LAST WEEKS

For our group project, we have been meeting twice a week to get everything together.

The week before last we came up with a final idea for the structure. We decided to make a black box with a mirror on one side of the interior, and a phone with a border on the other side, so that the viewer can watch the video component of our artefact through the reflection. In the workshop that followed, we made a prototype of this idea out of a shoebox and perspex as a mirror and were really happy with the results.

After that class, we met up to construct the structure out of foamcore, which we bought from Melbourne Artist Supplies. The box is A4 in length and height, and half of A4 in width. The mirror we have used is a piece of reflective perspex from the art store. We put it all together with thick black electrical tape. The structure is very light, but solid.

Last week we also signed off on the final drafts of the video, text, image and sound. We also finished our production dossier, which includes an annotated bibliography, general bibliography, reference list, written reflections, links to blog posts, assessment declaration, online content of the project, mission statement, collaborative contract, first and second drafts and minutes from our meetings.

In our last meeting, we put all of our components onto the structure. It turned out so fantastic!

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This is a really blurry picture of me listening to the audio whilst watching the video component. You can also see the image component of the project which has 9 images velcroed onto the side of the box.

I am very proud of the media artefact that we have created and the whole project that we will hand in. I think we were successful in realising our idea which was born from extensive research; the project is how I imagined it to be during its developmental stages.

I think we were very thorough in our research, and that we took critique during class well and worked towards creating a cohesive exploration of the media idea of ‘texts’. We stuck to schedule and the creation of the project was stress free. Scheduling was definitely helped by the project brief that had a really helpful guideline of the pace that we should be working at. Nothing was left to the last minute, which was a great relief. Plus, having the annotated bibliography due early on in the assignment really informed our project and the kind of direction we wanted to go in, as well as pointing out some limitations of practicality we may have on our original idea. The time and feedback that we had during workshops was also really helpful and spurred a lot of ideas and revisions of our project.

What may have been problematic about our project was that we were unable to imagine what kind of meaning we will make with the combination of all our components until it was all complete. Once we had finished the first draft, it all fell into place, but the process of creating without knowing how the end result will affect the audience was disconcerting. I think that our project provides a critique of the way that women are portrayed in media texts, which is overwhelmingly negative, and I think that we could have pushed a solution for this negativity (for example, to have more women making media and representing themselves) more, whereas at the moment it is quite abstract. I think this would have required more time for research. I think another problem with our project is that it only uses copyright material from other texts, which was our aim so that we could critique them all together, but it means that we can’t share our project with others. Also, the physical nature of the project means it is hard to share, but our primary goal was to make something intimate and thought-provoking, which I think we achieved.

During the process of developing our project, I learnt that communication is very important to collaboration. We met often and corresponded online even more, which made progress very easy. Because we communicated so much, I was motivated to do my share of work on time. I also learnt that collaborating is great for working on drafts, where we edited and revised each other’s work and gave each other feedback. I’m really happy with the group that Brian assembled for us, as we were all very supportive of each others ideas and our skills and interest really complemented each others. I also learnt that delegating roles is very useful for getting things done, but we begun to work on things together naturally and helping out where we could, sharing our skills with one another, which was really nurturing and fun. We also researched particular topics that we individually found interesting, and listening to others explain something that they have read and found really useful helped to find the gems in our research and texts that we were analysing.

From this experience, I have also learnt to play to my strengths. I am not great with coming up with ideas or writing creatively, but I am good at editing written work, which I used in the creation of the production dossier, and I have watched a lot of film and television shows that was useful when thinking of texts to use in the project.

Overall, I am so pleased and proud of what we have achieved, and I have found this group project to be enjoyable, educational and fruitful.

 

mimo

My name is Mimo. I like to watch TV and films with my neighbour's cat.

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