Here I am, at the end of semester one. Let’s go through what I was thinking about university before I started this course to now. First I was anxious, having done maths and science for high school and doing engineering in my first year of uni last year and finally deciding enough was enough, I wanted to chase my passion. But I wasn’t sure, whether if I was capable of this, I had done no video projects in the past, no production of any kind but so have most people in this course actually. Now I feel like I belong here, I enjoy and look forward to going to uni now and this course does a great job making me feel like that.
This is my thought process during that time.
Upon the first few weeks of university my anxiety about starting this course were swept away, from me thinking that maybe this might not work out to now I feel like I belong here. It is quite contrasting my thoughts before and after starting this course which makes me feel relived I chose to start this course.
Blogging was something I have never done or was really interested in before coming here, but in the first half of the semester I was really invested in blogging, often blogging about random thoughts and reflecting on life along with course material.
Here’s a couple examples of my blogging from that time.
I tended to relate readings and lectorials to things I am interested in because they spur me on to think about them which makes me have a discussion on the topic in a broader view and contextualise things relating them to what I am doing now and what I plan to do in the future or what it is like now.
I also blogged extensively every time I had a significant progress or issue with my Project Brief. I covered things like learning how to use premiere, problems I had with editing, compressing or encoding. Different techniques when it comes to shortcuts and maintaining things to my memory. Overall, learning how to use premiere was a refreshing experience, something I had not done nor did I think I would do before joining this course. But once I got into it and started really learning how to use the program my confidence grew and my comfortability with this course became more apparent. It wasn’t something I learnt that I thought was a chore, but more of an experience.
In the second half of the semester, we were getting into the thick of things, so most of my blogs were about the process of work and reflecting upon it. For instance we had the lecture on Copyright and I had a thought process relating it to our upcoming project. Most of the time I related back to our project brief and the work upcoming.
Upon receiving the last project brief and getting with my group there was a lot of discussion and idea generation of what actually to do for the video and audio essay. We had a lot of discussion between ourselves in our first initial meetings, but I felt we did not have a concrete argument for them and it was too broad to cover things we wanted to cover. When we met with Rachel in our workshop she said the same thing, so we had to go back to the drawing board with our ideas and somehow come up with an argument that can refine our broader ideas down.
There was a point however where I didn’t have the motivation to do work however it wasn’t because I wasn’t enjoying uni, it was just a lull in between assignments where there wasn’t much going on. Illustrated here on my ‘learning graph’.
The dip in week 10 was an indication of that, and throughout the semester I have been building my ‘media brain’ and work ethic towards this final project.
My initiative posts toned down as we got to the business end of the semester, the work was piling up and I had no time to do many things, the only note worthy post was a review I did on Captain America: Civil War. Other than that I did mostly random things I noticed, or music that caught my attention and I talked about the impact it had on me. However because I was in media I decided to start up my own podcast, which will be on every 6-10 weeks because I want each episode to be relatively long and to talk about anything from Video Games, Anime, Manga or Society in line with me and my panel members’ interests. Other than that my work has been limited to research or discussion with my group along with other work from other subjects.
Now as we approach the end, I feel like I found the course right for me. Coming from a maths and science background it was a bold step for me to take up media based on the sole reason is that in my spare time I love watching movies, anime or playing games (I haven’t played games in months however). Now that the semester is about to end, I’m going to follow through with this course as it is where I truly feel happy.
