The feature, it’s an important part of this studio. The problem I faced with tackling the feature is that we could make it about anything we wanted, the options were endless, where does one begin?
When our group got together to discuss what the feature should be we were throwing around many ridiculous ideas, one of them coming from Elle who said “lets make it about rival meme pages on Facebook”. We all had a laugh about it and moved on, threw other options into the mix but none of them quite felt as exciting as the meme idea. So we went with it.

Over a couple of weeks we would expand the idea. We realised we couldn’t do an entire 10 minute piece of just rival meme pages because it would be boring, so our piece grew into covering the history of memes and then even further into how memes have changed social and political factors of every day life.

With our contention sorted (“How have memes changed the way we learn about social and political news”) we started to plan interviews and content. I wrote up an introduction and a piece on the history of memes. I also interviewed a published journalist, Finn Devlin, on how memes have changed the way we receive news. Amy also interviewed a journalist friend on how the way we make news has changed and Elle interviewed a friend studying at Melbourne University studying Social Media and another friend who runs a meme page (Footscray Road Memes).

By having these four different perspectives, we believed that we would have different opinions to play around with. We had a professional opinion, a comedic one, an enthusiastic one and a slightly disdainful one which helped keep the piece refreshing.

Our planned structure went like this:
INTRO
HISTORY
MY INTERVIEW
AMY INTERVIEW
ELLE’S INTERVIEWS
CONCLUSION

It didnt end up like this in the editing room, in fact it became something different than what we had planned – as it always does in the editing suites. It became more engaging and a little bit wacky.

We took the advice we had learnt in class into careful consideration. We made sure that we didn’t have too much narration, made sure that the flow was quick and that there wasn’t too much of one person speaking at one time. We added sound affects, played around with the structure and had fun with it. We joked that we made the feature into a meme (which in my opinion was unavoidable, as talking about memes in an intellectual way is a meme in itself).

Going in with a plan is important, but sticking to it can become restrictive. If we had stuck to our original plan I believe the feature would have been tedious and boring. We threw ideas around and they ended up working. For example making the history of memes into a satirical story time, or beginning the piece with snippets of memes themselves.

The audio quality differed between the interviews which was frustrating to listen to. I interviewed my friend in the suites and therefore there was no background noise, whereas Amy’s interviewee recorded his answers on his phone and sent them to her via email, as he was overseas, so the quality wasnt as good. The overall quality turned out to be satisfactory, but editing them to sound as best as they could proved to be a slight challenge.

We spent hours in those editing suites perfecting the piece, we had lots of fun with it and we’re all really proud of it. You can listen to it here!

P.S.
Looks like we’re not the only ones studying memes! Check this out.