It has been a month since I was assigned to work with Jen and Aisha for the project brief 4. I consider this project as my first product for my media practitioner career. We started everything from the bottom. Our objective is to find a way to present media “text” which is such a general era theoretically and practically. The 4 key phases for the pre-production are: who will be with me – what we want to do – why we want to do it that way – how to do it.

Phase 1:
I did not attend the day Jasmine assigned group members so I had no idea who would be my teammate. Even when I received an email of collaboration from Jen, I still have no idea who they are.
Phase 2:
The first step is always the hardest. My very first and biggest question at that time was: “what is text?” .Thanks to the lecture of Brian Morris in week 9, I finally got the idea of how broad the media “text” is. Doing individual research did improve my reading skill a lot, but it was hard to decide which academic documents would fit in the project. During our researching and debating, we discussed a lot about how social media, particularly news media, delivers a huge impact on our society in an era of technology. Finally, our group decided to focus on the context of how false statements made by a wide range of media affects negatively to the community after running through case studies. More importantly, we worked and came up together a fake story about a false missing case of Izzy Varis.
Phase 3:
We as a group aim to propose that social media has changed the way people approach via a diversity of media platforms. In addition, we also suggest how social media contents are being exploited as a source of news by news producers.
Phase 4:
We made a decision to create a blog roll to present our project. The blog is designed to follow the case day by day including news report on TV and radio, newspaper and social media. It contains all the description of reasons why we decided to create a specific medium. Moreover, the descriptions are strengthened by academic materials.  Although the blog is not perfect as we wanted because we did not manage to find a template which allows us to add details on the side, I am so proud of it. We even wrote scripts and shot the news reports as well as recorded radio shows to make it more visual and more realistic. I did enjoy this phase the most. I learned so many practical experiences and had so much fun during our shooting days.

For the post-production, I was in charge of editing and writing descriptions the radio show. I had never edited anything like this before but I managed to do quite a good job. More importantly, I realised the strong bond between pre-production and post-production. Indeed, if I do not do the shooting or recording correctly, I will not be able to create a high quality product no matter how good my editing skill is. A small mistake during the pre-production can make a big difficulty for the post-production. Recording distance/atmosphere and the light setting on our shooting days are typical examples. On the other hand, I find the writing part is the most challenging task.  It took me over 2 hours to finish 2 small descriptions based on the document which I had already annotated. Seriously, I have to improve my writing skill to catch up with the media course. I wonder if my English writing skill was better, my team would not have to wait for my text to complete everything.

Frankly speaking, it is a pleasure for me to work with Aisha and Jen. We all know what we want achieve from this project. During the process, we encountered only a few difficulties in timetable. However, we overcame all the problems because we were willing to share our ideas and our difficulties. I think communicating and responsibility are the 2 key elements of our success. This project not only enhances both my practical skills and theoretical skills, but also teaches me how to work as a team. We cannot expect a media product with a great quality without the collaboration because everyone has their own week points and strong points. Essentially, to become a future practitioner, we have to learn how to identify a clearer picture of ourselves and other people.
https://izzyvarisproject.wordpress.com/

We  had another shooting day due to technical problem on the last one. By the way, Jen invited her friend Lucy whose appearance is just like a reporter to read the news. To avoid getting annoying shadows, we tried to adjust the light system of the green screen room and the chair’s position as well. Everything went well as we planed. Besides, I recorded Jen’s radio script again.

However, Jen’s scrip today was  still different from the one I recorded at her grandmother’s house. There was a subtle ambient sound of a machine running somewhere. I couldn’t dispose it, but the whole session was not bad.

Today I went to her grandmother’s house near Richmond to shoot some footage for PB4. The architecture there is somehow similar to Fizroy’s: still remain the sense of old days, not affected by the invasion of the modern era.

For this shooting day, I was in charge of recording audio while Jen handle the camera. We had her grandmother play the role of Pearl Varis which is the name of Izzy’s grandmother (our missing girl). I was amazed by her natural acting. She just needed to read the script a few times and everything went smoothly. Furthermore, the natural sun light in a sunny day through the window was such a big advantage for us. I think natural light is much better than the one in the green screen room. Then, we recorded her parents for our radio show and TV news. They were really good at it. We also recorded ourselves as the radio DJ. I really enjoyed the day.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake. I was not aware of the importance of the recording distance until I tried to make the raw audio sounds like a radio show. It is too hard for me to mix the 2 big different in distance voices into one. I am not that skillful yet so I will record Jen’s voice again in the next shooting day.

I and Jen took turns to play the news reporter role. This was the 1st time of my life to be a news reporter although it’s a fake one. Fulfilling that kind of role is harder than I thought. I felt frustrating and awkward while staring at the camera and talking like there were thousands of audiences in front of me. Ridiculously, I had to tried so many times just finish some simple sentences on the script. Even for Jen, a local citizen, had to redo a sometimes to memorize them.

It took us over 2 hours  to finish a few lines news just to find out that we couldn’t use those takes. My forehead is cut because the lens are not wide enough. Jen’s is better but there is a big shadow on her shoulder which is very hard to get rid of. We weren’t aware off serious effects the lights in the green screen room.

At the end of the day, although we couldn’t use those footage, we got valuable experiences and had so much fun. I think working behind the scene isn’t boring at all.

We continued to work on the story about the missing girl. We had already got the time line for the story but we need more than that. Eventually, we had to come up with more specific details such as characters’details, channels’s names  as well as the radios’ to make our work more logical. Surprisingly, it took us a considerable amount of time just to get some names.

We also set up shooting and recording days for the project. Aisha will be in charge of writing article on news paper and websites. Jen and I will take care of the footage as well as the post production. I’m really looking forward to the shooting days because I believe I will be able to get lots of experiences from it.

Overall, our project is going quite well and we seem to be on top.

As we planed from the last minute, our group brought up all the annotated bibliographies that are relevant to news media. We discussed about the credibility of the news and its interaction with the audiences as well as how it is spread from one platform to another. Our major question is that whether the messages of the news still remain the same when they are used in many platforms or not. Apparently, how the news is presented does affect the interpreting process of the audiences. Just take an carnival as an example. Most of the time, the news on TV will provide audiences both visual and audio. Meanwhile, the radio just gives audiences the audio and they have to imagine themselves so it might lead to different interpretation.

As we dug deep into the media news, Aisha gave us more hot media affairs which involved in credibility. Finally, we made the decision to focus on how the same news is spread around media platforms and the responsibility of news practitioners. Our plan will be making a fake news about a missing girl who actually just enjoy a camping trip with her father. Her mother states that her divorced husband kidnapped the child. However, the one to blame this false news is the media staffs who do not investigate the sincerity of the story. Following up, we made a brief plan how we are gonna present the whole story in many types of media”text”.

On the 1st meeting, we mainly focused on comparing all the materials that we had collected for PB4 so far. Our topic is “text”, so our materials covered the whole media “text”: from TV, newspapers, radio, websites to social networks. We also came up with a temporary and simpler meaning of our topic: “text” is what we capture with our eyes and ears, then we interpret it with our brain and experiences.

We broke down our topic because it is too general. Then, Aisha brought up some of the latest affairs of news reporter and those were really  interesting. After discussing about those affairs, we chose news media as our key media “text”. However, news media is still too big, so we decided to gathered more academic materials relating to news media and to write annotation of those ones. I think we are going on a right track.