1. In what ways do you hope your screenings/exhibited/screened work (whether individual or group produced) engaged its audience and communicated a key concern of the studio?

The primary impact goal we were aiming for was to increase the awareness of queer-dedicated spaces in Melbourne and to motivate our audience to participate and support these spaces. This obviously meant hopefully increasing the foot traffic of our main subject of the video, Flippy’s Queer Bar, but increased traffic for queer spaces in general would be our larger goal. As our studio is focused on how documentary storytelling and distribution can lead to social impact, I hope that our film communicated the ways in which documentary could effectively do this to our audience through the way we presented and framed the locale we were shooting at, as well as the way we structured the editing of our interview with our subject.

2. Imagine you are going to keep working on that media piece (e.g. to screen it somewhere else like a festival, or develop it into a different kind of work, and so on) – what would be the core things you would want to improve and extend and why?

As our current project is merely a proof of concept, we are hoping to continue our media piece by making it a ~40 minute documentary. While trying to find different funding for the project, we realized that most organizations wanted longer, full length documentaries rather than short ones, so for practicality we might have to adapt to that. With this funding, we may be able to pay fro screenings of our film when it has reached completion.

This isn’t too much of a worry, as we plan to interview more subjects from different parts of Melbourne’s queer nightlife scene. This will give us much more content to work with, diversify the presentation and look of the documentary, as well as give a larger variety in the voices we grant to the queer scene in Melbourne. Our hopes are that this will give a more accurate, truthful and more interesting overview of queer nightlife over fixating on a specific locale, with the hopes of drawing a variety of people into these scenes for their participation and support.

On the topic of teamwork, while I believe our group does work pretty well together, I believe we have areas we could improve on, namely communicating expectations before meetings. While our only conflict was a mostly a result of a tight schedule, it could have been remedied if we had communicated a bit better.

On a personal front, I would like to focus on learning skills that I didn’t originally possess when I first got into the project. I would like to become more familiar with editing software and the smaller things that it is capable of. Mainly, I would like to focus on color grading and sound design. I found that my group mates had to pick up these roles as I was unfamiliar with them, and I believe our workflow could have been more efficient if I was able to do both in my own time.

3. From your studio, reflect on an aspect of two other students/group’s media work on the website in terms of specific insights they produced about a key idea addressed by the studio?

‘Leftovers to Landfill’ focused its message on food waste and what the average consumer could do about it. One of the ways in which it incites social change is pretty simple, the documentary directly spells out the ways in which the average consumer can combat food waste – through reuse of materials and composting. From a narrative standpoint, the use of the participatory mode emphasizing the interviewer as someone as equally uneducated on the matter eases the audience into the topic, as they may not feel like they are alone in this journey of learning.

‘Rewilding’ focused its message on the environmental impact non-biodegradable trash has on the ocean. I appreciated the stark contrast of the intro between the serene and beautiful scenery of the ocean into much more combative scenes of the ocean filled with trash, as well as sound bytes of the rise of pollution in the ocean. I believe it does a good job at inciting a sense of urgency within the audience, and to remind them what is at risk of being lost if we don’t do something about it. I also like the b-roll included of efforts to clean up the ocean. It highlights that while things may seem dire, we still have the power to combat it in some ways.

4. For the other studio website you engaged with,  describe a key idea that you think the finished media/studio work communicated with reference to a specific example (i.e. a particular individual/group work)

The studio ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ focuses on the use and capabilities of generative AI in media. One of the works from the studio “re_generate”, is created using archives of the creators and the internet in an attempt to capture elements of memory. I appreciate this approach, as generative AI often creates media that is an amalgamation of different media relating to the prompts given to it. While this means none of the works are technically ‘original’, ‘re_generate’ leans into this trait of generative AI to create a work that gives the audience a feeling of memory and nostalgia, as it combines the common experience4s shared by many and presents it as a single work. I believe this work has successfully given me more insight to how generative AI could be used in media, communicating the key concern of the studio.