Memory identity and Neighbourhoods has been, for me, a great learning experience, and it’s changed the way I see things in and outside of class time. I think that there was only one single class that I couldn’t attend so I was able to soak up some solid learning from Kim, my classmates and from the content we were exposed to. I realised early on that the studio was going to be exactly like what I thought it would be, which is the first time this has happened in a studio. We explored the concepts of Memory, Identity and Neighbourhoods right from the first class that we had together, and I’ve found myself immersed ever since. Everytime I come to the final weeks of a studio I think ‘I definitely learnt more this semester than last semester’ and the same thing has happened again. I keep expecting to stop learning but my learning curve seems to be shaped exponentially.

I think the greatest thing about this studio was that I got to just go out and experience things. I found that the most engaging parts of the class were when I was planning and plotting for how I could actually achieve certain looks and feels with the way I filmed. Filming a documentary seems so simple at first, what can be so hard about taking a camera out and following something or asking some people a few questions, but wow is it a complex process and I’ve only just realised how complex it is this semester.

One of the wonderful things that I took from this class was also learning from my peers. I connected with some of my classmates so well and was able to work with them and learn new techniques from them, these things include ways of interviewing, filming, setting up and recording audio and of course snazzy tricks in the final editing process. I love learning and I’m glad that I was able to learn from so many different things and people. I’ve even begun to learn from things I see on TV like ads and news stories. I’ve begun to look at every video as a new idea I could use myself, analysing the methods and aims of each video I come across. (See some examples in my blog here, here, here and here)

There are a few key things that I have taken/will take away from this studio in this semester. Despite being in my third and final year of my media degree I began to understand things in this class that I’d never understood and noticed at this level before. From very early on Kim asked us to watch as many documentaries as we could, not the whole thing though, just the first 5 minutes or so. This was a great encouragement for me. Previously I’ve had trouble starting things in an interesting way, I’ve made my films about the content in the whole thing rather than something to really draw someone into from the start. I also don’t watch a lot of documentaries as they can be quite lengthy and quite frankly usually I prefer fictional films.

This class was my first voting preference in the studio ballots, and this was because I wanted to learn more about making films, both documentary type and anything else that I could apply my knowledge too. The very first studio that I chose was also a documentary based studio, and I think it’s safe to say that I’ve come a long way since then. The first documentary I ever made, like this one, was a learning journey. However, the journey that my first documentary took me on taught me basic lessons so I could make a basic documentary. I’ve found that this semester I’ve learnt much more of the detailed things that really make the video seem professional. This learning has given me a huge amount of confidence going forward in my media studies and future career.

I’m a pretty busy person, I always have been, and I like to spread myself across many commitments every week. This fact I have always been able to deal with and I’ve always been able to make it work. I’m pretty organised with my time because I have to be. I’ve never let my life outside from uni affect how successful I am at uni. This semester was the first time that it became all a bit too much, and it was because my group had to re-organise interview shoots. Each time we went to shoot we spent a significant amount of time doing so, and lots of that time was wasted on waiting for people to come who weren’t coming. I shouldn’t say that it was exactly wasted as I did shoot b-roll footage in that time and learn things about the equipment, however the amount of time spent doing these things was utterly unnecessary. Especially since it set my well organised and packed schedule up in flames.

For the first time ever my life affected my ability to contribute to some of my group work as interviews were organised when I was working and couldn’t attend. It was honestly devastating. I don’t like missing out and I felt like I was letting my group down. Of course this happened to other group members more, but I was unable to attend our main interview shoot at the end of week 11. I tried my hardest to contribute as much as I could in other ways to make up for this. I think I definitely made up for missing this interview shoot in the editing suites. I would say that I was the main editor in the group. I put so much time and effort into piecing everything together and I’m glad that I did this. In hindsight I think that, not only out of my group but out of all of the groups, I feel like I learnt so much. The best thing that came out of putting in all this work however is the confidence that I now feel in myself and my ability to make a decent quality film (with the right equipment). The feedback that the class gave my group after our final presentation was so motivational, I was pleasantly surprised that so many people had so many good things to say about it, and I don’t think anything is more satisfying than people complimenting an aspect of something that you intentionally tried so hard to achieve.

The final film product was, I would say, successful. Shanah’s huge compliment that she felt the film reached out to the exact audience that we intended and in the right was was amazing. Hearing the class throw so many compliments at our groups work seemed to make the journey very worthwhile. It’s interesting that we somehow achieved what we wanted to achieve accidentally. If we hadn’t of had to go back and shoot over 5 times then we wouldn’t have had the diverse amount of content that we did to get the message across so strongly. There are definitely methods that we employed that had their weaknesses, our audio in one interview was shrouded with traffic and the picture of the other interview was not all that appealing to the eye (and didn’t fit visually with the colour and framing of the other footage we had), but we did our best to overcome these issues with what we had. Because we had to reshoot so many times it also meant that we got to try out multiple methods. I think that if we had the time to go out and re-do them one more time then we’d get them absolutely perfect because we’ve already, at least i’d like to think, learnt from all the possible mistakes.