One of my group mates have graciously opened up her house to be the set of our Project Brief 4 video essay. My group’s topic is Audience, and what better way to present the concept of audience than being an audience ourselves. Our concept for the entire video essay would be us (the whole group of 4 of us) sitting in front of a television in the lounge and giving our takes on the change from broadcast to post-broadcast era and how it has affected the change from passive to active audience.

I don’t think I’ll be spoiling anything for anyone since this video (and audio) essay are not going to be uploaded onto YouTube or Vimeo and I doubt it’ll be shown in class. Therefore, non of us would be able to view each others’ work and the sum of research of all of us has done over the past 3 – 4 weeks on our different topics on media affordances. While it I am totally okay with that idea of not uploading our work on any online social networking sites due to the copyright issue, I was wondering, wouldn’t it be a more cohesive learning experience if we were to share with the rest of the class on what we have researched on. I’m not even thinking of a formal presentation, but just a screening and hearing of our video and audio essays, so everyone’s got a clear idea of what everyone of us has done.

I might be wrong in my last point, and I am pretty sure I’ll be slammed quite hardly if I were to express my view on a more vocal platform (like in the middle of a lecture), as different people might have different opinions and ideas. Some might want their work to be best kept between their tutors and group mates, some might prefer not to have the extra weight of thinking that their work is going to be screened and aired to the entire class, and many other reasons that might have gone passed my personal thoughts.

Okay, I just realised I have gone quite off point here with the last 2 paragraphs, so back to the video shoot. We managed to cover everything that we needed in a couple of hours. I was pretty pleased with the outcome, and am quite excited to view the rough cut which one of our group mates has volunteered to do. Though our procedures and filming techniques were pretty primitive, to hear the sound of one of us yelling, “It’s a wrap!”, had a certain sense of satisfaction ring to it. We loaned the Sony MC50 from the tech store in Building 9 and used a Canon EOS 700D DSLR provided by one of the group mates. The Sony MC50 was more or less dead center on to us, while the Canon DSLR was at an angle to provide a different perspective as well as adding texture to our video essay.

Apart from filming ourselves, we are adding some extra bits of found footages in between to elaborate our point on passive audience going back to the black and white television days. This also aids in bringing up our video essay running time to about 5-6 minutes instead of 4-5 minutes, since our group consists of 4 people, unlike stated in the project brief where each group should consist of 3.

Overall, I believe that we all had fun having gone through the experience of filming ourselves and doing several takes due to the difficulties of memorising our lines. Glad that the whole bulk of PB4 is coming together (video AND audio), and now is just putting everything that we have done together and preparing it for submission on the 3rd of June, that includes the production dossier and an 800 words reflective essay.