Today, myself and my group worked together as a group for the last time.
We have been working on this show for about three weeks. We had some troubles in formulating new ideas for this show, as it felt that we only just completed our first show. We sent our ideas to Elizabeth sometime in Week 11, which was about two weeks before our final show. I was responsible for contacting Free to Feed, and had received an confirmation from Loretta Bolotin by Monday on Week 12- one week before our final show. As I was also contacting Rachel Cox from the Listen Collective for our feature around the same time, I asked another team member to contact our other approved interviewee option-who was Professor Arul Arulrajah of Swinburne University, head of a project to reuse coffee grounds in to pavements. Unfortunately, Arulrajah had rejected our request for an interview, as he was heading overseas around the same time. This left us in limbo, as we scrambled to find another appropriate potential interview to send to Elizabeth. We then had an approved interviewee, Dr. Patrick Stokes of Deakin University to discuss the ethics involved in social media. Stokes had also rejected the interview. We then found the idea of the Melbourne Period Project, based on contacts of a fellow group member. Donna Stolzenberg had initially rejected our request for an interview, as she was interstate during our show. But on the Sunday before the show, we had confirmation that she was available for a phone interview for 12:30 onwards.
Co-presenter Laura and myself had met on the Sunday before the show to finalise our script. This meant that we were much more comfortable this morning, making any last minute corrections. I had received an email that Loretta from Free to Feed was unavailable to be interview last minute a few hours before the show. We interviewed her partner Daniel instead, who gave us a great and insightful interview of the Free 2 Feed initiative. I was also very happy with the interview with Donna from the Melbourne period project. I thought that there were very important issue to be discussed with both topics, with my personal highlights being the discussion of food and the culture shock that is involved in moving to a new country. I also loved discussing transgender men being able to received sanitary donations. These were my particular highlights of the interview, as they involved questions about issues that I (and I am sure others) have not considered as a potential problem before.
I think that for next time, I need to work on running off the script. I was grateful for the fact that I had a detailed script throughout the show, but I think I relied on it too much and was not comfortable to not rely on it. I think that there were several points throughout the show where it did sound like I was reading off the script. I think that I also need to work on the phrasing of my questions, as I think that although I was happy with the content of the question, I was not happy with the wording of it itself. I think that one of my strengths was stepping in when Laura got a little confused about the previous tracks towards the end of the show. I don’t regret not stepping in earlier, because she was reading the correct information at the time, and I was under the impression that she was going to try to read out the information again, but I thought the best thing to do was to step in to close the show as planned.
We stuck extremely well to our time sheet this time, and had a strong script. I felt that the show was well timed and very well operated technically. I don’t think I sounded confident in several parts, and I remember getting a little confused about the correct pronunciation of an artist (despite the fact that I did say his name correctly before presenting on the show). I think that Laura was a strong host today, and I think that we all worked well together today, and produced a much better show than we did in Week 9. It was far more organised, concise, and everyone learnt from our mistakes from last time.