During our First semester of Media Studies, our largest focus, and where I saw the biggest improvement, was in our understanding of Media techniques and representation. We focused in detail on shots, compositions, angles, audio, editing, mise-en-scene, and representation, learning about all of the relevant vocabulary and concepts. This was very useful for our practices with the Media Analysis essay, as we felt highly prepared, with an in-depth knowledge of the content, to analyze the given pieces.
Two other main skills were utilized during the first semester but still need further development during the second semester. Principally, the Media context essay was the skill in which I most struggled, though we only did one practice during this semester. I believe that as we continue to work on this skill in the coming quarters, progress will come quickly. However, there is more work we have to do regarding this skill in reading more sample essays to understand what a successful paper achieves and in a deeper understanding of the content, especially regarding a further deepening in the knowledge of case studies.
The other skill that could use further development in semester 2 is our videography and editing skills. Although we did have projects that were highly successful in developing individual parts of production, for instance, a project solely focused on sound, a project solely focused on editing, and a project solely focused on shots, we still need further practice in using all techniques in unison to create one great project. Given that the first semester was heavily focused on acquiring the content necessary to succeed in the course, there were few large-scale projects to combine all the learned skills. This is something I hope we will be able to practice more intensively in the second semester as we delve deep into developing our Portfolios and embark on projects of larger scales.
Our most recent project, the film pitch project, was a greatly educational project that was highly enjoyable to work on, and perhaps the project where I’ve been most satisfied with the final result. I got along very well with the group I was assigned to work with, and our ideas meshed together well to create a cohesive and creative final project. In the brainstorming phase of the project, each member contributed thoughtfully and built on each other's ideas to create something greater than what we could have each individually created. This taught me the importance of either finding group members who you know you have collaborated well with in the past, or with new team members, finding a way to achieve similar expectations and goals about what you want to achieve. Once we got to the stage of actually completing the project, having a unified vision of what we wanted to create, made the process a breeze as we simply had to put the pieces into the places we had already found for them.