This is my beautifully colourful and messy learning graph, which is almost as messy as myself. Posts of note are hyperlinked on certain words – should appear as light blue, just click the words and be amazed by yours truly.

Well, that’s one semester down, five more to go. It went so quickly that, at the moment, I feel like the next two and a half years of university isn’t as daunting as I thought twelve weeks ago at the start of this course. I’m not gonna lie, I struggled to engage with this course on a conceptual level, as I’m sure my learning graph indicates, but I did enjoy some aspects, especially the lectorial on sound, which I found fascinating. But to deny my overall conceptual dissatisfaction during my final reflection would be like lying about all the blog posts I made complaining about it, like this one for example. This course hasn’t really fulfilled what I wanted when I started it, but that’s okay because even if the content wasn’t necessarily ideal, I enjoyed other components, one’s that I didn’t think I would.

I think I’ve learnt a lot about consistency and sticking to deadlines, which has always been something I’ve struggled with, like most irresponsible students my age the lure of procrastination is ever-present. I complained about the blog posts at the beginning of the course because the idea of putting my life on the internet scares me and there are personal reasons for that, but mostly I’m just a hugely private person. But you know what? Maintaining a blog definitely teaches you a thing or two about consistency and there were even times I enjoyed myself and it was a cathartic experience,  I think that is especially clear in my initiative posts. Learning about deadlines definitely came into play with how regularly we had to show our progress on our project briefs during our workshops. It helped me make sure I was always prepared for what I had to show and submit. The way the project briefs were broken down allowed the experience of putting them together, combined with the blog posts and supporting documentation to be far less stressful than if we had to do the entire thing all in one go.

I already had quite a bit of experience with Premiere from my Screen and Media course last year, but it was good to be able to get back into editing again and refresh my knowledge of the program and different techniques. Editing always makes me feel really creative and powerful as all my decisions have a huge impact on the final product, no matter how minor they are. I also learnt a bit about Audition, which I hadn’t used before, but I feel like I only scratched the surface of the features it contains and I’m sure I’ll continue to learn about it in Media Two.

I liked the way the workshops were more casual and friendly than the lectorials and they better suited the way I learn. I have always preferred to sit and listen to what a lecturer is saying while occasional handwriting notes, rather than typing notes up. I digest information better when there is room for discussion about the topics we are learning, so that’s why I liked the workshop environment better than the lectorials, which were just a room full of people typing. I felt very out of time and place handwriting my notes. I also felt quite out of place with how I seemed to be one of the few who took the advice of the lecturers and tried to challenge myself beyond the course, by quickly getting involved with as much community television shows as possible and sending heaps of emails out to companies to enquire about internship opportunities. I listened to the advice about trying to get as much experience as possible during the course to ensure success in the future and while it caused stress (as shown here) and impacted my blogging timeliness, I’m extremely proud of myself for the effort I put in to generate new opportunities. I mean, not many first year students in their first semester get an internship with the ABC, but I moved to a major city for that reason, to capitalise on the opportunities that were previously unavailable to me in Newcastle.

I found many things challenging about this course, but I think the first thing would be the idea behind PB1 and PB2. A lot of people approached these projects in a more abstract way, especially PB2, even if they didn’t necessarily stick to the brief,  where we were supposed to use photographs, sound and video; and instead left photographs out and went the abstract route. I was seriously stuck on this project, not because I’m not creative but because I’m the sort of person whose identity is really below the surface. I’m quiet, in fact, I don’t really enjoy talking and so a lot of who I am as a human being is my crazy philosophical thoughts at 2 am in the morning, which gets turned into poetry that in the morning I find terrible. Like I said in the above blog posts, I found it difficult to express who I am through my superficial interests. I think that’s part of what I struggled with most in this course, the superficiality of a lot of the concepts and projects we had to do, there wasn’t enough deep discussion for me personally.

I also really found it hard to engage with the readings, that shows in my blogging and also the feedback for PB3 where I was encouraged to do more posts discussing them. But the readings felt so unrelated to the project briefs, in fact, there did feel like a bit of a discord between the lectorial’s content, focusing on the macro environment of media and the workshops, which felt more like a film and television subject to me. We spent so much time using Premiere, Audition, doing group projects and editing, it was all focused on one very specific medium of media as opposed to all the others discussed in the lectorials.

Through Media One I discovered that my creative process is intricately influenced by how passionate I am about a project or subject. I will come up with excuses, procrastinate, complain and feel uninspired unless I truly understand and appreciate what I’m working on. There were definitely times where I engaged with this course and I was fascinated by certain ideas, but I look forward to more practically and perhaps, the freedom of the studios in Media Two.