This final project brief has been a rollercoaster of stress, excitement, humour and relief. I was, in the initial stages of the Project Brief, very excited to get into the research and gather some solid information. I saw it as an experience to learn about the complexities of the media and how it affects audiences and creators alike. The topic that was assigned to Eliza, Alex and I was Institutions. I was very happy with this choice as I think it compliments my interests in politics and government regulation as well as letting me look at the overall impact that institutions that create media have on the people that consume it. I was very keen into getting into the nitty gritty of the theories behind the media and exploring them for myself. As a group, we came up with the idea to make an artifact in the form of a documentary or a report.

I was extremely happy with the group that I had been assigned to. Eliza, Alex and I immediately clicked as a group and we all had a lot of ideas and were very animated about what we were going to create. I think in the planning stages, we had the most fun because we just kept on building upon one idea and having so many we had to come back down to earth and think more practically. In our first meeting together we talked about our skill sets and we found out that we were working with the same skills and we could adapt and better these. I was, however, disappointed that they were just as wary of using sound as I was because I wanted to learn from my group members about how to be more confident with editing with sound etc. As we progressed with our Project Brief, we found that each of us had stronger skills than others. Alex and I were very good with technical things and, when it came to filming and editing, we took charge of camera and mise-en-scene. Eliza always kept us in line and made sure we were on point and organised – she was more of our communicator because she has awesome people skills; this came in handy when we were organising interviews.

We spent most of the time given to create this project brief planning what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. So, in class discussions and presentations, when we had only plans to present because that was all we could do as we were awaiting for our interviewees to organise dates with us, it seemed that we were not doing any work. This made me very frustrated as I am a very focussed and head strong person and I like to complete things to the satisfaction of all that are around me. And the truth was, we were doing A LOT of work – I would go as far as saying that, collectively, Eliza, Alex and myself did more work than any other group in our class. We just had to fix our time around others. The feedback that we got in class was to make our content more engaging than just a documentary and to be more textured. I think we took this as a challenge to overcome and Eliza and Alex came up with an idea to create a zine or a comic book to  accompany the documentary. I didn’t really understand the point of this, but Eliza and Alex had a clear idea of how to do it, so I didn’t complain. I still don’t think it’s necessary to the project but the others were insistent upon it. I chose to not argue so as to keep harmony within the group. I think that was a good idea.

I took more charge in editing and filming interviews, and this was a stress for me too. Not because editing was difficult, but more because I felt that if I did a bad job, it would be my fault that we received bad marks. I think i did an excellent job with the finished product though. I would have liked to have made it longer and have more information in it so that it reflected all that we had created, planned and discovered but I think it would have been a stretch to make it a feature length documentary. In total we had seven interviews that totalled up to more than hour of information. That limited down to 15 minutes in a documentary is shattering.

My favourite part about this Project Brief was listening to the interviews. Mark O’Toole’s interview was my favourite and I felt very privileged to have conducted it as it was so interesting to hear the opinions and anecdotes of what someone who is working the field I want to one day work in.

Although I was stressed and angry at times, as a group, we worked so well. I couldn’t have asked for better group members.