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Well, that’s it! I’m 1/6th of the way through my bachelor of communication (media) course at RMIT. It’s honestly been such a great experience – creating content, learning about its theories and applications, and just simply meeting new people (some that I like and some that I dislike). I’ve learnt and been through so much already, so let’s take some time to reflect on it – shall we?

When I first started the course, my knowledge about media creation was extremely limited. My process of creating videos before the course simply consisted of recording the footage, making quick cuts here and there, and then chucking it on a timeline – without giving too much thought to the art of the edit, or who was going to watch it. Nor did I ever really give devote any time to looking at my old work and reflecting on what I did wrong, and what I did right.

My second week of university is to this day – one of my most memorable. I remember the reading for that week was a comic about the closure that audiences formulate in their minds when closure isn’t provided by the illustrator/writer/director. Prior to this reading, I had never once thought about how important the space between cuts was. I simply thought of it as transitioning from one shot to the next. But after reading the comic, I applied what I had learned into my own practice. I related it to Japanese comics (called Manga) and realized that as a reader, I participated more than I actually realized when simply reading a comic. Then I applied the same theories to my own work – which includes work made both for uni and also for my own leisure. I also created a blog post regarding this same topic, which you can find here!

Another thing that simply never came to mind when creating videos was the audience. In high school, I used to create videos for YouTube for fun. I would write up a script, and gather a few of my friends and together – we’d create a video. But never, had I ever thought about the people who would end up watching it. I just didn’t think it’d be that important, since I didn’t really expect a lot of people to watch it anyway. Arguably, audience is one of the most important things a video maker must consider when creating content – regardless of whether they expect someone to watch it. Why? Simply because, the audience is responsible for creating the story along with the creator. What I learnt is that when a video maker creates a video, they create it in the vision that they imagine. However, this ‘vision’ sometimes doesn’t come across through the screen. Consequently, this can lead to a number of misinterpretations by the audience. The audience always commits closure when watching something on a screen, and as a result, they are equally responsible for creating a story, despite never being part of the production in the first place.

Audience is a broad topic, that can span across a number of mediums. One of which I am an avid consumer of, is gaming. Just like video, gaming also has an audience – and a fairly large one at that, that commits closure and creates interpretations based on the content that is provided in the medium itself. Here is one of my blog posts exporing that topic a little further.

And of the biggest things that media one has taught me, is the importance of reflection on your work. As stated before, I never really gave my old videos any thought when making them. They were purely for fun, so I never really gave too much thought on ways to improve as such. However, upon reflecting on my project briefs, I realised that reflection – not only on your work, but on your life in general, helps improve in ways that you wouldn’t have initially thought of. I saw bad habits that I made, and I saw things that I was doing well, and continued to improve on them as much as possible. There is also a visible improvement from project brief two and project brief three. Here is a blog post reflecting on the outcome of my project brief three.

Now two things that I was already familiar with before the course was the idea and important of collaboration, and also the importance of sound. Although I had already knew about them, the course has helped to improve the skills that I already had in these two fields. My collaboration was improved due to being partnered up with people I had never spoken to; whereas my past collaborations where usually with friends. My application of sound had also improved, as I learned about more ways of getting cleaner audio, and I was also introduced to new ways of recording the audio itself – more on the technical side. This last point that I made was thanks to the free rental service at RMIT, and also my volunteer work at SYN radio. A blog post about the power of sound is linked, as well as a post related to collaboration.

Overall, semester one has been one of the most productive semesters of my life. As a person who didn’t take high school too seriously, I’m extremely proud of how I have progressed – and also of all the things I have achieved.