Assignment #4_Part B2_Grace & Melody_s3574544 & s3672080_“Review of Girona Group 6’s Final Cut and Melbourne Group 6’s Rough Cut”

This post is the second 1/3 of Assignment #4 Part B. It is a review of the final cuts from both Girona Group 6 and Melbourne Group 6.

Click here for “Individual Reflection”.
Click here for “Feedback on Rough Cut”.

Girona Group 6’s presentations of both cities are starkly different: Girona is lively while Melbourne is dreary. Rather than creating a video that draws upon similarities between both cities, they have created one video for each city. Presenting it this way, their viewers are able to identify how both places are distinct from each other. This contrasts with Melbourne Group 6’s approach that highlights their similarities by assimilating footages from both cities into one video.

Their video on Girona is an appealing advertisement that seems to target backpacker-tourists probably aged between 18–29 years. We can deduce this through their film form. It is a journey video; the camera follows a young adult female. Her smile indicates her sense of safety and curiosity as she travels in the city. A shot of her using her smartphone further hints at their target audience: generations of youths and adults who have sufficient digital expertise. Upbeat electronic music, fast cuts and animated transitions present Girona as an exciting place to explore. A sense of community is also communicated with the following scene: a shot of people of varying ages pulling together a colourful object from the river, followed by a shot of present onlookers crowding on the bridge above the former group of people.

In comparison, their Melbourne video is coloured cold. Put together with slow-tempo music and shots of people who look out of a window or keep to themselves in a crowd, Melbourne is depicted as isolating and dreary.

Our video of both cities seek to connect rather than polarise them. We draw upon the idea that knowledge is relational. We understand something by making connections between new and existing information. Since we have never visited Girona, footage of the place (provided by our peers from there) is “new information” to us. As residents in Melbourne, we attempt to connect with Girona by looking out for similar locations and activities shared between them; we relate to foreign Girona by drawing upon, from our lived experience, bits of Melbourne that are familiar: architecture, sounds, people and their activities.

Upon viewing our rough cut, Hannah gave feedback that the purpose of our video was elusive; it is unclear what our motivation was, in stringing those specific shots together. In response to this, I incorporated black screens and on-screen texts. This choice had me confronting the fear of changing up Melody’s last edit.

The black screen and on-screen text play a few roles. Firstly, they create pauses between a series of shots, thereby segmenting the whole video. Likened to our physical body’s inclination to blink, the afore-mentioned editing technique allow viewers to process what they have just seen and contextualise them. Pauses help viewers make sense of the scenes that last passed; each pause provides space and time to draw connections between the shots within each segment.

Their second function: to invite a sense of curiosity and exploration. It builds this imaginary conversation between, not only Melbourne and Girona, but also between video and viewer. Making a guessing game out of connecting shots, the video encourages audience participation and inadvertently asks questions about one’s relationship with their city.

Each segment, marked between pauses, give rise to different, open-ended topics of conversation, e.g. perception and bias between an outsider vs insider, the balance between man-made structures vs natural elements, conventions or tropes of a city, the demographic distribution of a city, the contention between heritage and modern, etc. All these topics that could be relatable to both cities, and thus connect, Girona and Melbourne.