Project Brief 4 was the last assignment of the semester. In the group was myself (Penelope), Rory Pogson and Gabby Zwaggerman. The broad topic we were given was ‘texts and narrative’ and one of the first things that popped into my mind was Harry Potter. Luckily for me Rory and Gabby were also big fans of Harry Potter, and with all of us in agreement, we set off planning to make an audio and video essay about Harry Potter.
The most successful aspect of the essays was the fact that we were all passionate about the topic choice. Researching facts, statistics and readings on Harry Potter is not exactly a chore when you think about how other people’s degrees involve them having to research 1000 page long papers on quantum physics. Another successful aspect of the essays was the editing process. We all have similar editing styles, and by the end of the day we were all happy with the finished product of the essays. One more successful aspect would be the positive attitude we had whilst working together, it didn’t feel like a chore, it was fun!
In terms of the negative aspects, there were a few of them, but nothing truly mind blowing when thought of in correlation to doing a group assignment at university. Firstly, the most obvious would be that we couldn’t get in touch with Gabby for the first two weeks, that was a little problematic. We couldn’t find her facebook, or number or anything. Thinking Rory and I would have to take on a three person project was a little daunting, but Gabby came through and was a great team member, so it all worked out for the best. Secondly, sometimes we were all a bit off schedule. Sometimes we’d have work done, sometimes we wouldn’t. Sometimes our meetings would be great in terms of getting things done, and other times not so much. We also had different responsibilities so meeting up was a bit difficult at times as our schedules would clash. Lastly, responsibilities swayed here and there throughout the process of making the essays. This isn’t a problem, it just made things a bit harder to get done.
Theories and concepts raised in lectures and tutorials were extremely helpful. I remember the week when we were introduced to audio essays, the tutorial featured audio essays which were a good notifier of how we were meant to edit our essays. It was of two men discussing something, I paid attention to the editing mostly. There were smooth transitions, their voices were engaged, with no visual cues they had to rely mainly on noise to keep people engaged. I noted all of that, whilst making our audio essay in order to keep it engaging as possible. The week we were introduced to the video essay, we say the lead singer from ‘The Nationals’ brother created a documentary about his time on tour with him. This opened my eyes to the different way in which a video essay can be unconventionally entertaining, and made me strive to think outside of the box for our video essay.
Something I learnt about the affordances of audio essays is that you cannot underestimate the power of the timbre and tone of your voice. In order to make a successful audio essay, you must make sure that your voice has an excited quality to it and make sure that you the speaker seem interested in what you are talking about or else the listener won’t be. The speaker cannot be too loud or too quiet, they must find that special place in terms of sound in order to make the words and sounds accessible to the listener, as their job is not to strain to be interested or to hear, it is to merely listen and enjoy. I realised these things whilst listening back to the rough cut of the audio essay, editing it was a bit of a trouble as we all spoke at different levels, different tones and timbres. In certain ways I didn’t feel it was a true whole yet at the end of the day I am very proud of it and I believe we made a great video essay full with great information.
What I learned about video affordances was that quality is a necessity. When recording yourself photographically and audibly it is important to make sure the quality is the best you can make it, or else it takes away from what the main focus must be, the actual information given to the audience watching the video essay. I also learnt that a video essay must have a range of affordances added to it to make it compelling to watch, such as found footage, original footage, titles and good editing that keeps the pace moving and momentum going.
Collaboration is a hard thing to do, many people know this to be true. In highschool, it’s easy because we are with the other people for a set time throughout every day, whereas university is a bit different. There is much more responsibility. Facing this responsibility head on has taught me that to have a future as a media practitioner you must be responsible, take initiative and be on time for every deadline, or else things can get out of hand. It also taught me to compromise, stay on task and to keep a firm temper at all time, or else the work can get off task and non-issues can become issues.
