The Next 3 Years…

After 6 months at university, I feel like I’m in a better place now to make judgments about my expectations and goals for the rest of my degree.

Skills:

  1. This is very broad, but I want to improve my organisational skills. I realised this semester that a lot of my assignments fall at the same time, and I could have made life easier for myself by looking ahead at the assessments calendar and planning accordingly.
  2. I’ve started to work on this already, but I want to continue developing my group work skills to ensure everybody works equally and communicates well to produce quality work.
  3. I have had a taste of working with film equipment and I hope to continue learning through experience.
  4. I plan to improve my editing skills both on iMovie and FinalCut. I think this is mostly a matter of practice, watching tutorials and experimenting with new ideasĀ and techniques.

This semester I have been thinking a lot about how I can make the most of my experience at RMIT during my degree. I think one of the most important opportunities provided is the work attachment scheme and I have already been thinking about what I’d like to do for mine. I’m going to work to find as many relevant attachments as possible over the course of my degree and I hope this will set me apart when I graduate.

Advice on Brief 4

Last week, Rachel made some suggestions for how we could best progress with our final project brief.

  • Make sure that everyone is asking the same questions of the texts they are analysing (this prompted us to create a list of 3 questions to focus our work)
  • Keep the focus narrow so you can increase the depth of the work
    • Take out side ideas – remixing, Space Odyssey
    • Left with: Texts > Adaptations > Romeo & Juliet
  • Extra ideas for looking at Romeo & Juliet
    • Look at soundtracks separately from the films as this is a whole different medium
      • E.g. original soundtrack composed for West Side Story
    • Book of West Side Story

This advice was helpful for us as it gave us a better idea of the direction we needed to go in for our brief and helped us clarify in our heads the work we still needed to complete.

The coming week…

The next week will be busy in terms of working towards completing a polished draft of our media artefact. There are a number of things that still need to be done, which include:

  1. Watching each of the films and productions I will be analysing
  2. Researching academic interpretations and critiques of these texts to cement my own analyses in theory with a sound understanding of the context of each
  3. Answering in depth the three standard questions we are asking of each text
  4. Working on editing the aesthetics of the blog
  5. Adding to the “texts” page of the blog using information from further research
  6. Keeping track of new sources and write brief annotations for each

Aside from the project, I also need to write some more blog posts!