Final Week

I believe that overall, this whole semester has been such a valuable experience, especially just the contrasting work environment and different types of people I meet compared to the sheltered life of high school. I really had to take an extra step into my own independent studies, and my personal initiation and responsibilities have definitely been challenged and exercised. More specifically, the structure behind readings and the blog posts is a style of learning that I haven’t really done before. Mostly in high school, it would be read a passage in a textbook and then answer a couple questions. It was a little daunting at first to have so much readings and these weekly blogposts, but ultimately, much like how high school was sheltered, only learning from a single textbook was trapping me inside a bubble. With these readings from multiple sources and different people who have experienced different things, it was definitely such a valuable experience to have all these various insights of the world of media through other people’s lenses. Thus, thinking of ways to apply all these diverse ideas of the media to my own creative content definitely challenged, but in the end, sculpted my works with more insight and depth because of these different perspectives and knowledge of the media world.

The most challenging part of this course was definitely the final assignment, Project Brief 4. Audio editing was definitely my weakest skill when coming into the course as I have had little to no experience of it, thus, I really had to push myself to learn the ways around the Zoom mics and Adobe Audition. Fortunately, thanks to the workshop activities, by just fiddling and experimenting around with Audition, I was able to quickly figure out the basics that has helped me with making the assignment’s audio piece. Another component that was challenging from this course, especially from PB4 was the collaboration component, hence the slight dip in my “Ways of Working” line on the graph. My group and I generally worked together very well, however, as we all had our own individual lives, finding ways to bring ourselves together and support each other’s weaknesses with each other’s strengths turned out quite messy. As much as I wanted to keep our workload equal, I felt that sometimes I needed to push another member for work, but I didn’t want to become authoritative and bossy. In the end, I tried to do my best on what I was capable of doing within the group, and I really do hope that the other members feel the same way that they did the best they could’ve done as well. With the limited time and hurdles in life that have gotten in our way, I believe that we did what we could do for this final assignment.

Overall, I am so glad that I made the decision to attend RMIT and study this very course. As someone who is more hands on with my work, this course definitely allowed me to exercise this passion of mine and really test my creative thinking in order to create my works for the projects. As the first couple of projects were ‘documentary’ style, I definitely felt my creativity tested, because I wanted to really have a unique individual style of work whilst maintaining the truth of the portraits. Definitely for PB3 where we had to create a portrait of somebody else, I begged for my tutor to allow me to take on a fictional storyline whilst maintaining a elements and conventions of a documentary. This idea was unfortunately revoked, but I was still very happy and proud of what I was able to create with my interview of my Aunt May. Having only created fictional short films before, I was able to exercise a different type of creative mind for this portrait short film, such as taking our conversations between Aunt May and I and then reflecting the same raw emotions of her stories into my film. I didn’t think that I would’ve enjoyed doing a documentary styled short film, but after the many positive feedback for my short film, I will most definitely endeavour to create similar works where I can creatively adapt people’s lives onto screen.