Going into a Bachelor of Communications (Media) I didn’t know whether or not I would enjoy it or whether it was the right degree for me. Yet through this last semester, I can safely say that I believe I made the right choice in choosing this degree, I’ve made great friends and learnt about things I’m genuinely interested in.
I’m the type of learner where things need to be visual, interesting and engaging in order for me to be truly immersed in what I am learning. I never quite pieced the puzzle together before the degree started but obviously, this degree has a lot of visual and audio based learning techniques. I’m in the perfect course for such learning, in hindsight, I can see that this is the most engaged and most interested I’ve been in any work I’ve done in my school career.
I’ve learnt many different things in Media 1. I’ve learned about the how media affects the world we live in, how it is around us at all times. Learning from the very beginning how impactful media can be in our day to day lives showed me how important this degree can be in making a difference, and was really a stepping stone for how I came to really connect with the world of media. I learnt about audio and video affordances, how the different aspects of these affordances are the difference between a great piece of film or audio and a quite average one. Narrative and nonnarrative have also been extremely interesting to learn about, the ways in which a video or audio essay can have structure and meaning, yet can also have no structure but a range of affordances that can be utilised can still divulge a meaning. I’ve learnt that learning doesn’t have to be traditional, and the way I show that I’ve learnt also doesn’t have to be traditional, such as the video and audio essays. Throughout the entirety of high school, all I ever was told was that a great essay determines whether you are smart or not. This course has shone a light on how essays can be insightful, intelligent and come from a place of learning, yet still be engaging and fun to do. I’ve learnt that collaboration is an extremely hard task to do, but it is an essential one if you are aiming to become a media practitioner, which I am. Collaboration is the backbone of any god piece of media, whether it be the director and the actor or the editor and the cinematographer, collaboration can take a piece of art to the next level, and if not done well can crash and burn your project. I’ve also learnt that if you do not keep on time with your blog posts, you will eventually burn out, which brings me to my next point; What I’ve found most challenging about the course…
KEEPING UP TO DATE WITH THE BLOG POSTS. It is my downfall, my nemesis, my Achilles foot. Not the blog posts, just my inability to keep up with them. I found what troubled me most was getting too comfortable; I’d submit assignments on time and write a number of blog posts that were deemed satisfactory, if not more than satisfactory, for the week. Then I would say to myself, ‘I have time, I deserve it’. Apparently I just had a crazy amount of time to finish these blog posts, but I’m very sure this ‘crazy’ amount of time I was so sure I had was really just a figure of my imagination. To the tutor and Samuel Harris who is reading this, do not think I am not disappointed at how I went about my recent blog posts, cause I most definitely am. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing blog posts, I find it to be slightly meditative at times. I can see now that it’s about time management, telling yourself to just do it now rather than later because your future self will thank you for it. When I was on time with blog posts and assignments, I felt great. That may be a slightly dorky thing to say, yet I can say it with pride, doing well is a nice feeling because you know you’ve earned it. Apart from my inadequacy with keeping up with blog posts, I found that I kept up to speed with everything, in a trepidatious and anxious sort of way, but I’m a first year so there really is no other way to keep up to speed.
Something I learned about my own creative practise, is that I need to give myself more credit than I do now. At the beginning of this course I wanted to transfer because I looked at Adobe Premier and I negatively thought ‘Oh good God, all of these buttons and lines and boxes, I will never be able to use this’ which is never a good way to start anything. But I remember a defining moment around week 5 or 6, where we were given a very short audio essay task, and had to edit it and sent it in by the end of the week. I got onto Adobe Audition and started to edit. Being only audio editing, it took away the scary visual aspect, allowing me to mainly focus on the audio, which made everything a lot easier for me, I was less daunted and afraid. I edited that piece together in 3 hours, and by the end of it had a piece of work I was so proud of, and genuinely couldn’t believe I had done. That was the moment for me when I thought ‘maybe I can do this’ and ever since then, with that small bit of belief, I feel like my skills with Adobe have improved a whole lot and definitely prepared me for PB4.
The first semester of University is daunting, you’re thrown into something you don’t know the true foundations of and are expected to keep up. I remember thinking at the beginning of the course ‘just don’t think, do‘ and in both my moments of doubt and success, it has helped me tremendously.
