Group 2C
Antoniya Petkova, Jordan Muckley, Bashir Yusuf, Katherine Tysoe, Sarah Myers, Carley Bartlett and Ryan Powell.
The feedback session today started with our opinions on everyone else’s project. We pointed out which ones we liked the most (the favourites were the Coke advert and the Dreamcatcher clip), whereas Spencer wasn’t really impressed too much by any of them, because all the ideas were too stereotypical. He pointed out that students usually tend to fall into the familiar topics and play it safe. Some points came up that our minds are still high-school/college-adjusted or that we don’t actually think of ourselves as producers and of the projects as actual media pieces, but as university students and university work.
It was obvious that we tend to reflect on media products that are already out there, rather than on our personal experience and we portray issues that have been portrayed so many times before and leave out other problems that have not been touched upon by anyone. The conclusion from the whole activity week was that the more freedom we have, the more conventional we turn out to think and produce, which is really disappointing. Or perhaps we were putting ourselves into constrains, thinking about what may not be acceptable or how little time we had, whereby we weren’t actually approaching the project open-mindedly and we didn’t use all the freedom we had.
Spencer pointed out a few important questions for every producer before they begin work on something. They are: how do you challenge the conventional, how do you avoid the banal ideas, how do you get the message across. It turned out from the projects that no one trusted the audience enough and we felt the need to put our messages into phrases and actually tell people what that clip was about, because we were too worried that people were going to be left insecure about the intended message. But then, on the other hand, that might not be such a bad thing – as long as something makes you think and wonder and you actually remember it for a while, then that’s a successful media object.
One good advice that Spencer gave us was when we come up with an idea, we should actually try to do the complete opposite of it in order to get the same message across. We might even make a table and list our ideas and then list the complete opposite in another column and produce that instead. He told us about a very good anti-discrimination video I believe it was, but was actually produced as a pro-discrimination clip. That video did not have a text, a clear message put out for the audience to read, it was just so provocative, that the audience is left in shock, wondering how the producers could’ve actually done something like that. But they remembered it for a long time, exactly because it was shocking. Which is the point – the same message could be put across in a different way, as long as we trust the audience enough to get it, even with the constant risk they will not.
We discussed the problems we’ve had with the production process as a whole, whether it was technical difficulty or conflict of opinions, and we came to the conclusion that it was inevitable to happen in a group of different people. It turned out that a lot of groups had problems with their projects (one group had to cut their clip short, because the main actress fainted and they couldn’t film; the other did a music video, which wouldn’t work, so they went in a different direction; one of our scenes was re-shot 2 times), so it was impressive to me that everyone was actually ready in the time limit that we have and met the deadline (as I am a journalist, deadlines are deadly important to me). Spencer said that it will become obvious by the end which are the people that will create and which will be the ones who edit, as there is a big difference in the way they think and see things.
Overall, the main advice about producing something, anything, was to make something memorable and controversial, provocative and not conventional. If people say “it was alright”, then we failed. If the audience absolutely loves it or absolutely hates it, then we were successful in our production. Just as the saying goes: “no publicity is bad publicity”. As long as people talk about it and remember it, point it out, we succeeded. Because if our project is forgotten the next day, we didn’t really do a good job of getting that idea really out there. And the final piece of advice was not to think of ourselves as university students who are going to turn into producers at the end of the course. We were already media producers; the course was only supposed to help us and teach us more, so that we could do better and know better. And our projects are not just a university assignment, because tomorrow, when we are out there producing and we don’t do it right, we don’t come up with an original idea or we can’t portray it in an original way, we’ll be out of a job in seconds.Labels: tasks |
