About Communication

Communication ties into the podcast project in a couple different ways (effective communication within our group is necessary to produce a good project, for example) - but as far as communication skills we're learning and developing, I guess there are two major ones.

Since this is a project which conveys information both through Japanese text and speech, our ability to express ourselves in the Japanese language is being tested and developed.  That makes sense given that this is a project for Japanese class.

In a slightly more abstract sense, we're also communicating via the language of film: the shots we use, what we choose to include and exclude in the frame, how we put everything together, etc.  All of these things allow us to communicate with the viewer without spoken or written language, but in a way that still conveys important concepts.  For example, a Dutch angle is a type of visual pattern which is immediately recognizable/understandable by pretty much anyone - even those who aren't familiar with it in an academic or critical sense can still understand how it conveys uneasiness or instability.  Even the smallest things can totally change the feeling of a shot, even things that we may not notice ourselves or be able to control, so this will be tough to control.

So in other words the two major types of communication we're utilizing in this project - the two ones by which we're communicating concepts to the viewer - are both languages we're unfamiliar with using in day-to-day life.  Both the language in which we'll actually speak over the film, and the visual methods by which we communicate with the film itself, are ways to communicate which we'll necessarily have to develop if we want to make a good product.