Here we are at the end of the beginning. Semester one has come and gone. Get your cliche hat on. That’s a wrap, folks. Cut.

It feels only necessary now after all is said and done to come back to my first post, ‘I’m not a blogger’. It took me a week to build up the confidence to ever begin writing, a post that everyone who already was and could possibly be a friend could see. My writing style seems consistent with where I’m at now (at least three bracketed side notes in every post, too much italicised text). I still see myself at the base of the ‘ten-thousand-step tall staircase’ but I like to think that I’ve since grown, or at least flourished a little in the direction I want to go. Even now, week #1 seems stuck between being too close and too far. In my mind it feels like I’m kinda trapped in an odd duration of time, a weird transition period between here and there. Sure, I’ve learned how to animate some text in After Effects but what else have I really learned? I can only really notice this when I return home on the weekend, but I feel like my way of thinking has changed. A new perspective on everything. Maybe that’s because of the texts we’ve explored in Media One, and maybe that’s because I’ve had to buy myself groceries for the past ~13 weeks — and maybe it’s both. Thanks, Melbourne.

Since beginning this course I’ve found a new ease to writing, a new freedom which has opened up no doubt because of the constant need to blog (need in the sense that I wanna pass) that has plagued the weeks of every student in the course. When I decided (subconsciously) that I was going to write a million billion words for every post and not worry so much about the little ones (though towards the later section of my blog they’re definitely there) I fell into a rhythm. I felt confident that what I was writing was at least of some standard, though in retrospect they probably look like a series of half-baked ideas and illegible rants. And there are more than a few posts to prove it: ‘Week #2 Lectorial & Experimental Film: Editing‘ being the first, the one that more or less started it all. It felt good to be able to reflect something that I’m passionate about in the weekly readings/class. Other highlights include: ‘Week #3 Reading – Remaking Media And The ‘Now’‘ (where I recount my time in high-school media), ‘Week #5 Reading: Everything Is A Text‘ (where I learned that embedding things makes your posts look cooler and stand out) and ‘The Zoom: When And Why? Part One‘ (in which I make the case for the zoom and, in turn, Robert Altman). I hope throughout my course my writing continues to grow and my vocabulary expand.

The most challenging aspect of it all is, as always, finding the time and energy to actually do everything. Let’s be honest: when you’re overwhelmed with assignments you just don’t wanna do assignments. You want to take a break, or three breaks, and find every little excuse not to set yourself on task. Now that I live in a box in the middle of the city, my temporal organisation has very much improved (there’s not much else to do). Group work was another aspect I dreaded but after overcoming the initial stages of anxiety I realised that my peers are people too and that collaboration (while sometimes strenuous) can lead to better things, a collective source of inspiration.

Although group work is beneficial in a hundred different ways I find myself working better by myself. Even when my roommate leaves for a few hours it opens up this newfound expressiveness in my writing as if I’m not ashamed of what I write when no one’s watching. In this context less pressure = better outcome; but not in everything. Impending due dates do spar me on when the going gets rough (see PB4).

I definitely put the most effort into maintaining my weekly initiative posts. Taking the form of a diary recounting the film’s I’d watched throughout the week, I forced myself to write at least a few lines about each film. While nothing of particular worth really came out of them (save my best words for Letterboxd) they each had their own glimpses of something special (I don’t really have a favourite, they’re all so varied in quality but if my life depended on it I was offer up this one). Some weeks I was inundated with the task of providing coherent writings on a vast number of films (films which I felt the need to say something about). Overall, I guess this shows my commitment when put to the task of doing something I’m passionate about.

PB3 was something of an eye-opener for me. It allowed me to actually take control of the entire ‘making’ process and create something I was proud of. As I progressed through the semester, my confidence in my own thoughts and ideas strengthened (as can be seen by later posts ‘Media Misrepresentation And Manipulation‘, where I actually explicitly offered some of my views, and ‘Technological Determinism, Digital Amnesia And The Failing Hard Drive In Our Heads‘, where I wrote up something I was even a little proud of). Media One has been an important chapter in my book and I hope that the following semesters amplify this delight.

You can take your cliche hat off now.