Since my reflection is a good 700 odd words I’m just going to slot it below

Project 4: Written Reflection

For project 4’s media artefact project, I was grouped together with Chrystalla and Georgina and they were an absolute pleasure to work with.  I found working with them efficient, effective and fun with not a hiccup from the beginning.  I felt each of us were comfortable with voicing our thoughts and opinions and had good creative criticism for each other throughout the duration of this assignment.  We tweaked the collaborative contract to suit the three of us and stuck to it all the way through, meeting up every Tuesday as well as in class on Thursdays to compare notes, write minutes, discuss our work and assign new roles and tasks for the new week. 

We were all on the same page when deciding on film festivals as an institution after writing out all of the institutions we could think of.  We worked on our angle by throwing ideas around and looking at our research and found that we had the mostly information on film festival programs and marketing. 
It was through more discussion and brainstorming that we came up with the idea of creating a news-esque segment of ‘What’s on in Melbourne’, however we also came up with a list of other artefacts that we could do should that plan fall through.  After attempting to plan the segment, it was mutually decided that time restrictions would put a strain on us trying to get a full video production done.  So we compromised and chose a different artefact idea on our list; a podcast.

For the creation of the podcast, we split our focus into three current film festival; the Human Rights Festival, the St Kilda Film Festival and the Audi German Film Festival, and proceeded to write our own scripts separately before coming together one Tuesday and combining them into one.  We then tried recording ourselves with microphones and I had the responsibility of editing the sound together.  Our feedback from our first draft was to ‘ham it up’ and try different microphones as the quality of the recordings weren’t great.  So for our second draft, we tried a couple of different microphones (a shotgun, a hand held and just the zoomH4n itself) and tried adding sound effects to see if it makes our podcast more interesting to listen to.  However, after listening to it with the sound effects, we decided there weren’t enough and the ones that we did input, didn’t really match the tone of our banter, so we took them out and came to the conclusion that what our podcast was missing is music.  So while I edited the dialogue, Chrystalla and Georgina created the background music on garage band and Georgina combined the dialogue with the music, giving us the final product. 

I believe the most successful part of our media artefact was the angle of having a staged argument about the programs of the various film festivals in order to market them.  I think it’s a clever way of subtly displaying our research in a way that is entertaining. 
I found the most problematic aspect of our project was finding the right microphone levels for each of our voices.  Whilst editing the dialogue I found most of the levels were too low with the occasional high pitched sections and loud peaks.  While this isn’t too hard to fix, it is annoying to have to tweak. 

I believe a part that we needed to work on maybe a little more is our voice work.  If this were a professional piece, we probably would have had to hire someone more experienced to do the voice overs, however we decided this time to do it ourselves.  While our voice work is good, it could be better with a professional.

Throughout this project I learnt the importance of respect, punctuality and sharing the load in collaborative work.  I’m thankful for the wonderful group I was placed with and am so glad I didn’t need to learn the ins and outs of group-work the hard way.