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.