This final project brief for semester one came in the form of an audio discussion or podcast style presentation to be done in a group as a collaborative work and could focus on any given area or discipline of media and how we as audiences consume and interact with this particular medium. Ours in particular was focused on large movie and TV franchises and what made then so successful as well as researching the roots and origins of the stories and characters within these films. On the whole I think we worked well as a group. First of all we all get along really well which is always going to be an important thing when working with others. We had good communication too, using a group chat we were all able to discuss meeting times as well as what each member’s roll within the overall task would be (eg. who’s got a laptop with Audition and can edit the audio, who want’s to handle the disclaimer, who wants to discuss which aspect of large franchises etc). As a group too I don’t think that we’re all particularly organised or fully reliable people in these situations but we all had good communication between us so if someone was going to be late to a recording say or still working on something to add in we all knew what was going on. To get deep and to help fill out my word-count here it was the acceptance of each other as fellow flawed humans that got us through this task even down to Oscar listening to a version of the project I sent him and realizing that I’d fixed literally none of the stumbles we recorded while reading our segments and pointing It out so I could fix it up ASAP. What didn’t work so well in this project on a more personal note was me not reading over the brief enough and getting confused about the nature of what had to be written and about the inclusion of a lovely annotated bibliography. This was a problematic feature for old Mickle when I he realized that he’d just spoken off the top of his head and written a piece that had quoted literally NOTHING. So I’m a bit of a spud for that. I think timing too is something I could have managed a whole lot better here as I’m writing this the evening that it has to be submitted.

I think when it came to the final edited version of the project, something we could have done a lot better is to have had more of an input from everyone in the group when it came to the way the recordings were put together. Due to lack of time mostly I edited and uploaded the project myself hoping that everyone else would be pleased with the work. Luckily they were (after I’d fixed my terrible initial version). The topic we chose on the other hand was a strong point I feel, as we all had reasonable knowledge of these franchises to begin with and could write about them a lot more easily from the point of view of consumers than other mediums since we’d all grown up on films like Star Wars and Pirates Of The Caribbean. The process of writing my bit on how these franchises build fandoms and followings as well as editing in Adobe Audition actually didn’t take much time at all, the actual hard parts of the project were definitely more self organisation and time management i’d say. My actual written section and how I delivered my dialogue while recording could have been improved too in retrospect as I spoke more casually and more like I was answering a question within a discussion rather than formally reading from a written script. This, while not being a large issue overall, still means that within the project the tone of my section may not be so consistent with the sections everyone else delivered. One other thing I noticed while listening to the final version is that there is a shift in recording quality as well as loudness between some of the sections or people had been a lot closer to the mic than others while recording too. I did what I could to generally balance out these changes but with my limited experience with Audition it’s definitely still noticeable. In future I think with an audio or filming project such as this, it’d be beneficial to the final product to organize for all members of the group to record together at the same time. By this I mean we could all make sure we record with the same settings on the mic for example or we could more easily ensure everyone stands the same distance from the mic. Overall however I think we all worked effectively as a group and while we weren’t the most time effective or organised we could be, we all still made sure we got the job done!