A month ago I didn’t even know what the hell an audio or video essay was. I’ve only ever produced written essays and to be completely honest, I’m not even the best at doing those. So, to hear that our final Project Brief was this I was a little lost. Being grouped with Jenny and Stella helped me understand the task at hand. They helped explain how we could pretty much run wild with any idea we had and call it an essay, as long as it had a couple main points throughout it.
We began by choosing the topic Narratives in Reality TV, each being responsible to research one element of it. I investigated into Production, Stella into Structure and Jenny into Audience. We brought together this research and as a group summarised them and decided what aspects we would focus on for each essay. We then began to plan out the first essay we would complete.
Audio: At first I thought the audio section of the brief would be boring and the least enjoyable of the two, however I was wrong. Writing the script for out Radio show ‘Triple B’ was quite amusing and interesting at the same time and, I believe, our most successful group creation. As a group this was our best point of working together as a team. We met up countless times to write the script together, record together and edit together, including everyone’s ideas and accepting each others feedback and opinions to help create a better finished product. I found it was a very nice environment to be working in and I hope the other girls felt the same. I didn’t learn a lot about making audio, but I was encouraged to embrace my creative ideas and give them a go, even if they didn’t make the final cut it was good to experiment. I was very satisfied with our final result.
Video: Creating our video essay did not run as smoothly as the Audio did. Not only did we hit multiple technical issues but we were a bit disorganised. As the time before due date neared we each grew busy in our other subjects as well and we felt a lot more pressured to get it done. After hours and hours of slaving away in the building 9 basement we hit a point where rather than saying ‘maybe we could do …’ to improve our final film, we were sighing ‘yeah that’ll do, just export it’. We grew tired of the constant editing and I don’t think any of us were truly proud of the final result. It was not what we envisioned it to be. Due to our difficulties in both filming and editing the video essay it became much less enjoyable and we were all pretty over the whole thing, just wanting to hand it in already. The video isn’t bad of course, we put a lot of thought, time and research into it and considering what we had to overcome I’m relatively happy with the result.
I learned a lot about collaboration and that communication is definitely key. We did everything as a group, we met as much as we needed to every week choosing to complete everything whilst everyone was there rather than take things home and piece them together at the end, therefore it was vital that we stayed in touch about when we were available and for how long, what we were going to do in that meet, what equipment we needed to hire, who was going to hire it and when, who was going to book an editing suite etc. There were a lot of things we needed to know before we got there, Facebook messenger played a major part in our communication and planning to make sure that everyone was aware of what was happening and what needed to happen in the future.
As a future media practitioner I think that this project has taught me both the importance of communication and how to collaborate with multiple personalities present. As quite a loud and opinionated person myself I was able to learn how to include much quieter people in discussion, making them feel comfortable and ensuring that I listened intently to their opinions and ideas. I learned that in the beginning someone must lead to get the ball rolling, however they cannot lead for the entire project because they could possibly miss a great idea that someone else has rather than every person having an equal share in the final product of the project.