The Communication
During this 4 weeks of collaboration, one of the biggest lessons that I have learnt, would be the importance of having communication. As I am a non-native speaker in English, if there’s a pretty creative idea that flashed through my head, sometimes I would rather decide not to say it in front of others, or teammates in this situation, for instance, at the idea development process, after they had expressed all of their thoughts, and asking for my opinions, I would say that I am in a digesting and organising process, and the truth is, there’re some plans in my mind, but I would bite it back unless what they have suggested are extremely weird.
However, some crisis had happened due to my attitude of words biting back. After reviewing all of the member’s rough cut, we were supposed to be decided who’s going to be the final editor, the effect editor and researcher. I had been volunteered as being the effects editor at first, however, as I wasn’t clearly convey to it members, and hadn’t double-checked the responsibilities delivering, we both just realised that we haven’t decided that who’s going to be that final editor at all while we were having the discussion about the last meeting, as they thought I am going to be final editor and effect editor at the same time. This miscommunication eventually due to one of our members has to compose a cut within 2 days, as well as we had just exported the final cut with effects a few minutes before the deadline.
Researching
I have to admit that, for me, the researching process was quite challenging, that within searching for and reading on reports/articles/essays that relevant to our topic, we also have to determine that how relevant it was, to rank their priorities to be analysis as there are word limits for the annotated bibliography. For example, I had found a certain reports from Nielson on the music and media consumption statistics of the American, but the question is, could it show the ‘evolution’ of these consumptions, or only indicting some information on a specific year that couldn’t help on our research topic that much when comparing with the rest resources that I had found.
The idea development process
The Sound Effects Editing
As our topic is related to the evolution of media consumption, what I want to achieve by those effects and sounds would be applying the atmosphere of different media platforms (i.e. Radio, podcast, television and computer) into our plain speeches by using a function called Essential Sound, that intended to show our audiences the evolution of media, and how dazzled the world that surrounding by different media we are living in. Besides, the sound effects of different kinds of media could be used as the transitions between clips as well, to make this sound piece look much smoother as we had combined various kinds of audio form into our work.
Regrettably, another minor issued had occurred due to the insufficiency of our communication, that I forget to fully explain the above to my teammates, which leaded to little dispute that both of us have to waste our time on presenting what’s in our mind to each others, figuring out a concept that we both agreed, and to modify the whole session while I was about to finish all of effects inserting process.
Gift or Curse: Has the evolution of media consumption damaged the attention span of music listeners?
The Application
In terms of applying all we had learned in Media 1 through this semester, our idea, of composing various of audio forms into one single piece, was coming from the topic of sound, that as being a media practitioner, we have to do our best at grabbing our viewer’s interest and to avoid our work of being just a simple conversational one and script-reading one that we can’t even entertain our own selves by it. Likewise, by realizing that our own attention span had declined to 8 seconds from different researches/in class, I, as a sound effect editor, have to pay all of my attention to make this audio piece be more attractive and eye-catching by using the above methods that I had mentioned, and by shortening all of the ‘scenes’ to less than 20 seconds.
For further improvement, since this collaborative process had made me recognized that how significant an accomplished communication could be, which sometimes keeping thought in mind would lead to lower our opportunities of expressing the creativity that we wished to, I have to be more expressive and communicative as avoiding the misunderstanding and dispute to be happened within a team.