Media One was a substantial change of pace to what I was used to in high school. The course is very fast paced, almost the moment you start you’re already thrown in the deep end. I think as a whole the course has helped me in reflectivity more than in any other area. I went in to the course having worked with clients, on larger projects, my own short films and with a degree of technical knowledge I had gained through volunteering with media makers. For me, I was in this course for the opportunity to make a diverse range of great content, and I think the course certainly pushed me to do the best with what I had.
What I have learned in Media One:
I think more than anything Media One has taught me that intense focus is not always the best way to go about things. Throughout school, we would have these moments of focus, these hot-spots of assignment deadlines and essays and long winded academic writings and study. This course has really gone out of its way to undo me, in the sense that, we don’t have long essays or even exams at all. The content we create forces us to spend a long time planning and organising, effectively undoing the “short bursts of intense focus” doctrine that school has been teaching me all my life. I think this has changed the way I create content and has taught me to rely less on talent and more on theoretical knowledge. One of the disadvantages I had going into the course was technical knowledge. I had operated broadcast cameras, professional field recorders and have been using Premiere Pro (admittedly not always proficiently) for (no joke) almost a decade of my life. In that way, for me it was the self-discovery that I found most illuminating not so much the technical training.
Learning Graph
How I learn:
I have always done my best learning, discovering on my own so this course has been a little rough starting out. A lot of the course has either been revision or things I just entirely had never considered in my life. I learn best when I am given the opportunity to explore past the obvious. I think I have, coming back to my earlier point, been able to focus intensely on a task and not been easily distracted. I attribute this to the way we were brought up in school, this has made blogging particularly hard for me.
What I have found most challenging in the course:
Following on from my last point, blogging has probably been the most difficult part of the course for me. I would have rather written an essay for each week of the course than written five different blog posts about each of it’s facets, because that’s the way my mind has been programmed by years of teaching. I would often leave blogging to too late in the game simply because in many ways I dreaded slogging out such a short piece of writing having usually written longer form pieces, this is why you might find my blog has fewer pieces than most, yet the average word count is more like 450 words. During the semester, my grandfather passed away, this made family life a little strained as my parents expected me to attend a lot of events and to be ready to take care of things at home and abroad when they needed to be elsewhere. This had a substantial negative impact on the work I was doing in the course. I tend to compare and consolidate many things I learn into singular ideas rather than a massive explosion of seperate thoughts. I think in many ways, the difficulty in blogging is just a VCE hangover but also I think I could have done better work if the blogging had been based on say, a minimum word limit than a minimum post count.
What I have discovered about my own practise:
Through the semester I was also directing the second of my festival short film entrants. I found myself using a lot of what I had learned theoretically in the course and in Cinema Studies in my direction of the film specifically when communicating with my DP. Though, on my film everyone who I worked with was amazing, the group projects I have engaged in across electives and courses has told me a lot about conflict management and also how to choose my battles wisely. In a lot of cases, compromise doesn’t have to have a negative effect on the work and the work is the most important thing.
I have enjoyed the course so far but I am very excited about Studios and being able to hone my craft in second semester. I look forward to continuing my media journey here at RMIT. Thank you to all the amazing tutors particularly Seth for supporting us through the course.
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