It feels like this first semester has literally flown! It seems like just as I started really enjoying myself and getting the hang of things, this semester has finished. The first few weeks seemed quite daunting as I tried to get accustomed to uni life as well as sitting in class for 3 hours with people I hardly knew.The first few class exercises definitely gave me a chance to get to know the people working in my class as well as having the self-reflective assignments shared with the class.

Going into to this semester I also had to get accustomed to switching from a windows laptop to a macbook pro. Surprisingly, it did not take long at all and I am really loving that I made the switch, as the macbook pro has so many more programs that were unavailable to windows. I liked that we initially had some editing practice as although I am quite confident in editing, I had to switch editing programs from Sony Vegas Pro, as that was only available on the windows platform.

My criticism with the projects in Media 1 is that they were quite repetitive, as they were all ‘self-portrait’ style project. Two of those being on ourselves, and another being on someone else. However, I did feel that it was a good task to explore different techniques such as using sound, video, text and image to convey meaning. Going in, I was most familiar with working with video and image so it was nice to get some experience manipulating with sounds and using texts. The project I liked working on the most out of the all of them was probably the self-portrait on another person as I found that to be the most enjoyable in the creative process. The last project, project brief 4 I felt was quite out of place from the other assignments so it did take me a while to get my head around the whole concept, but I did enjoy the experience working in a group.

I quite liked the lectorials each week and felt 2 hours wasn’t too short or too long. I liked that there was often two or sometimes more speakers in the one session so that the lectures were varied and interesting. I know that there was at least one or two weeks that I couldn’t make it for a particular reason, so it would’ve been nice if there was a recording of the lecture put online. I know that there is often some information/powerpoint slides from the week but I think a full recording would be quite helpful to students.

As for the blog, I don’t think I’ve been too bad with keeping up with blog posts. Although, definitely towards the end of the semester as I was working on project brief 4 I became a lot more slack with writing three posts a week.

Overall I am quite happy with the work I’ve completed in this first semester of this course and I’m looking forward to the future.