Over the course of this semester, my ideas of what I was getting out of this degree and what I wanted to get out of it were constantly moving on a sliding scale from not much to lots, and nowhere to many things.

A few years ago I wanted to get into radio production and broadcasting. I had this huge plan that I was going to be the female voice in a world of Hip Hop (haha). I wanted to know the most, and be the best, while being a girl at the same time. Time has passed and things have changed and although I don’t know that that is exactly what I want to do forever, radio is still there, somewhere, on my ever-growing and evolving to do list. I guess that’s why I applied for this course. It took me a few weeks to really get back into the swing of things, and although I was feeling a little unmotivated, I stuck to it. Midway through the semester I scared myself when a lack of time management paired with some unavoidable real-life circumstances left me handing up subpar work. At the beginning of the semester I had the attitude that I didn’t want to make movies, purely because I didn’t know how to. I turned that negative attitude into motivation to learn, and I really noticed a change in the amount of time I put into uni, my confidence in what I was learning and better results on the work I was creating.

One of the first classes in this course that has stuck with me as truly inspiring and one that got me thinking was the Lectorial in week 2, in which we did an activity on noticing. I found that John Cage’s 4’33” really asked some questions that we hadn’t been asked yet, ones that recurred throughout the semester. Questions like, what is media? Who decides what defines media? What is the difference between art and nothing? Or art and a world of options?

The second blog post I want to include here comes from week 2 also, it was my connection entry in which I recalled some projects by Adelaide-based street artist Peter Drew. His work has been a constant in the background of my life and I actually noticed some of his ‘pixel face’ stickers when getting my daily caffeine over the weekend. Drew’s art, especially those focussed on reminding people that they are in the real world, and just how much the online world has permeated our lives and blurred the lines. The self-reflexivity of the media world has been a constant this semester.

My third post is the one on Narratives, regarding the lecture that Dan gave us in week 8. This lecture came straight after completing work on the infamous PB3 which was my least favourite activity we did this semester. Not because of the actual requirements but of what I ended up creating. Dan’s lecture about the importance of narrative structure in the telling of any story was engaging and useful.

In week 8 my lit class, Textual Crossings, we covered Brian De Palma’s 2006 The Black Dahlia. What a crappy movie. My lit tutorials often got quite heated as the film nerds, feminists and straight up brains fight it out over that weeks screening and whose ideals it opposed the most (I’m in no way saying that I wasn’t a part of one of these three groups at any given time ~ because I was). The Black Dahlia caused quite a stir, mainly centring on the complete muck around that was the attempt to recreate the original story and then cutting that extremely long movie into a 2 hour movie ~ without patching up any of the gaps. Anyway, get lit.

Finally, in week 11 I was lucky enough to obtain a double pass to the opening night of the St Kilda Film Festival. (thnx RMIT) Not only was this a great opportunity to see some really amazing short films, and to get our creative juices flowing (ew) but I really enjoyed writing this blog post. It’s nothing amazing, but I found it easy to write an short, interesting blog that night, and that’s a nice thing.

All of these blog posts highlight a time for me in the course where I was engaging with the material we were learning on a level above just writing notes. By no means are these blog posts in any way profound but these are the times that I was completely inspired, these ideas came to me on the tram, they had me writing notes down in my phone and subsequently on the blog. These are the times I learnt something more than textbook media studies.

1 WEEK 2 LECTORIAL || NOTICING

2 WEEK 2 CONNECTION || SHUT OFF AND SOCIALISE

3 WEEK 8 LECTORIAL || NARRATIVES

4 WEEK 8 CONNECTION || GET LIT

5 WEEK 11 CONNECTION || ST KILDA FILM FESTIVAL