Our project brief 4 has finally come to the end. It was truly a great experience for me to work with Stella and Grace. As being an international student, I was not doing as well as others, however, I got my best teammates who really gave me lots of help. A month ago, we did not even know each other’s name and we were unsure what we were going to do for our final project. But now, we are working very well and we do our best for the project.
We chose our topic Text & Narrative in reality TV. As I did not watch much reality TV formerly, I had to do a lot of research and watch some of the reality TV shows before I started. We had divided our work into three main components, I was in charged of researching in audience, Stella in structure, and Grace in production. We then started to combine and summarise each other’s points and as well giving opinions to each other to create a better job. Next, we planned to divide the research into two essay.
Audio: I was really surprised about the result of our audio essay. At first, I thought the audio essay would just be people talking for 4-5 minutes which was boring. However, it was totally not. We created our audio essay as a radio show “Triple B”. After we decided the topic for the audio section, we had countless ideas came in mind. We organised and summarised each other’s idea, we then wrote out the script for the radio show. It was really fun that we were actually recording like a radio show. The phone call effect and sound effects make the essay be more interesting. Overall, I think we really did a great job!
Video: We decided to plan our video essay as a lecture. We had Grace act as a lecturer and discussed Text & Narrative in Reality TV. We added in the real footages in Reality TV programs to support our points. As well, we using white board to draw the points which make the video essay be more interesting. However, the result of our video essay was not as successful as the audio one. Due to some technical problems, we did not have much time to finish up our project brief. We were a bit rush and stressful at the last moment. Rather than produce a really great job, we decided to just try our best to get it done. Although it may not sound as good as the audio essay, we did spend lots of time on research and planning and the result isn’t that bad as I am satisfied with it.
Personally, I think the most successful aspect of the project was the collaboration among our team. Within our team, each teammate act in different role and collaborate efficiently. The most problematic aspects would be the technical issues. When we were doing our video essay, we met lots of technical issues which made us lose of the direction. Within three of us, no one is doing really well on the editing software whilst we only knew the basic skills. Every time when we pressed a wrong button, we need to re-do again and again. Unfortunately, the biggest problem occurred in the last two days where we did not keep the original files of recording, so when we came to the editing suite in the next day, the recording was gone. We were really upset and we could only choose to re-start everything again.
Overall, I was very grateful that I could work with Stella and Grace such hardworking teammates. I had learned a lot from them where they showed me what is a “group”. In a group, you need to have a positive attitude and you have to listen to others. Sometimes we may have different opinions, and to solve the problem, communication is the key. For our group, we did everything together, we did not choose to bring work home to work individually. We met up two to three times per week, and stayed together at editing suite in building 9 for couples of hours. Facebook messenger is the major platform for us to communicate with each other where we would keep in touch and notify each one if there are any changes. Google Drive would definitely be a useful platform where we contribute all our work on the drive. Every time when we got out new resources, we would upload to Google Drive and share with the team members.
I think this learning experience would be a great advantage as a future media practitioner. As Rachel said, you will never know who are you going to work with in the future. There are new faces with new personalities that we are going to meet, you cannot choose who you want to work with all the times, you cannot follow everything that you want. Therefore, communication plays a significant role in collaboration. As a group, you need to understand your role and responsibilities and just do your job!