How has my practice changed over the duration of the semester in this studio? What have I learnt? // OVE Memory Lane
I cannot believe this semester has come to an end.
I was extremely sceptical about this course from the start and I made no secret of it in my early blog posts and in what I’d told anyone who’d ask. I did come into the course open minded to the possibility of preferring the new model as I figured it must have been changed for a reason.
The studio model for me brought out my fear of the unknown more times than in traditional study models and I wrote about this in my first reflection post. In these early posts I’ve written how not having my assignments predetermined was my biggest worry as I feared that in self-directed learning I’d lose track of time, my direction and my motivation. My main reason for this is my previous experience with a studio art subject in VCE but it was magnified at the start of this year because this course is a lot more expensive, worth 24 points and overall makes up half of my grades for this semester (and in the studio art subject I still had a literary exam that balanced out the studio efforts). Through blogging and recognising this early on however I was able to begin overcoming my fears and I managed to keep a diary so as not to forget details throughout the course and highlight important developments and understandings in my blog.
This practice consistently helped me throughout the course as when I felt there was no progress made, I’d look back on my blog, my notes, my diary and realise otherwise. This is why at this point, the end of the course, I have a big appreciation of what has been achieved in Online Video Experiments.
Another part of this studio that really assisted my practice was the way in which communication was facilitated in the studios. I’ve always valued teacher and peer feedback and this course for me emphasised how important it was more than anything else I’ve ever done. I always felt more at ease after discussing work or just concepts with my project partner Clare, my tutor Seth or anybody in our OVE studio. I’d emphasised feeling positive and inspired after talking to other groups and also after seeing everybody’s work. I took notes during presentations and revisited ideas inspired by conversations that took place within the studio for example I recall in Project Two completing a sketch based on when the class was trying to decide whether a single frame and audio can still be considered video.
The sketching process was completely new to me this year. What I found interesting was how with Project Two, Seth had described how our sketches were a method of understanding our case study as opposed to the standard research and evaluation based presentation that we did in Project One. This was probably the first time I realised the pros of practice-based research as I felt more connected to the case study through the sketching process than I did with my Project One Case Study research process. It allowed thinking about its affordances on very broad terms such as the role of hashtags, networks and internet users as opposed to just the main actors involved and the most obvious traits. Clare and I picked a rather complex case study; the Horror Vine Competition for Project Two which provided a lot of variation in our sketches and kept our creative process rather interesting.
In our process onto Project 3 the serious amount of questioning going on in this course was very evident. By this point we had explored the question of what is online video in Project One, Clare and I had brainstormed many many ideas and questions about sketches that could deconstruct our case study for Project Two and then again for Project Three. I found overall with this course most of my reflecting was in question form. Particularly in using probes to inform our projects we were generally refining a question until we could refine it no longer.
Project Three onwards, Clare and I had decided to focus solely on Vine and classic film theory of dialectical montage for our project. For this project we’d presented in class and then again in front of a panel. This was a first for me another part of this course I valued highly as it was the only opportunity I’ve had in my studies so far to be critiqued by academics I don’t personally know and to have credible feedback from outside sources.
Then on we basically started a long process of creating lots of vine videos. I’d never made a vine before this course but today as a group I think Clare and I have uploaded 40-50 vines online. I guess this repetitive process caused a bit of a dull moment in our journey where we were lacking motivation. We’d gone back to basics with our probe and experimented with recreating the Kuleshov effect in Vine to see how to most effectively use dialectical montage. We’d been uploading our vines to our own channel and because we were repeating the same outline of the experiment using the same content it started to feel redundant and it’s clear in the design of my week 11 posts 1/2. Our struggle was developing without straying from our main focus or finding a way to refresh our focus. We didn’t really have a sense of direction towards a prototype either. I thought this was a limitation of the sketching process until we had a breakthrough moment while discussing our project with Seth on the Friday of Week 11!
Our process was very organic and it really did pay off in the end as we seemed to end up directing ourselves into creating content that we found meaningful in more than just academic terms with our prototype. I am very proud of where Clare and I have ended up with these projects.
The final thing worth noting is how much the studio has helped me with presentations. My Project One and Project Two presentations were both on my blog. This wouldn’t be much of a bad thing had I properly prepared for the limitations of having my skinny blog layout which resizes videos and writing in a not very presentable manner. Getting through these not-as-good presentations and having two presentation opportunities for Project Three really helped with planning that first panel presentation- particularly with having to reset our time limit in the slightly longer class version of P3 Presentation and having feedback on whether we were clear enough about our project and intentions to the class who know our project was probably the best way to know and suss out whether we’d were clear enough for a panel who aren’t familiar with our project.
Overall I can say it’s been an interesting semester and I’m grateful to have been a part of a class full of inspiration, I had many moments of uncertainty but seeing developments of all the different projects and with my own projects sticking to a documentative process- knowing when to go back to basics and not being ashamed to ask for help or advice has had positive consequences and now I can only look forward to seeing how our OVE studio will be received by others at the Media Program Exhibition on Thursday…
Posts I tagged in the Essay (In order, again, in case any links didn’t work up there):
Early OVE Days
Inspiration from Communication
Wk2 Notes & Thoughts From Project One Presentations
Wk 6 How Talking To Other Groups Assisted Project 3
Wk9 How Studio Feedback Helped Make Our Project Probe
Week 11 Posts & Slow Progress
1/2
Breakthrough (& Intro of Major Prototype Iteration)
Blog Presentations