Project Brief 4 reflection.
Project brief 4 was the final assignment for Media 1, and was significantly bigger and more involved than project briefs 2 and 3. I feel our final project is a good, but flawed media artifact.
Unlike the previous Project Briefs, this one was a group exercise, which made me initially nervous because I usually prefer to work alone. Even more daunting was the fact that we did not get to chose our own groups, which has lead to disastrous results in the past (and talking to friends in other Media tutorials, happened there as well). However both Kristan and Ali were both great to work with, and our group functioned as an efficient team. Our group met once per week outside of class to work on the Project, which I feel was very important and allowed us to work as team much better than other groups who worked independently and combined their work at a later date.
Our group worked well and everyone stayed in regular contact and did their assigned tasks between meetings, Ali especially did incredible work on editing the footage together. We worked well as a team as both Kristian and Ali were great partners and very easy to approach with any questions or concerns. We all adhered to the collaborative contract, and there was never any serious disagreements that were not dealt with civilly and respectfully.
I feel our group worked well as a team, each having our own strengths and weaknesses. For example, Kristian was the primary writer for the script because he has a passion for writing. His first draft contained numerous errors and awkward phrases relating to gaming and gaming culture because he is not involved, this is where me and Ali helped him re-phrase it to sound more knowledgably and cleared up some factual mistakes relating to release dates and other miscellaneous facts.
Originally we had not much of an idea on how to approach the topic of “Mediums”, or how much work was expected from this Project. Our initial idea was a website that showcased the history and differences of many different mediums, with each part being portrayed in the medium it was about.
We were very excited and enthusiastic about this idea, but as seen in THIS blog post, it was quickly and brutally shot down. However upon later reflection I can see that a Media artifact of this magnitude would have been impossible to complete in the time we had available.
Our final idea was to focus entirely on the medium of Video Games (which originally was going to be 1/4th of our project) and create a 5-6min video in the style of the ABC television program “Good Game” that looked at how video games were influenced by, and incorporate different mediums to become a new and unique medium.
I feel we succeeded in making it look similar to “Good Game” in the setup of the set and how the camera worked, switching from a wide shot with both of us, to close ups of our face talking to each other. We could also use footage of the videogames to cover up continuity errors. Over the several weeks following slowly developed the idea, making several prototype scripts and trying out different ways to film it.
The feedback we received in class was reassuring that we were headed in the right direction, and provide useful feedback to improve our final artifact. An example of this was Rachel suggesting adding the quotes from scholars as on-screen prompts, to add visual flair and help people see who was saying it, and where it was published.
I’m am reasonably happy with our final artifact, I cant think of many ways we could have improved it, but I feel the design wasn’t the best choice for our topic. Making our video in a similar style to “Good Game” and simultaneously quoting scholarly references did not mesh well in my opinion. I wish we had to opportunity to be more creative, but we were limited by time and having to cite scholarly research. My major gripe with this semesters project briefs is that each media artifact I have produced has been either about me, someone else or a thing in a factual way, I am much more comfortable making purely fictional media.
I am proud of our groups work, especially when I hear about the internal problems that plagued some of my friends groups, and although in retrospect I wish we could have taken a different route, I feel our artifact is well made and conveys its message well. This Project Brief has helped my perception of group work, as well as looking into the scholarly work done in the field of media.