From the very start of Media 1 I was reconfiguring how I thought about media. Initially, in week two, I thought I’d discovered that I’m a hyper-attentive learner, but as I continued through the course and my productivity dwindled I realised that I work better when I focus solely on the task at hand. I constantly encountered moments like this where I had to modify (and sometimes destroy) my previous notions of certain topics and ideas related to media.
Looking back at my assessment submissions for the year is really eye-opening. My Project Brief 2 is, basically, terrible. I struggled with putting myself into a video, and took the easy way out by making the video not really about me. This disengagement with the idea of the assessment was reflected in my mark, which was by far the lowest I received all semester, but luckily I took that to heart and things definitely improved after that.
I’m quite proud of my work on Project Brief 3, to the point where I’ve actually been happy to show it to friends and family who ask about what I’m doing at RMIT. I learned so much in the process of making PB3, and although it’s definitely not perfect I think it was exactly what I needed to put me on the path to becoming a better practitioner. I definitely consider PB3 to be the “start” of my engagement with the course; the point where everything clicked and I realised what was required to get the best out of the course.
With Project Brief 4 I think adding the element of collaboration was really valuable. Not only did it force me to get used to working with others (including all of the potential problems inherent in that practice), but I think it actually resulted in better work than I could have achieved on my own, particularly with the video essay portion. Over the break I’m considering other ways to keep collaborating with other students, with the goal that I’ll be perfectly comfortable with sharing the workload on group assessments for the rest of my degree.
This is a learning graph of my progress through the semester. Plotting a graph like this forced me to revisit my work and old blog posts to determine exactly how (and how much) I progressed from week to week, which was an enlightening experience. Looking back at the semester as a whole I definitely feel like I’ve grown and learned a lot, but it wasn’t until I put it all down on paper that I realised just how quickly it all happened.
From the very start of semester I’ve always felt like I had a good grounding in the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings on media making, especially textual analysis and the like. This is the area in which I’ve grown the least, which is not surprising considering I’ve concentrated on making progress in other areas. I also consider myself a “good student” (since I’m used to working a 9-5 job and having immutable deadlines), so the professionalism aspect of the graph is also mostly high.
By far my most dramatic improvement has been in the category “practice”, which describes creativity and actually operating like a media maker from day to day. This definitely wasn’t something I considered a strength at the start of the year, I basically just coasted through life without realising the impact media has on me, but now every day I’m thinking about my daily experience in terms of media – I’m constantly looking for projects to take on, making note of ideas I might like to explore, engaging with texts in new and interesting ways, etc. It’s fair to say that doing this semester at work has completely reconfigured my brain to be thinking about media in ways I never did before.
Finally, here is a small selection of some of my favourite posts from the semester:
- The Edit (March 10)
This post describes a Lectorial in which we learned about the conceptual ideas behind editing in cinema. Discovering the nuts-and-bolts behind a process that I previously took for granted was a fantastic learning moment, and it also gave me a new and deeper understanding of Martin Scorsese’s Casino, which a film I love but hadn’t explored in great depth. - Vocal Timbre (March 22)
Taking what we’ve read about in class and applying it to my experience of other media is probably my favourite thing about Media 1. In this post I apply the idea of sound timbre to two podcasts hosts, and analyse why it might be that I love one and dislike the other. - Will technology destroy cinema like it destroyed the music industry? (March 29)
Another highlight of my semester was applying concepts and ideas explored in one subject (say, Music in Popular Culture) and applying it to what we were learning in another (say, Media 1). This post is a kind of thinkpiece where I consider changes that decimated the music industry, and whether or not new media students like myself should be worried that the same could happen to other industries. - Do you see what I see? (April 10)
This is perhaps my favourite post of the entire course, because it brought back to mind an incredible documentary that I’d originally watched with just a surface level understanding (amazing though the film was), and recontextualised it to my current knowledge and understanding of media. I still find the idea of cultural divides influencing physical experience to be absolutely fascinating, and hope to explore this area further later in my degree. - Medium theory and technological determinism (May 16)
Being much older than most of the students in the Media 1 cohort, I often have different, older social or cultural touchstones that inform my understanding of Media 1 topics. As I was in my 20s when the original iPhone came out, I’m now able to consider its influence much easier than perhaps other students can, and I used this to discuss technological determinism in the context of a Lectorial topic.