Alas, the end has come for us to say that we’re done with Project Brief 4. Both audio and video essays are very much completed and ready to be submitted through our google drives. It comes with great pleasure to be writing this blog post, not only because it’s the end of yet another long and gruelling Project Brief, but also the end of the first semester of uni, but I will reserve my comments on a separate posts regarding that. For now, I’ll express my thoughts and feelings that occurred over the course of this assignment.

For starters, it is the first assignment that is done as a group instead of individual. This comes with a set of pros and cons, fortunately, it all panned out with more pros than cons for this particular assignment. Way back in week 4 or 5, we received a lecture on teamwork and collaboration, which I mentioned in a blog post that I was pretty baffled that even in uni we are still being taught how to work with people. Thankfully, with the stroke of luck or whatever you want to call it, my group mates and I were all within the same wavelength and it was easy communicating with one another. Even when we couldn’t agree on certain things, we managed to work something out and achieve a general consensus accomodating most of our individual opinions.

The group didn’t waste any time getting started on PB4. We sat down to brainstorm ideas and arguments related to our topic, Audience. I still remember one of our very first group meetings, we were tossing out ideas, thoughts, opinions, personal experiences, academic articles, basically anything and everything that we could think of that is related to the word Audience. Like the other topics on media affordances, Audience is a really broad topic, and we needed to streamline our ideas to a specific question to form an argument and debate around that. This was where our annotated bibliographies come in to help narrow down on our findings and find a specific topic for us to debate back and forth on. Personally, it was a challenge putting together an annotated bibliographies as I’ve not done anything like this before. Moreover going through all these academically written articles and journals, it was quite a tough read for most of them. What more, sieving out information that might be related to our essay topics, and putting it into context of our arguments.

A few weeks went by and we were ready to record our audio essay. The night before, we had a conference call over Skype to finalise on our audio scripts. Unfortunately, I wasn’t available to attend the recording as I had a lecture to attend, but I accepted the role of editing and mixing the entire audio essay, as well as adding extra textural elements and composed a starting/ending theme song into it. I guess that should count as my “voice” in the essay, since my actual voice is absent from the audio essay.

Once we got the main bulk of the audio essay down, we began planning, storyboarding, and coming up with scripts for our video essay. Since we’ve already got the main content and arguments in paper, it was only natural for us to bring those into live action. We thought of a place and setting for everything to take place, and what better way to present on the topic of audience than being a group of audience ourselves. A fellow group member volunteered her lounge room over at her place for us to shoot our video essay and that was pretty much our set for the video essay. A bunch of us sitting on a couch in front of a television set talking about the whole concept of the shift of passive audience to active audience as we move from broadcast era into the post-broadcast era. Since non of us received any professional acting lessons or came from any performing arts background, it was a challenge for us to memorise our lines and speaking right into the camera. We had to do several takes on and on before we could get a hang of it. A simple trick we did was to place one of our laptops right in front of the television and that became a “teleprompter” for us in case any of us forgets our lines. Another minor problem we faced was getting a clean audio recording. The mic that came with the Sony MC50 that we loaned from the tech store at Building 9 was too sensitive and it was picking up almost everything in the room, and since the room was not acoustically treated, it sounded really echoey and boomy in the recording. To counter this issue, we decided to record our speech on a separate device, using one of our iPhones as a audio recording device. Thankfully, the audio that was recorded using the iPhone was not as echoey or boomy as the one from the Sony MC 50.

One of us decided to take on the role as the overall editor for the video essay rough cut. However, we sat down as a group to chip in our own input to the video essay during one of our final group meetings. We booked an editing suite at Building 9 to sit down and run through the final cut of the video essay. We also took the opportunity to target any last few kinks that were in the audio essay and made final adjustments to both audio and video essays before they were ready for submission.

PB4 is definitely not an easy task to be taken lightly, and it was pretty daunting in the beginning as the tutor distributed the hardcopy around the class. To see that we had to produce, not one, but two essays, both with different content and only 30% could taken from each essays, was initially quite intimidating. Just visually, looking at the project brief felt suffocating and the list of submission requirements just seemed never ending. However, we took it one strike at a time and planned our group discussions, and what we needed to accomplish at the end of every meeting. One thing I would attribute the ease of going through this assignment was how we managed our time. Time management was crucial when it comes to producing two essays. We needed to know when we should put a pause for the audio essay to start on our video essay and also finding a common time for everyone to meet. The group had to rely on skype calls quite a fair bit on a few occasions, due to circumstances that we are not able to meet in person or the timing just does not permit us from seeing each other, however, it was these sessions that we managed to cover quite a lot of ground when it comes to coming up with our scripts, ideas, and content for both essays. I also felt fortunate that our tutor allowed us to carry out our discussion during class time therefore we had more time to ourselves to focus on other assignments from different courses.

On a personal level, I enjoyed collaborating with my group mates coming together to produce these two final products. You hear stories and rumours from other course mates about so and so not carrying their weight, or so and so is not turning up for meetings and so on, but I guess we’re fortunate enough that this wasn’t the case for us for this particular assignment. Look forward to the many collaborations I might be participating in future.

For the last 2 workshops, we reviewed our audio and video rough cuts to our tutor during class and received really good constructive feedback from her in order to achieve the desired grade the group is aiming for.

For one, our audio essay lacked texture, and it was rather monotonous. This I can agree with, as I was the one responsible for mixing and editing the audio clips together and adding sound effects, music, and other sound clips that could lift the audio essay to sound a little more entertaining rather than just 3 people speaking. But due to the limited time in producing a rough cut, this was the main bulk that could be produced for the time being, and adding in extra textual elements would be slightly less taxing than arranging audio recordings and mixing the audio levels.

Our video essay was also coming together, but like the audio essay, it lacked extra textual elements such as found footages, still images, and maybe some minor editing techniques to make the video essay a little more engaging as well as entertaining instead of just 4 people sitting in front of the camera talking. Content wise and arguments, our tutor remarked that it was spot on and it was through provoking to the viewer, but also has a good resolution at the end.

This left the group going back to our drawing board to see how we could enhance our audio and video essays, adding extra sound effects, clips, found footages, images, and applying various technical effects to lighten up our essays to a more entertaining level. It’s easy to just produce an audio or video essay, after all, it’s just an essay with people reading out from a script through video or audio, but it’s not easy to make the final product something the listener/viewer can maintain their attention before they decide to stop and doze off into oblivion. We planned to use the remaining time frame that’s left before the deadline for PB4 to enhance our essays.

In this week’s workshop we were given feedback from our peers regarding our PB3.

I received feedbacks, both positive and negative, one of each was that the sound wasn’t mixed all that well. One of my peers found it a little distracting when my subject is speaking, her voice seems to be competing with the backing music and it was a struggle for them to focus on what she was saying. Which I found it a little odd, as I was very particular in mixing the audio levels, especially coming from an audio background, I thought it was one of my strengths in mixing audio levels in a short clip like this. I guess sometimes it boils down to the source that you’re listening from. I was mixing the audio levels on a pair of professional studio headphones, and my PB3 was played out from my laptop speakers, therefore I think there was some difference in terms of audio quality. Well, at least, now I know that I have to cater for that when mixing audio levels in future projects.

As for positive feedbacks that I’ve received, one of my peers mentioned that the subject matter was interesting and engaging with the audience. He thought it was something new and entertaining. Having said that, it was some much of a portrait video of someone, but rather more towards the subject of ‘Singlish’. Hopefully, the tutors who are going to mark my assignment would be a little lenient on that, as it is still a good representation of my subject and her background coming from Singapore and what she’s doing in Melbourne.

I believe that peer evaluation is a strong tool in gathering critical and constructive feedback, as it is from the ground, unlike coming from someone like a tutor or lecturer, there is a certain motive of wanting you to achieve a certain grade or meeting the marking criteria or assessment constraints, but coming from your peers, they are in your shoes and they can provide some views that may be beyond the sights of the classroom, such as personal experiences, trending affairs and more.