Making Media:
the remarkable adventure
12 weeks, neither long nor short, for a freshman like me, I have been through various emotions: timid, anxious, delighted, apprehensive and finally relieved. Making Media was one of the most interesting courses for me. Making Media, where I can be creative and active in doing assignments. It requires me not only to learn but also to explore myself that what I can be good at and how hard I can try to achieve the goals. The achievements that I set for myself when studying this course were to know how to use the technique applications competently, making new friends and having good marks. Looking back at those goals, I can proudly say that 2 out of 3 goals were mostly achieved. I have broaden my network and learnt a lot of things from them.
For the goal: using the technique applications competently, I am still learning it. Even though I know the basic steps and tutorials, it has never been enough for the creativity, especially in this course, Professional Communication, we have to be Professional, not amateur. Among the three assignments, I got a chance to access to the well-known apps: Adobe Audition, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator to produce the podcast and magazine. Besides, this is the first time that I’ve seen and used Zoom, mic, and recording equipments. It is not easy at all when we have to learn and work with new things at the same time.
Those technical applications require us lots of time to know the tutorials and editing. To be honest, I was so nervous and had a panic time while working with it. Finally, I also had opportunity to work with Wix, where I created my own website and wrote blogs on it. This is also another challenge since I have never used Wix before.
For the podcast, I was responsible for the editing part since writing is not my strength. My other weakness is when I speak for a long time, I have the problem of being twisted, so it costed quite a lot of time because our group had to record for me again. Thanks to Bella, she is good at speaking English, so she taught me how to fix my problems. Moving to the editing process, Quinn and I did it together, we spent about more than 5 hours in the studio room. After the podcast assignment, I could see what my weakness and strength are so I can change and improve them.
For the magazine, as I have basic skills in taking photograph so I was in charge of the images and designing. In this part, I got to learn to use lightnings, how to set up for a photoshoot both indoor and outdoor. I spent a long time researching on several media platforms for the layout of the magazine, concepts of the photoshoot, fonts, color board, themes, mood, etc. Our topic is Local Brands so we tried our best to make the most use of the tools we had, so that when the images appeared in the magazine, readers can understand our concept. We spent two days to complete the photoshoot and 4-5 days to edit and design the magazine. It was an unforgettable journey for me.
I cannot express how much grateful I am to my lecturer, Dr. Justin Battin who is the most thoughtful lecturer. The one who always support students and willing to help whenever we have troubles. Justin gave us a creative environment as he always asks us about what our opinions in something are or do we have any ideas, he create a comfortable study space that we do not feel too stressful. Generally, I am quite proud of my teammate and myself, for what we have done and achieved together. I feel thankful for all the experiences, knowledges and skills that Making Media has taught me, I am still learning from it, day by day.