For our final assessment of the semester to come together, our exhibition at Signal and the media day, we needed to work as a team and delegate each other into roles to ensure that all grounds would be covered and that the exhibition would be a success. In order for this to happen, we needed a tech team to oversee and conduct all technical aspects for the exhibition. We needed a documentation team to document and record all of our progress as well as present it to an audience. A public relations and web design team was necessary to create the website, flyers, bios, pamphlets etc that would help to promote the exhibition. And finally we needed an installation team to make the actual exhibit come to life. I was allocated to the documentation team along with Dea and Amalina. To be honest, at first I didn’t really understand what my role entailed. I knew I had to document things but I wasn’t really sure as to what the purpose of this would be and we were all still figuring out what our exhibition at Signal would actually be about and what it would look like. After a week or two I began to understand. I saw everyone around me delving into their separate roles and begin to get things underway and it finally clicked that I must do the same. So for the next week I spent some class time taking photos of everyone editing their clips and preparing bits and pieces. I helped gather shots of ‘behind the scenes progress’ so we could add them to our exhibition portfolio and track our progress as well as install them into our assigned room for the media exhibit. It wasn’t until about the third week that I got really excited about what we were creating and immersed myself into my documentation role. If I’m to be honest, I think this also had a lot to do with the fact that I had re-shot all of my footage and entirely changed my concept for the exhibition. My new concept revolving around the use of avocado and egg excited me because I knew I would be showing something at Signal that I was actually really proud of. Making the trailer was a big part of our role in documentation. This is also where I figured out how valuable our group page on Facebook was as a means of communication as I had to make several posts asking other classmates to upload their footage to the drive so that we could actually make the trailer. Amalina, Dea and I really worked as a team on the trailer and communicated our ideas to each other quite effectively. We didn’t go ahead with any decisions unless all three of us were in agreeance as we wanted the trailer to be something that we were all proud of. My role in helping the exhibition along grew from here. I took headshots of our class members so that we would be able to put them on the website and I got really involved in our Facebook page. I posted in it quite frequently to check up on the progress of others, to ask questions relating to my own role and to organise things. I volunteered to speak at both the Signal exhibition and media exhibition even though I completely dreaded the idea. Public speaking isn’t my strength. I think I managed to at least pull it off but next time I think I’d like to prepare myself a lot better presentation and speech wise. Towards the end of the whole process I felt like the individual teams really just became one big team and we all ended up helping out with whatever needed to be done regardless of whether we had been assigned to the role or not. Everyone really stepped up. I’m so grateful for this entire assignment, it’s shown me how much work and effort it takes to create an exhibit and I now know how to recreate this in the future. Before this task, I really underestimated the workload that would be required to pull this assignment off and had no clue how a public relations team worked or how to edit on a template in Premiere Pro. The skills I’ve obtained because of doing this are so valuable and practical and something that I can take with me into the real world. I feel like I’ve achieved a whole lot this semester and the fact that our exhibition was so well received by the public speaks volumes as to how far we’ve come.
http://www.mediafactory.org.au/elle-sablotny/2015/10/15/signal-head-shots/
http://www.mediafactory.org.au/elle-sablotny/2015/10/12/signal-editing-and-progress/
