For our fourth project brief, we had to work collaboratively in groups of three to produce two media essays — one audio-based and one video-based — in response to a conceptual idea central to Media as an academic discipline. And the concept my group and I received was institutions.
At first, I wasn’t really keen on it because I didn’t really know what ‘institutions’ were in terms of how we were suppose to look at them, and this concept wasn’t going to be discussed in our lectures for another couple weeks. However, once we all did some research and decided to focus on one institution, that is, Disney, it definitely made more sense and I became more keen on this topic especially since we decided to base it on just Disney. And with that, we decided to look into Disney as an institution in terms of its history, audience relationship, marketing, values and representations.
A successful aspect of our audio essay would have to be how the sourced materials were incorporated. Since it is just an audio piece, there’s nothing else to make it more interesting other than incorporating other material that isn’t just people talking. I think that the way different Disney sounds and music were merged into and within the information creates engagement as it made the piece sound more casual and fun despite all the facts we were saying. For instance, there were different Disney songs used as we were speaking to support certain points, or to just add background music. Furthermore, the Disney audio pieces added were iconic so it really helped establish the ‘setting’ of our discussion on Disney. An improvement for next time would have to be to adjust the sound levels more thoroughly as throughout the essay, some of the audio between us speakers were not consistently equal. I also think that we could have broken up the information more to reach close to the 5 minute maximum duration as sometimes it felt like we were just throwing fact after fact without much pause and we were only divided through sound bytes here and there since we cut it to reach just past the 4 minute minimum duration.
A successful aspect of our video essay would have to be the plethora of found footage used. There is definitely a huge variety of videos used, predominantly Disney of course, which really aided in creating visual engagement. There are also some videos that were not Disney, such as the raining money clip which was used when discussing the company’s profits. As well as the texts that were used, particularly statistics, helped in emphasising certain points being said. Moreover, the video essay contains photos which aided in creating more variations visually. I’m really happy with how the visuals supported the audio. For instance, when talking about Disneyland merchandising, there clips of actual Disneyland merchandise. Likewise, when discussing Hong Kong Disneyland, there were clips of Hong Kong Disneyland. Similar to the audio essay, an improvement for next time would be further adjusting the sound levels. There is a clear difference in quality between the audio of the voiceovers and on-camera spiels. The voiceovers had more clarity and were louder than the the audio of the on-camera spiels. I also think that the on-camera spiels in the middle of the essay could have been incorporated better as it felt a little awkward at times going from a straight 2 minutes of found footage then cutting to a face-on shot, but this is also in relation to the audio differences.
In terms of affordances, there were definitely a lot of things that I learned about the different affordances of audio and video-based media through this assignment. The audio essay helped me in gaining a deeper understanding of sound affordances considering it is just an audio piece with no visual stimuli. The texture applied in our audio essay, that is, our voice recordings, Disney songs and other sound bytes reminded me of the importance of deep listening. You really have to be listening in order to hear the different layers of sounds. For instance, while we’re speaking, there’s usually some light music playing in the background and then it would fade into a different sound extract. On the other hand, the video essay had the visual stimuli accompanying an audio piece. And with that being said, associations can be made between the video and audio, for instance, the found footage usually matched the information being said. It is through these different affordances that helped us in producing, what I think are, interesting media essays.
During the production of these essays, the one, and probably main thing I learned about collaboration that may be relevant to my broader development as a media practitioner would have to the importance of communication, and by that, I mean effective communication. Because if you have that, you’ll achieve the things that you want to get done. I think it’s absolutely vital to have this when working collaboratively as it helps create an open and comfortable environment for all participants. It also makes it easier to ensure that everyone understands what’s happening and the goals being set as a team, as well as how to rise above complications with the work and/or within the team.