SOC344 2019 Final Blog (Re. Films) – South West Sydney

Tutorial 6: A managed heart of work and home The photo essay for this tutorial explores the idea of emotion management. The management of our emotions is a skill we learn to use from an early age. This is an idea that came through strongly in the photo essay. The collection of images focused heavily on the child’s response and reaction in conflict situations. It was clear to see that young people had greater difficulty in managing their emotions and more likely retaliated in a physical expression of their anger and frustration. However, the images could have been improved by including the adults’ perspective rather than hoping the audience can imply this understanding based on the image of the child. Also, it was challenging to make the connection between managing emotions at work and home through the choice of images. While the images clearly depicted anger through body language and facial expression, it was more challenging to make a connection to how emotions could be managed. The mock interview in this presentation was useful as it gave us an insight into the management of emotions and the role deep acting plays at a workplace. The presentation allowed us to view the emotion through the employee’s point of view. It emphasised how the management of emotions will benefit the company. Overall, this presentation helped to focus our understanding of the ways in which our emotions are managed plus influencing social factors that determine the appropriate emotional responses. Tutorial 9: Happiness, Hope and Empathy The images for the photo essay in this tutorial attempted to explain the impact of environment on happiness. The collection of images, titled Park Life, follows an individual in three distinct ‘park’ environments. The first being a natural park, as a viewer I felt we were positioned to accept this environment as being happier than the second environment which was man made. The shopping centre car-’park’ was the second environment and you could assume from the picture that the intended message here is that the concrete ‘park’ was stark and ‘unhappy’. Lastly, there is an image of the individual seated on a park bench looking towards a copse of trees. The strong statement about humans being on the outside and looking in correlates to the overarching idea in this presentation, that our happiness is affected by the environment we choose to be in. Whilst this was my reading of the ideas in the photo essay, it was difficult to make the initial connection to the tutorial topic and the composition of the photo essay without background knowledge of the topic. The choice to omit facial expression and overt body language from the images made it challenging to fully appreciate the underlying message of emotion connected to the environment. Besides the photo essay, insightful comments were made around the role of western emotions attached to Christmas and the level of empathy this created around the Indonesian Boxing Day Tsunami. To add to that, the presentation positioned us to question the ways in which our world view is affected by both Happiness and Hope. #S344UOW19 #TutFilm #SWS

Sulata Fetui perfectly captured emotions and bodies in her presentation. She was able to explore how disconnection, loneliness and medicalization affect a certain society both mentally and spiritually by focusing on the statistics of patients in Australia. By doing so, Sulata was able to successfully identify how individuals do no appreciate the importance and severity that mental health issues have in communities and that when such issues are brought forward, people tend to treat it as an illness rather than find ways to accept and deal with it. Sulata’s mock interview about single parenting had also helped to further explore emotions and bodies, especially the concept of loneliness among individuals who feel isolated to be experiencing certain situations that other people have not or cannot relate to. The only thing that Sulata needed to work on was her photo essay. If she found more photos that gave a better representation of loneliness than it would allow for a more insightful presentation. On the other hand, Elisabeth Mcilwain had taken many images for her photo essay that helped to explain happiness, hope and empathy and how certain environments can change a person’s emotions. She had also shared a lot of information on global politics and how their immediate broadcasts of people who have witnessed firsthand certain natural disasters can affect a person’s emotions as it can trigger empathy and remorse from the people who see the footages. To add to that, by Elisabeth asking the class if people, especially people from the west, would still care about these natural disasters if they did not see such heavy coverage of the disaster, it allowed for a deep-thinking of self and society as a whole. However, as well as she did on the presentation, she also shared a lot of information without actually relating it to her topic and did a few grammar and spelling mistakes. #S344UOW19 #TutFilm #SWS

Looking through the presentations and photo essays that Kiara and Sulata made they showed how the emotions which fit in their presentations. Kiara's displayed the retaliation and can evoke your emotions, using the images of children made the photo essay easily recognizable to everyone. on the other hand Sulata's attempt in making a photo essay was difficult due o the fact she was first and didn't know what a photo essay entailed due to the limited direction. this however didn't stop the emotions which the images were intended to display from reaching the audience. an overall review of the photo essay is that to truly create the perfect photo essay more guidance would be need within the instructions whether it be in the form of an example of step by step instructions. #S344UOW19 #TutFilm #SWS