Filed under: media industries 2, reflection, seminar | Tags: documentary, final, reflection, self assessment, seminar
Contribution and Collaboration
My contribution to the seminar was that of post-production, where it was Eric and my job to edit the seminar footage as well as consult with the steering committee. This role was mainly a 2-way collaboration, with little to no issues along the way as Eric and I worked well together to formulate the highlight video. We worked together in that I would formulate the structure and he would do the technical aspects of putting it together so our skills worked well together in terms of complimenting each other. Due to the nature of my role being within the post-production section, which I could only really contribute to after the seminar was over I also helped out in some of the pre-seminar tasks. This included coming up with a set of questions with Gabriel and Ruby prior to the event and also talking through with Candice the questions, once both our host and back-up host were ill. Therefore, the major problem that arose through the process of hosting our seminar was our two hosts becoming ill and not being able to attend the seminar. This required a great deal of team work in terms of going through the questions and key topics with Candice as well as being on top of all the other elements that had to go into play to put together a great seminar.
Refer to: http://hannahfilmtv.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/editing-seminar-footage/
Proactive Learning
My proactive learning came in the form of going to see documentaries and also attending a masterclass on documentary filmmaking. I felt that I made a conscious effort to immerse myself in the field of documentary, which really helped when it came to formulating questions as I already had formulated some through my reflection on documentaries. In reflecting on the documentaries that I had seen as well as the masterclass allowed me to be more aware and also more involved in putting this documentary seminar in place as I felt that I already had key knowledge in terms of what made and didn’t make a documentary work. This also became incredibly important when it came to formulating the highlights video as I could dissect what was important in terms of relaying this to an audience. In conjunction I felt that I technically learnt some new skills in editing with Eric, the more you do something, the more you learn and I felt that this was clearly evident through this collaboration.
Participation
Most of our group collaboration and participation was done through a Facebook conversation in conjunction with our weekly class meetings prior to our seminar. In these collaborative environments it was difficult to participate fully due to the scale of the group and having all different members working in different areas. I was able to participate more when we broke up into our separate groups. In our separate groups participation was easier and there was a better dialogue happening between each of the groups, which worked a lot better. In terms of my own levels of participation I felt that I always made a conscious effort to respond to facebook conversations if appropriate and attend most of the editing sessions with Eric. However,I felt that I could have participated more in the final editing of our highlights video. Whilst I participated with Eric in the earlier editing sessions it got increasingly harder to make times that both of us could edit. I felt that I could have made a more conscious effort to finalise the edit with him.
Refer to: http://hannahfilmtv.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/is-this-reel-life/
Connections and intersections
One of the most valuable things I learnt through putting together this seminar series is how happy people are to talk about what the are passionate about and that networking is one of the most valuable things to take out of this course. Being able to approach people, even if it is simply via an email can be really difficult and daunting, yet really there are a lot of people that are willing to help you out. In conjunction to this it is really obvious to me that the value of the seminar series, is that you learn a lot from a practical perspective the ins and outs of documentary, not just in terms of content, but how to realistically apply what we have learnt in subjects such as ‘True Lies’ and ‘TV2′ within an industry-based context. For instance, some of Dennis Smith’s real documentary scenarios allowed you an in-depth perspective on what it’s like to deal with difficult subject matters and how to ethically approach documentary scenarios. What I have learnt about myself is that I still find it incredibly difficult to network, to approach people and to be confident about what I am interested in and I think this seminar series along with my own Personal Networking Report have encouraged me to become more sure of myself and confident in the skills that I have learnt throughout this course. However, at the same time I have also figured out that my previous career interest in being a Project Manager is not really what I want to do anymore, because I feel I don’t have that extroverted quality in terms of contacting and speaking to people, which is needed for this role.
Overall, I found the process of putting a seminar together quite challenging, yet extremely rewarding, mainly due to the content delivered by our fantastic guests. In our hosts both not being able to make it I felt that I learnt a lot about not getting flustered and the importance of being really organised to put swift actions in place to resolve the issue. This ability to resolve an issue comes not only from yourself but from good collaboration between yourself and your group members.
Role:
At the beginning of the semester we delegated certain case studies for each group member to focus on throughout the semester and to write 2,500 words each per relevant case study. We then would come together to write our conclusions, introductions and put the whole project together. My Avaaz case study role stayed pretty static throughout the semester, however my role in terms of other components within the group dynamic did shift. For instance, throughout the semester we had a lot of trouble pinning down the exact relevance of our project, we knew it was relevant we just had some issues defining what they were at getting to that point of absolute clarity about them. My function within a lot of our group meetings was to get us to the conclusions that we needed to move forward- we often had lots of discussions yet it was often difficult to take bits out of these discussions and turn them into tangible actions for us to move forward as a group. I see this role as an organising role as my job was to figure out what direction each of us should move towards, while still maintaining and sticking to our overall topic. This often became very difficult as our case studies were quite different (which was good), yet made it difficult to gel them together and to define why it was relevant? By the middle to end of semester we eventually got there with the fact that we as media practitioners have the ability to change the image of an organisation, etc. What was most difficult about this in terms of my role as organiser and attempted solution giver was that the solution was really murky and what I realised was that not everyone views media ethics as really important and that really sparked us to think how we can convince these people that it is.
Progress
Researching is always really exciting for me as I really enjoy following leads, that lead you into new and exciting adventures that really expand on all your knowledge and help you bring everything all together. This research project was rather difficult as there was never this static topic to research and expand upon like a cinema essay or the likes. We were not given a topic, but had to find our own, and ours never seemed to be static. Our project had one major topic shift from grassroots vs astroturfing to social responsibility in relation to corporations and grassroots. Therefore, it was important for me to re-structure and re-think how I was going to move forward. This was done through our brainstorming group sessions as well as thinking about key words. This was important in terms of looking and helping me search for new sources in databases, and also in thinking about what is at the core of this research, what is really relevant, and therefore being able to dissect what I really needed to research away from what was on the surface. This helped me to organise my research and find new sources. In terms of other research organising I would always make sure I summarised each source of research either using EndNote or in a blog post. Due to the amount of time given to this project it was important for me to know what areas I had covered and to re-look at key points of that research as a refresher. In terms of my strengths and weaknesses I think my main strength comes in being organised and having a wide breadth of research and my weakness comes in terms of putting all that research together, structuring it and actually beginning to write. This is always a massive hurdle for me and I have to spend days structuring, thinking and making sense of everything that just seems to be a massive muddle in my head.
Strategies:
We set out our research strategies in our original brief in which we would use primary and secondary sources to obtain our information. I always tend to research with the same strategy in mind and that is to start somewhere and follow threads. For instance, one of the first articles I read was a news article on the Avaaz website being ‘Can Avaaz Change the World in a Click?‘ in which I found some key threads to follow- one of them being clicktivsm. Clicktivism ended up being very important to my overall report as it allowed me to find the link between the media as interpreters of Avaaz and that for Avaaz to be more socially responsible it has to use its criticisms as stakeholders to make their organisation better.
Collaborative strategies are always difficult as you have to consider each other member and come to some form of consensus. Luckily with my group we didn’t really have to implement a lot of strategies as we worked quite well together. One of the strategies we put in place was that at the beginning of every meeting we all have a chance to discuss where we were up to (such as coming with an abstract of our research thus far) in our research and what we had found out. This became integral as Aysha’s findings in researching anti-astroturfing at the beginning of the semester allowed us to realise that the differentiating astroturfing from grassroots wasn’t integrally important anymore. I would definitely implement this strategy in further group projects as it allows all members to feel as though they are contributing.
In terms of my personal learning strategies it is important to be really critical of the relevance of what you are doing and often I would come to group meetings and have this brilliant idea and other people would think that it wasn’t relevant. Within, a group dynamic it is integrally important to come up with a strategy that always allows you to think about how your personal learning will be relevant to your own research and also your group’s research. I think this is really difficult and a strategy to overcome this would be to constantly think about the relevance of your project to your audience. Rachel kept pushing this and I realised that we didn’t implement this strategy as much as we should have as then we would have come up with what our project was about much earlier in the semester.
Problems:
The major difficulty I faced was in coming up with your own conclusions. When not a lot has been written on a certain subject due to the fact that it is quite new it becomes really difficult to use what you can gather and turn that into something tangible. For instance, clicktivism is a very contentious subject and therefore most of the sources were articles written pro-clicktivism or anti-clicktivism and then from this you have to figure out what is more relevant. In my essay I was originally going to simply suggest the pro-clicktivism side to the argument, but realised that it is important to objective. None of these sources are purely academic in fact they are mostly opinion pieces. Therefore, the problem comes in being super critical of each opinion and looking to contextualise these arguments. In being able to link clicktivism back to issues of authenticity allowed me to overcome this problem as it provided a more academic framework.
Another problem was that we had the impression that people would already really care about media ethics, which was soon disrupted by Eric who claimed if McDonalds gave me $5,000 to film an advertisement I would do it because I want to be a filmmaker. At this we were shocked and it became a problem in terms of our original idea to provide a criteria of media ethics. What we realised was that we couldn’t take the moral high ground and distinguish what we good and bad, but to make our relevance part really objective and give people things to question rather than providing a criteria.
Connections and Intersections
What I have learnt the most about my learning practices this semester is that having group meetings are really important- being able to sit down and discuss issues on a weekly basis is integrally important and just giving time to nut out all the little bits of pieces can only be done within a group context. From this I learnt that presenting problems is integrally useful as a lot of the time one of my group member’s would have a solution or tell me it isn’t all that relevant anyway and therefore being critical is also integrally important. All our problems made our project all the bit better as all the problems allowed us to see the flaws in our project and question what we were doing. Therefore, I kinda view our project as growing from our problems and difficulties.
In the presentation day I first had the impression that what we were saying had no relevance to any of the other projects, because it was so different. Ours was about what it means to be an ethical media practitioner whereas others discussed television, film or convergence culture. However, what I realised was that our project could be applied to a majority of the other projects. For instance, in the project about American indie films and taboo subjects there are two very different moral practices taking place. The filmmakers’s morality comes from wanting to show the truth, to show things explicitly because that’s what happens and why shouldn’t we have the freedom to show it. Whereas the classification board’s morality lies in protecting youth from seeing things beyond how old they are or what their parent’s wouldn’t want them to see. In other projects such as Australian content on multi-channels asks questions such as is it the moral obligation of television stations to show content that reflects the people that are living in this country?
This semester has been my best semester of blog engagement most definitely because I was most interested in this course. I feel that in the second half of the semester I have really worked on reflecting and blogging about the project itself, group work and resolving issues with our project, which I think was lacking with previous blog posts. I also think I have made every blog post worth it, none of the posts are rambly, well maybe a tad but they all are significant in terms of reflecting or sorting out information or just finding better ways to do things and actually thinking about what I have learnt, which I think shows my engagement with the course. As for that digital dossier it went very unnoticed and I regret that I didn’t make a conscious effort to watch some of those documentaries and was simply due to a lack of time and also my need to be really focused on our own project and our own editing that I got very wrapped up in this. In hindsight it probably would have been really worthwhile to step back from our project and see something else to get some editing inspiration or maybe something would click. However, I think I made a really big effort to use the screening and apply this to documentary on a general basis and my own preceptions of it. I think it is important to make the most out of everything you see or do and that does mean critically reflecting on these things because they do mean something. I also think it’s important to use your blog as a reference point, which shows through some of my more dull posts which just outline things we have to do or dot points about what I am thinking about. It’s good to write things down so you don’t forget and I did use my blog to do these kind of note taking exercises, though probably did not indulge into these further and explain them later in following posts. I also feel that I made a really big effort to reflect and spend the last week after our film was finished to really try to figure out what went wrong and right and what I would do better next time and also what I have learnt about my own filmmaking and what I enjoy or don’t enjoy. Therefore this is definitely my most personal blog because at times I almost feel that I am trying to find myself through writing, which I really enjoy and therefore I actually loved blogging. I articulate myself much better in words than talking through it so I also used my blog as a way to communicate with my group sending them links to posts because my blog got to the heart of what I was trying to express. Overall I got a lot out of blogging this semester in terms of cementing my ideas and sussing out if they are fading or solid ideas that can tangibly be brought into our documentary, which I am really happy about. On one final note: Documentaries are much more enjoyable to make than drama and I think in comparison to last semester that really shows through my blogging.
