The audio essay for Project Brief 4 is one of the two major outcomes for the assignment. I began writing it today and trie to stay away from a very opinionated piece, however, that wasn’t very fun so I started writing a piece about why and how the media in Australia is becoming worse and worse over time and what should be done about it. A key problem with my argument is that it fails to address the problem of money. Companies can make content that’s the easy part, they can market that content, also easy but the problem is getting people to watch who haven’t watched television in months. The sort of people who live between Netflix and Pirate Bay. The Australian institutions are putting all their ideas straight on free to air, which isn’t helping them at all and you know when the ABC is producing probably the exciting TV, there’s a huge problem! So How do you go about fixing that? I think the key is getting Australian content on Netflix as well. Get it in the same places as the overseas content and make it god enough to hold its own.

The problem then exists, how to fund such a project from the limited resources the commercial television networks in Australia have at their disposal. I think the solution lies in the content itself. I think good quality writing is cheap, you just have to find the people to do it. This is where young talent is important. There’s no reason you can’t find a young screenwriter willing to work cheap. The hard part is then turning that into an achievable idea. I think that this needs to happen especially in the screen department. One of the issues we have is that the best Australian films are made by Americans and American money and the money goes straight back there when a film or television show is successful. Take the series Gallipoli. Biggest budget Australian Television for as long as I can remember and no one even watched it. Cause I just didn’t care enough and to be honest after the first ten minutes it was boring. It was painting a picture of the war not focussing on individuals and stories that I wanted. So many mistakes are made by the out of touch media makers in the country, yet those people who have great things to say rarely actually say it.