So that new years resolution went out the door pretty quickly.
It is currently Friday 20th. On Monday 23rd I have my last essay deadline - and with it my last commitment to Uni work in my first year. Has it gone fast? Incredibly. Too fast for my liking. I still have friends who have another two months of work - all the while I'm here looking at two months of freedom.
I have looked at many things in my time at Uni and I think now is the perfect time to look back and reflect upon what I have learnt and studied in my first year.
FUTURETAINMENT: WIKI'S
One of our first assignments was to present a published media ideology in the form of 'Wikipedia' style pages. I was placed in a group alongside Josh McDowell, Elicia Powell and Kay Shutts and given the book 'Futuretainment' by Mike Walsh.
In 'Futuretainment' Walsh gives his theories about how media distribution will work in the future - suggesting that the generation who have grown up with the internet will decide the latest trends and not the distributors. It was a very interesting read - especially for me who had recently come off a Media Studies A level course in which I discussed about something similar to this - and I found talking about led to great discussion. However, the idea of writing an article to describe the book was less appealing as I felt that the topic had to be talked about and not directly explained. It was this suggestion that led to our team in fact recording this piece of media and putting it on our wiki:
"PLAY"
The next idea we approached was the aspect of "play" in the media. Initially I had doubts about this as I doubted the idea of studying what was basically "fun" and how it would link to Media.
However, despite these initial doubts this line of study did lead to me creating one of the funnest tasks I studied in my time in Uni. As a class we were split up into pairs and told to design a game for the Screen School. Together, me and Mark Nugent created the game of "Paparazzi". Keeping with the theories set by Johan Huzinga that "play is tense" and creating a media related element to it in keeping with the setting we set up a group of eight players. We told them they would not to have to do much - the only objective they had was to avoid being captured from an unknown 'photographer' who was in amongst their ranks. The photographer's aim was to take as many photo's of members of the team as possible. Mark and I placed ourselves in the game as 'Admins' - generally looking over the game and allowing players the chance one chance to 'guess' the photographer to aid their cause. Mark made a video showing the game in action, the aftermath and our final thoughts.
NARRATIVE - GOOGLE MAPS
As a class we understand the importance of narrative and story telling. As film-makers we all strive to find the best ways of getting our story across to our audience. In these sessions we looked at alternative ways of portraying narrative other than film. One of these was through Google maps. To look at this more me and Nicohlas Deas created a comical story of 'Mojo - The Train Detective'. Taking its humour from mocking 70's detective shows - we even included a sound track of theme shows from shows we were in effect parodying such as Cojack. The story can be seen here.
This interested me as I liked the idea of using non-natural techniques to tell stories. Upon seeing other groups works with their Google Maps stories I wish we could've expanded ours to include other elements. I feel I will be looking at using these methods in the future with my own private projects.
NARRATIVE - JOHN PLACE
Our final project was looking at how we could tell a story through social media sites. We looked at examples of 'fake vlogs' and how people played characters through medium of videos on YouTube and interacted with other people. What interested me was how other people, not knowledgeable that what they were watching was in fact a character, got so emotionally attached that they were incredibly upset when the truth was revealed.
Mark Nugent, Ian Gardener and I created the character of "John Place" - an arrogant, ignorant music lover who believes he is a free spirited thinker. We tried to expand John on a range of social media outlets including Facebook, Tumblr, and Soundcloud.
Facebook
Tumblr
Soundcloud (song: "Facebook Sluts")
