At the start of the course, I really didn’t know how to use any of the editing programs such as Audition and Premiere, and the recorders and cameras and I felt a bit out of my depth. It was also difficult at the beginning as my laptop couldn’t handle all of the new software being downloaded, making it very difficult for me to edit anything. http://www.mediafactory.org.au/stella-cooper/2016/04/05/recording-task/

But slowly and surely things just clicked and I once I learnt a new skill I would remember it for the next time such as learning how to put cut-aways in on top of other video in Premiere and razor and moving different clips in Audition.

I also learnt how to record sound on a H2N Zoom and transfer that data onto a computer to download and edit in Audition. Within the editing process I learnt how to create effects on the sound and use this to develop more meaning and texture in a piece. http://www.mediafactory.org.au/stella-cooper/2016/04/20/recording-assignment/

This was really helpful for my final assignment as we had to do a lot of recording, editing and transferring data.

Through the completion of the small video recording assignment in groups, I learnt how to compose an “interview” style video, ask open ending questions when interviewing, finding the right location to shoot, and manually adjusting the camera to suit the surroundings. http://www.mediafactory.org.au/stella-cooper/2016/04/20/video-recording-…ent-life-at-rmit/

These basic skills in regards to video and audio recording, editing and uploading were essential to the way I approached PB3 and PB4 as I was now on my own to combine all of my skills in a short video or audio project.

On the theory side of things, I learnt a lot about how media has changed over the years as well as the structural elements of sound, interviews and visual and audio essays. http://www.mediafactory.org.au/stella-cooper/2016/03/18/old-vs-new/

Many of the readings I found interesting as they related to the course and reading them I thought that was it was really cool that authors had picked up on such new concepts surrounding media.

From the course, I found out how I learn as a student. One of my goals for the semester was to try and get to every single lectorial and workshop possible as I believe that I work best when I am there in class working with a tutor and my peers. I find this environment really motivating as I am surrounded by people who are all heading in the same direction and working on similar things.  I also found out that I work well in study areas such as RMIT Connect or study rooms in specific buildings as I feel I can focus a lot more without being distracted by things I normally would at home.

Within the course, I found it most challenging to stay on top of my blogs, as on top of the other work due, they were always at the back of my mind. I felt like even after I had finished a big project/assignment there was still more to do. I pushed myself to pump out my blogs but in future would like to do more and of better quality, I just found it hard to find the time. I also found it challenging at the beginning of the course with my faulty laptop as I was falling behind with a lot of assessments due. It started me off on a bad foot and it was only after I bought a new laptop, I could really get into the course. I felt like my old laptop was holding me back in the class because it just wouldn’t let me do things I needed to do. http://www.mediafactory.org.au/stella-cooper/2016/04/15/technical-issues/

What I discovered about my own creative practice was that I really enjoy sharing ideas with people and making things happen instead of just waiting around http://www.mediafactory.org.au/stella-cooper/2016/05/08/groupwork-update/. I pushed myself to learn how to use Audition and Premiere by watching tutorials online and googling issues I was having as I knew those skills would be fundamental in me succeeding in the course in the future. After receiving each brief, I approached each one in a different way from the last. The first project I was very scattered with how I managed to pull things together as I didn’t really know what I was doing. But by project brief 4, I systematically approached the task, laying out goals with my group and guidelines for how we should tackle it. I felt more professional to the end of the semester, as I was collaborating as a group and following procedures that I may follow in the future.

Overall I have really enjoyed my first semester in this course and am nervous but excited about what is to come in the next few semesters as well as thinking about work experience.

Overall I am quite happy with the way our audio and visual essays have turned out. The more successful parts of our submission I believe were the quality of the sound in our audio essay as we worked really hard to ensure that the gains were perfect. Something that I thought could have been done better with the audio essay was the use of external voices, but as we were pressed for time, we could not find anyone available to do it. I thought the visual representation of drawing on the white board worked well with the dialogue in the video essay, so it wasn’t a dry video. Something I think we could have done was add in some background music so it flowed more but perhaps this did not fit in with our “lecture” style video.

 

In my group, I brought up the idea for a radio show based essay as I thought it would be a good platform to discuss various ideas and concepts as well as collaborating with others through the use of callers and “tweets”.  This links in with institutions and how different institutions withhold their own structures and allowances. The institution of radio allowed us to speak casually about our topic but also add texture through callers and tweets. As it was a radio show, we had to keep within the lines of a typical radio show (meaning we couldn’t just reference ideas out of the blue, there needed to be some prior prompt to bring up the information). We also added an intro song and end to the show to make it more realistic as a radio show as well as playing music at the beginning.

 

I learnt that there are surprisingly a lot of affordances with audio production. At the beginning of the task, I thought that the audio essay would be really hard to do without just reading a slab of information and recording it. However, I realised that there was a lot more we could play around with in our audio essay such as using certain effects on our voices, blending and fading different recordings and music and adding sound effects and sound clips. With the video element of the assignment, I learnt how even with simple visual cues you can represent much more meaning when overlayed with dialogue and you can rely on clips and extracts a lot more to explain and represent certain information and views.

 

The collaborative part of this assignment was very worthwhile as I learnt a lot about myself in group situations as well as techniques to use in the future in order to successfully complete group work. I learnt that in a group I am someone who likes to take the reins and get things done, but I also learnt that I am good at including everyone’s decisions and opinions in the group. In my group, we caught up every Monday to discuss our ideas and plans for the assignment as well as actually creating our projects later on, but I think we did the most work when we were together and knuckled down as we could plan and bounce ideas off each other. The times where we assigned things to do individually, most of the time meant that those things didn’t happen as we forgot about them when we got home. The facebook group chat that we created was really successful in communicating about where we were at with things as well as sending pictures and letting each other know when and where the next meeting was. The google drive was also really effective in uploading all of our rough cuts, links to good websites, downloaded clips from the internet, bibliographies, pictures and notes that we had taken. It was also interesting to see how all the clips came together in the end from a mess of a folder to our final version folder.

 

Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment as I was able to use the skills that I had learnt during the semester on Premiere and Audition to the best of my abilities. It was also satisfying to be able to help my group members with problems I had learnt to solve on those programs. It was really interesting to be able to focus on such a specific topic and draw out as much information as possible in our research and find a way to put it into an audio and visual essay. I think that this idea of recreating the common hand written essay is really exciting as it means big changes in the way many students may be allowed to show and represent certain information, aside from with pen and paper. With our society so entrenched in technology, pen and paper is slowly becoming a thing of the past and I think we need to be more accepting of this change.

Our group decided last week that we are going to base our video essay off a lecture style video, with Grace being the lecturer. We are going to have cut aways of examples of different reality tv shows and soapies and contrast and evaluate their effects. It is getting harder and harder to blog now as I have so much work to do! Today, Grace and I are finishing our script for the video and tomorrow we have planned to film it.

After a few mix ups with booking the editing suites, we managed to get into one (as they were almost all taken) and complete the audio part of our essays. After we exported the clip onto our Google Drive, we began brainstorming and recording our video essay which decided to do in a lecture format. We thought this style would be great to explore ideas and texts in depth with reference to sources. We used the white board to brainstorm some ideas of what we wanted to focus on.  Excuse the crappy writing…

Today’s lectorial was the last one for this semester, which is exciting but also kind of scary that we won’t have this style of lecture in the future, but instead studios. I am keen to see what the studios are because I think it will be interesting to focus on a specific area for a semester rather than the broader topic of just ‘Media’. After looking at the powerpoint of what we have done in the past 12 weeks, I felt a sense of achievement as I can now step back and look at all of the work that I have created this semester and I can only look forward to the work I am going to produce in the next few years.

Last week I was unable to make the workshop, but my group discussed via Facebook message that we needed more content in our audio essay. We struggled to try and come up with a way to incorporate more substantial ideas into our ‘radio show’ but we are going to brain storm ideas this afternoon after our lecture in the editing suites. We are also planning our video essay and how we are going to capture the ideas and feel we would like.

In the reading by José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, they highlight the impact social media has had on public service broadcasting, looking at the social and public levels. One thing they focus on is how an institution such as public television maintains its values and integrity whilst building a larger audience through social media. I think this is really interesting as lately I have noticed that many news channels have opted to sharing their news stories online, normally with a link to an article or a clip from the news. This technique allows the public who are perhaps not near a TV to receive the same news at the same time it is aired, if not before. This broadens the audience that these news channels can target as it is no longer the people at home on their couches, but train goers, office workers and uni students who can have access to these news stories. However I believe that some of the news’ values have lowered due to this sharing technique as many times, the news channels compete with other news channels to get their story out first. There have been numerous occasions were I have read an article with incorrect information that was later changed or ‘fixed’ to the correct information. Some news channels have lost the value of correct information for the public in an attempt to out do their competitors with speed of their communication.

The reading by Jay Rosen, said that “The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another”. When I think about this idea, I agree to it to an extent. Back in the day, people used to huddle around one radio, tuning into the latest news update or new song, but now we are the people who can share news from our laptops and create music ourselves to be heard by others with the click of a button. However, I believe that not as many people are listening to these new media creators as they were many years ago. This is because everyone nowadays has the power to create a piece of media and share it online. For something to become ‘viral’, it needs to have an enhanced amount of viewers or likes and be somewhat different to anything else out there on the web. I think some of the excitement has been lost in regards to new media due to the huge amount there is online at the moment. The amount of times I have scrolled past videos on Facebook and Instagram purely because I’ve seen something like it. 

Yesterday after our lectorial, Jenny, Grace and I went and recorded and edited some of our audio essay in the editing booths in Building 9. We used the H2 Zoom with a large foam wind shield on the top to record our audio. We then transferred the footage to the computer and began editing on Audition. However after beginning the editing process and after playing back some of our footage, we realised we only had the left hand side gain on the microphone switched on, so we deleted all of our recordings and started from the start with the surround gain on (this was frustrating but a lesson for next time to always check the mic before recording). We then edited the good footage and began to add in sound effects/intros/music. We struggled with the saving process as we couldn’t figure out how to save the session to our hard drive, but we managed to find the setting in Audition and upload it to our Google Drive.

In last weeks workshop, Jenny, Grace and I managed to form part of an AV script for our audio essay. Our format is based on that of a radio show with each caller represented a new point of view or depth on the topic. Today we are going to try and record our script using the HD Zooms after the lectorial.