MC Sustain Lives!

MC Sustain, my champion for creating a culture of sustainability at UC is alive and online. His primary mode of communication will be on Facebook but seeing as though he's a rapper, I've also set up a Soundcloud page for him which I'll be uploading his music onto... (gulp).

You can find him on Facebook here and on Soundcloud here

Music Apps

I've been hunting around the app store and have discovered a few apps for my phone that should be able to help me make some tunes for MC Sustain to rap to. The most interesting and powerful one is called iMaschine which looks really cool and fun to play with. I've actually had it on there for a while but haven't really had a chance to play with it yet. Now should be a good opportunity to get to use it without feeling guilty that I'm not doing any Uni work. I WILL be doing Uni work :) The only problem with this is that it's quite complex and I'll have to make the music from scratch, record the lyrics seperately and then combine them together in a separate music program.

Another good one I found is called Cipher. This one has been created for rappers to freestyle to and comes with a collection of pre made beats for you to rap over and record your lyrics to just using the phone. You can then export the finished product directly onto Facebook which should be handy.

Another good one was suggested to me by Sam Bartlett and is called Autorap. This one is a bit simpler again and all you need to do is choose a beat and record yourself talking and the app magically converts it into a fully sick rap for you. Sweet as!

MC Sustain

Students as Villains

After seeing all the mess that got left on campus the other day I was thinking in today's tute about portraying the students at UC as being villains that were polluting the campus with their laziness and unwillingness to pick up after themselves. I see it all the time. People go through Maccas drive through then decide to park by the lake and eat because they enjoy the view and feeling of being out in nature. Then when they finish, they just dump all their rubbish out the window and drive off. WTF!?

I wish I was a super hero sometimes so I could deliver people like this the flying head butt they so desperately deserve.

Unfortunately this behaviour seems to be the norm more than the exception in the younger generations and cleaning up after yourself seems to be thought of as being uncool. I wonder what the best way to change this mindset is. Would the threat of violent retribution work best or would the message work better coming from someone that they can relate to? Somebody who is down on their level yet respected enough to be looked up to.

I think that music would be a good way approach. An artist's lyrics and image can reach people in such a way that they are not being told what to do, they are merely being informed and educated and allowed to come to their own conclusions. If people can make their own mind up, it's likely to be a longer lasting lifestyle choice and not just a temporary change born out of peer pressure.

The only problem is that I'm not much of a musician. Sure, I played piano and saxophone when I was a kid, played drums for a while and have been DJing for the last ten years or so....So actually I uh do have quite a bit of musical history and maybe just a little bit of know how.

But the question is:

  Could I produce some music that could help get the sustainability message across to the UC massive?  

In a serious way, relying on deep lyrics and quality musicianship? No.

In a piss taking way relying on lyrical and musical cliche's and delivered in a fun and amusing way? Mmmaybe....

Makeup Workshop Week 8

This week we had a super quick workshop (1hr) that tried to make up for us all missing the real (3hr) super awesome one that happened last Wednesday. In the real workshop they came up with a few categories for the main audience demographics at UC which included;

• Students
• Staff
• Businesses
• Admin 
• Clubs

They broke this down further into a huge list that Stephen has posted on his blog.

Between the workshop and our supplementary one this week Stephen came up with a few more that he gave us the choice of using for the next step. They included;

• Health Centre Patients
• Banks
• Gym Junkies
• Concert Goers
• Bike Riders
• Car Drivers
• Bus Travellers
• Motorbike Riders
• Deans (who have underground car parks outside building 1)
• Walkers
• Joggers
• Builders & Tradies
• Ping Pong Players

Somehow my group ended up with the Deans as our demographic which made it really hard to do the next step of identifying media forms that the Deans identify with because I have absolutely no idea what they are like.

Working on the assumption that any dean would be super highly educated we came up with a bit of a list of media forms they would use;

• Email
• Moodle
• Intranet
• Academic Journals
• Monitor Magazine
• Linked In
• Mobile Phones
• Advertising & Marketing
• UC FM

From there we guessed that the media forms they would probably identify with the most would be email and academic journals.

Character Development

So the next step was to sketch a character that the Deans might relate to to help create awareness of sustainabilty at UC.

Huh? What sort of character would deans relate to?

People more powerful and educated than themselves I would imagine. But who? Obama? Kevin Rudd? Nelson Mandela?.... How about...The UC Vice Chancellor Stephen Parker?

I really don't know much about him at all but apparently he grew up in the 60's and rides a bike to work everyday. He's obviously well educated and well respected around UC as he is the Vice Chancellor but is he suitable to use as a character to help spread the message of sustainability at UC?

Probably not.

Yuk

I was walking from UC down to Belconnen the other day when when I came across this:

It looks like the kiddies living on res have had themselves a little party and probably chose to do it outside because it was a nice day to be out on the grass enjoying nature. 

Not Anymore!

So UC needs to develop a culture of sustainability on campus? Yeah, no shit. By the looks of all the rubbish and how many goon bags there are hanging about there must have been at least 10-15 kiddies at this shindig and every one of them just walked off and left all this crap behind. It's right outside all the res buildings too so it's not like they wouldn't have seen it the next day either.

Little shits.

What UC needs is somebody to get out there and open up a can of whoopass on people like this who blatantly litter and leave their mess for other people to clean up. 

UC needs a hero...  

Week 5 Tutorial

In this week's tute we got broken up into groups and talked about who we had interviewed for last week's exercise. While each person was speaking the others in the group wrote down questions we had about their story on post it notes. We then analysed the questions we'd written to see if there were any common themes and grouped them accordingly.

From our questions we came up with the groups: "What & Why, Who, How, When & Where".

Post it Questions

From this we deduced that if we wanted to learn a new skill, first we needed to decide "What" we needed to know out and "Why" we needed to know it. "Who" we could find to teach us. "How", we would learn it, and "Where" & "When" we could put our new found knowledge into practice.

We made a rough flow chart to show the process;

Flow Chart