When my group was given Texts and Narratives as a topic to tackle for project brief four I was initially quite worried. It was such a broad topic and I worried that we would struggle to find what we wanted to focus our video and audio essays on. Having said that I was relieved at the same time that I got Text and Narratives because I was hoping for either that or Audiences as those were the subject areas I felt more confident about.

So my group got together and tried to find some common interests, we landed on superhero movies so we tentatively decided that’s what we would focus on. In that first workshop we drew up a mind map and began writing up our collaborative contract. By the second workshop we decided that we needed to narrow our area of investigation to gender representation in superhero texts and narratives. We then decided to do a little research and start working on our annotated bibliography.

We decided to choose our own sub-topics to write our script paragraph on within the broader subject of gender in superhero movies, so I chose the historical representation of gender in the comics and how that has had an impact through time. We then got together to record, but there was some sort of technical issue when recording where some of the files were saved but others weren’t, so we had to re-record our sections at separate times. I think this where things started to go awry with the audio essay.

I then edited the audio essay rough cut and it turned out to be 9 minutes, which had me really worried because I couldn’t see places where I could cut parts without compromising the flow of arguments and evidence. I still couldn’t when trying to finish it off for submission, it’s overtime but without rewriting and recording I literally couldn’t cut anything more than I already did. I wasn’t at the workshop for feedback for the audio essay so I was only vaguely relayed what Brian wanted for us to include in the final product. But I’m aware he wanted some sort of audio technique so I spent hours searching Google, Youtube and Lynda trying to find a tutorial on how to achieve what I was told he wanted but to no avail. I would suggest that perhaps we need to be taught a bit more in-depth about the programs we are using and the techniques we can employ, rather than be marked down for not using a specific technique when I’m extremely inexperienced with the program.

My intense stress over the audio essay aside, we scripted our video essay in one of our meetings, then got together again in the edit suites to find footage, images and music to use to create it, then Margaret edited it together, which she did a great job on. I think for the video essay we had just gotten the critique that our audio essay wasn’t playful enough so we really tried to go with that theme for it. I think it’s good to have a contrast between the two mediums, one serious and information heavy, while the other is more humorous with lots of visual examples/cues. It’s a balance, I believe, that is quite often shown between radio and television and I think it suits the respective mediums.

I think we worked well as a team together, we were in constant communication through Facebook messenger, discussing what we wanted to talk about or what was still needed before we had to submit/show the essays. I think our short-comings are from mistakes we made with the organisation of our audio essay right at the beginning of PB4. We were too separate in our scripting, so our separate paragraphs were too long which made it impossible to cut down in the editing process, we also didn’t discuss enough about effects we wanted to use in order to create an interesting audio experience, other than a few clips from films and some music. I think that definitely shows, I did what I could when editing it but I would have liked more time to go back to the drawing board to rescript and possible come up with an AV script (obviously specifically audio) so we could have a clear vision. But with how busy everyone is towards the end of may/start of June it was impossible to do that, I especially, had all my other assessment task due at that time, including a 40 minute presentation so it just wasn’t plausible.

I believe PB4 was both a positive and negative experience, it was positive because I had good group members who had similar ideas on how to approach our topic but negative because it felt like outside circumstances were severely impacting the production of our essays.