I found the assignment to be one of the most interesting and engaging assessments I’ve done. I’ve written a lot of essays that haven’t been interesting at all, so doing it in an audio and video format was a lot better. I found during this assessment that I discovered a lot about my strengths and how I work in group environments. One of the things I’m best at and enjoy the most is video editing. It was the main part of the assignment that was enjoyable for me. I have had previous video editing skills with other software, so I was comfortable to take on that role. However, Premiere Pro is new to me and has been something I’ve gotten used to throughout the semester.
In terms of creativity and engaging with the media topic, we tried a few things. We wanted to approach radio from different direction in the audio essay compared to the video essay. With radio as our topic we decided to stay quite broad in the video essay and be more factual. I liked how it turned out in the end. It wasn’t as bland as I thought I would be, and I was satisfied with the result. Having it as a timeline was the simplest but most effective way for it to work. Matching the voice over and found footage worked nicely, and we found YouTube to be the best platform for us to find the video content we needed. In the video essay we were able to add more texture by using images, voice over and video, and original found footage. Having breaks from voice over to raw extracts with audio made sure the video wasn’t too bland.
Construction wise, editing and the quality of the audio was the best part of our audio essay. Being more specific and targeting radio by talking about narrative podcasts was better because it didn’t approach the topic as broadly as the video essay. I had never heard of narrative podcasts before so it was even more interesting finding it in my research. The use of intro and outro music definitely gave the essay more of a realistic representation of a podcast format, making it less formal. It was a bit difficult at first to make the audio essay informal enough to match what podcasts are like and how they feel, but be factual at the same time. Having to change our structure and script at the last minute didn’t help much with time management and trying to get everything done on time. Having tune underneath the audio gave a more relaxed tone and added more texture to the audio rather than just plain talking. By constructing it and writing the script like a podcast we wanted to add more weight to the content we had researched.
When looking at independent research surrounding our media topic, I didn’t do as much resourcing as I should have. I did do my part in regards to the annotated bibliography, however I didn’t do as much heavy research. I could have gone a lot deeper and played more of a role in that area, but the assignment of roles over the whole assessment evened out by playing to everyone’s strengths.
The majority of my other group work I’ve done in the past have been presentations or some other format. However, this was the first time I’d taken part in collaborative work in which all the members had to work hard to make everyone’s creative ideas cohesive. The importance of roles and assigning tasks was essential in getting everything done to the standard we wanted and on time, you rely on each other a lot more. We would all work independently on certain tasks, but we worked better when together, bouncing ideas off each other and making sure everyone is on the same page. The most helpful resources we had access to were the edit suites in Building 9 and Google Drive. The editing suites were perfect to record our audio, edit, and work in a quite space with less distractions and noise. We met at least twice a week for three hour sessions and it was the most beneficial parts of the process throughout the entire duration of the assessment. I hadn’t used Google Drive before starting this semester, and it was a life saver and the best way to see all our work, save everything, and transfer content from one another.
Looking back on Project Brief 4, the collaborative work made the experience a lot more interesting. One of our goals for the assessment was to be able to look back on our work and be proud of the result. Overall I’m satisfied with what we came up with. There is always room for improvement but I think we achieved at least one of our goals. Trying to balance creativity and experimentation with research was difficult but that’s something to work on more in future assignments.