There were two key points and topics that I walked away from the unlecture still considering and contemplating.

Firstly, the ‘content is not king’ point was alarming yet interesting, as Adrian poetically told us that to merely become ‘content producers’ was to place outselves at the bottom of the media food chain. Which is a nasty place to me. Instead, he encouraged us to be idea and knowledge creators, figuring out what content needs to be created, not just idly and passively making what’s trending at the time.

A girl behind me, Bec, asked the bitterly realistic question of “if 14 year olds are posting videos on Youtube and are more successful than me, why should I bother?” essentially talking about how everyone has access to the same materials to it’s almost impossible to stand out. This question rang so true to my fears about being in the media world. I don’t want to put hard work into a project only for it to buried under the success and popularity of the newest ‘Cat Walks Up Stairs’ video made on someone’s iPhone.

e.g. This is a 20 second video of cats staring at each other (still pretty fantastic) that has 72,000 views… How many views do my short films have on vimeo? About 1/72 of that…

I think Adrian managed to answer this quite well, by stating that bloody Uncle Ben and his DSLR and iDVD can produce any old crap, so we need to sell and advertise our experience, not our quick access to equipment, which essentially everybody has. We can’t just learn how to use a camera or how to add a cross dissolve between these two shots, we need to learn how to make brilliant things and gain experience over the technologically-illiterate.

For some reason, I didn’t feel I engaged with this unlecture as I had the previous 2 or 3. This may have been the comedown from my caffeine high due to an 8am start, or the fact that I’d just had my brain turned to scrambled eggs after a stressful Broadcast Media class.  I felt like the lecture was slightly a bit too “conceptual”; the top three questions to be answered were all very broad and conceptual, unlike the one from last week that was essentially “why are we doing this?” which could get answered in a very conceptual yet specific way.

I do, however, like the idea of each class posing a few questions to the panel to be answered.