Finally, I finished all the assessments of this first semester and here are some learnings and achievements.

First of all, the most significant achievement is in the technical term. We mainly learned two Adobe applications which are Premiere and Audition to complete the video and audio, which can consist a completed media work. I’ve never used these two before, so I always spent lots of time on getting an understanding of the usage and learning more during editing. For me, the easiest way was to go to the official Adobe website. I watched lots of tutorial videos there to learn the basic usages, such as import files, adjust length, add transition effects, and etc. Moreover, sometimes I liked to discover the toolbar by myself because I find Adobe’s applications are just similar to use. I found a useful tool that I can stretch or short the length of video by changing its speed. Lots of bloggers use this tool to make their videos more straight to the point which can save audiences’ time. The thing I was confused was how to efficiently adjust the place of each clip. When I drag one clip a little bit forward, I tried to find the way to adjust the whole following clips in once. Hope I can learn this skill later.

Then, the learning experience in group is very meaningful.

The group work of making this audio is overall happy. We tried our best to do the key things together, and reasonably distributed works to each of us. We communicated a lot to make sure everyone understood what we were going to do, and because of this, we had this amazing theme about greyhound racing. I came up with the idea of focusing on homeless animals, and then Liam did the brainstorm to pick up the particular ‘racing’ theme. Cindy and me took the most responsibility of the final editing. The work became much easier when we discuss the effects and the time that a clip came in. Opinions from two people definitely made the audio work better, and I think that is the meaning of collaboration.

The skill I improved most is the researching and reading. This skill is really really useful for all three courses in this year. It is really hard to read huge amount of resource when English is my second language, but I insisted reading most of them and finally did it. During reading this material, I found it still interesting to view others opinions which help me to discover more details that I didn’t notice. Like the annotated bibliography exercise I did for greyhound racing, I carefully read these four resources and become an ‘expert’ of racing and adoption. Comparing to just listen to the lecture, reading by myself can make me understand more and remember things deeper in my brain.

At last!!!! The ‘hat’ feedback system is the thing goes through the whole media workshop this semester. The work won’t change a lot if I only listen by myself again and again. I need others advise. These feedbacks, especially the negative sides pushed me to adjust and improve my work. The thing I mentioned a lot is my interview shooting. My friend who learned media before and I both think the first shooting is not good enough. She suggested me to place the camera a little bit lower than the eye level of the interviewee, and that can make the interviewee looked smarter and more confident. It really worked for my second shooting. The hat system is the combination of reviewing and collaborative working. I also learned how to give feedbacks to others, and when I gave feedback, I also thought about my own’s work.

In all, I enjoyed the media study so much in this semester. I did three cool works and I will show them to my family after going back to China for holiday. Thanks to Liam and other teacher that you really help me a lot. That’s it, my last blog of this semester!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!