids) giving you the option of capturing and killing your other two characters or becoming a deviant yourself and joining them. The community online have made it a mission to kill Connor as many times as humanly possible, here's an example. Connor dying in Detroit Become Human.

TV shows: 

Overall, I used many different media platforms over the summer, some I didn't talk about were TV shows such as Body Guards which is a TV serial drama rising in popularity about an ex-solider who now has to be the Body Guard to high up MPs who he despises for sending him into Afghanistan so the viewer is constantly jumping through hoops trying to understand his motives. I, of course, also used a fair amount of social media, such as Reddit, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. These sites allowed me to keep in contact with my friends over the summer, watch content and discover new trends and online jokes. Social media can used in a whole host of ways and my media summer is only snippet.