There it is, the end of my first semester of uni. Much has happened in between, ups and downs, crazy hectic weeks to freedom till you forget which day of the week is it. Coming fresh out of the military, a mandatory national service for abled body males in Singapore, I didn’t know what to expect after 2 years of doing “brain dead” exercises and duties. Was definitely looking for a set of jumper cables to jump start my brain juices again, getting back into its studying state where it acts like a sponge, absorbing everything and anything that may come its way.
The following five blog entries illustrates the curve of my entire learning experience throughout the course of Media 1. They also carry values of not only being a media student in uni, but also being an international student living abroad away from the comforts of home for the first time.
This is the very first blog post for my Media 1 blog. It explains the initial challenges I faced moving in to Melbourne from Singapore and also going through the first week of uni. Reading through it gives me a nostalgic feel, the feeling you get when you search your archives and found an old picture you drew back when you were in pre-school. I might be exaggerating a little, but I can’t deny the fact that it does feel a tinge like that. The challenges of finding a place to live on a long term basis and also shopping for daily necessities, breaking in to the new surrounding, and of course getting used to uni life. As I recall in the first lectorial, we were issued an article about hyper attention and deep attention. We were given a couple of minutes to skim through the article before discussing it as a class (a rather huge class to be exact). That whole exercise generally set the tone and pace for what’s to come for the next ten to twelve weeks. Readings from academic journals and papers, discussing it in class and going through slides, presented by the tutor who was conducting the lecture for that particular week. My thoughts on this? Well, as I mentioned above, coming straight out of a brain dead job, getting my head around academic materials definitely requires time and some adjustments just to grasp what the article is trying to put across. I had a hard time understanding most of the readings allocated for the specific topics in the different weeks. And these readings were not just several pages, they were ten to twenty pages long across several set of readings within a week’s lecture. That’s quite a lot of readings to do! Eventually, I succumbed to just skimming through the articles, a little tool our tutor taught us during one of the workshops. By just reading the first and last line of the paragraphs, you roughly get the gist of what the article is trying to say. Slowly, readings became more like a breeze than a chore, and I felt the readings worked as a good pre-empt to what’s to come in the following week’s lecture.
2) http://www.mediafactory.org.au/wen-sem-chin/wp-admin/post.php?post=93&action=edit
This post is somewhat a “breakthrough” moment for me, though it may seem like a very minor thing, I was pretty proud of myself for producing a short one minute video with the aid of using Adobe Premiere Pro, a programme that apparently most, if not all, media practitioners and students are fond of using as a video editing software. I came into this course having no video producing knowledge or background other than just a simple video collage of still images I made of my family’s vacation to Brisbane in 2015 using iMovie, however, coming from a music and audio technology, I had a good idea on how cutting, trimming, arranging and other simple functions that may be similar between the two regions of video and audio editing softwares, and with the aid of Lynda.com, learning the minimal on how to edit on Adobe Premiere Pro was pretty simple. Which brings me to my next point.
With this exercise comes a certain level of discipline and independence. I realised being in uni, we have to figure things out on our own, pick up certain skills and knowledge on our own and only when we hit a brick wall, then we seek our tutor’s help and assistance. Gone with the idea that we all sit down in class with our laptops running Adobe Premiere Pro and our tutor going through a step by step tutorial on how to import, export works, move, cut, trim, colour grade, and so on… I feel this is the new way of learning where we are thrown into the “wild” and find our way back, but even being in the “wild” we’re still confined by boundaries and fences that mark out the overall nature reserve that are being watched closely park rangers, otherwise known as our tutors.
3) http://www.mediafactory.org.au/wen-sem-chin/wp-admin/post.php?post=100&action=edit
Being back in my element, and never felt more comfortable being in lectorial. The usual suspects, “what is he saying?”, “I just can’t seem to get what is he saying…”, called in sick on that particular day and I had a good time paying attention in class, only because I already knew what the tutor was saying before hand. Not trying to be a smart a** or anything, but I treated it more like a good refresher course and reminded me of why I took on this whole journey of leaving home to further my studies on media.
Tried to appreciate every moment I got in the lectorial, as I knew this would be a very rare opportunity where I feel completely on top of everything, for the next upcoming lectorials will be on media affordances and the word ‘clueless’ would be scratching the surface on how I felt on that particular topic.
4) http://www.mediafactory.org.au/wen-sem-chin/2016/04/18/slow-and-steady-or-fast-and-furious-week-7/
I must have mentioned about this post a couple of times in some of my other posts prior to this. I can’t get over the fact that here in uni we are still being taught on how to collaborate and exercise teamwork. Talk about learning independently on how to operate Adobe Premiere Pro, here we are having a lecture on collaboration. Personally, I think that teamwork is just one of those things that can’t be taught in a classroom, you just have to go at it and experience it. You can only give an individual tips and advice on how to work with other people, but not what he should do like a step-by-step tutorial or a “How to collaborate with people” handbook. You just can’t…
Having said that, I thought it was worth pointing out some experiences I encountered collaborating with various people, both in working and academic environment. And the key thing I’d say I took home was just how accomodating everyone is. If one could bend and not break, then that person would probably be the most accomodating person in the group, on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the person who wouldn’t give in for any case, and it is up to the rest of the group whether they should just go along with his idea or outcast him. Either way, it is proven time and time again, working together does get things covered in a more efficient way as well as, maybe even producing an end product that is way better than if one were to do it individually. We’ve seen it happening all over, no matter what the field of expertise may be.
I think this blog post contains everything I’ve learned from the first few weeks of uni from planning, filming, editing, and everything else in between. If there was a learning curve plotting my progress in the course, at this point, it would illustrate a spike in absorbing things and putting everything together that were just sketches on a piece of paper to actually putting it into action.
And since it was an individual assignment, you have nobody but yourself to thank for whatever the outcome turned out to be. Good or bad, I know that I’ve done my best and I’m definitely happy enough to live with that. The overall experience of this assignment served as a good platform as well for what’s about to come in Project Brief 4 where it doesn’t just require coming up with content of whatever inspires us, but something more relevant and has proper academic support. Something that I think I find myself struggling to even find solid ground to walk on. But thankfully with the help of collaborative work, it all came together really well.
So there you go, this last semester has been a roller coaster ride, and I think it could very well set the mood for what’s to come for the following semesters. Although it’ll be very different when it comes to going into the various studios, the overall general direction has been set, and it is only going to get tougher from now on. Should I be scared? Should I be excited? I’ll leave that for my future self to consider. For now, I’ll kick back and relax, enjoy my time back home on sunny Singapore.
Would also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all the tutors who have contributed in making my first semester in uni the way it has turned out, for better or for worst, my heart felt thanks to everyone.
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