Making Media: A journey to remember

Time flies, one of my first journeys at RMIT is about to end. After 3 months of relentless learning, I'm eventually looking back and ask myself: "Honestly, what have I learned throughout this Making Media course?"

Lucky me, all of my precious lessons here are both academic & personal; none of them outweighs other because to me, they have taught me numerous values for my own journey of Truly Living.

As far as I know, 'Media plays a very significant role in keeping everyone updated about the various events around the world. It's also the best medium of communication for the mass audience. With the help of various media like electronic media, print media, and web media, the mass communication method is accomplished in a suitable way' (Almerja 2018).

Firstly, I've learned about Producing a podcast, from A to Z. Before entering this course, I used to listen to the podcast whenever I went to bed but still, I thought that Making a podcast is way out of my fingertips. Now, it's surprised me that I even have a complete Podcast about an intriguing topic: Speakeasy bars. In terms of techniques used in the progress of Podcast Producing, I've significantly learned to: Distinguish between different types of Micro, How to use the Zoom recorder & the Isolation Shield wisely for a successful Recording process; especially now I know for certain all the steps needed to write the script for the podcast, from the initial step of creating & accumulating ideas based on the main topic. Thanks to this first assignment, I've gradually improved a weakness in my personality of being a Perfectionist, as I am always overthinking & overcomplicating everything; which severely affects the productiveness of individual work as well as the working process of my whole team. Our team had to Scripting (especially my Advertising part) and do the recordings over and over again until it met our expectations of making a decent podcast so that everyone can enjoy it.

Secondly, the process of Teamworking to do our assignment 2 of "Creating a 12-page magazine" is probably the most memorable experience to me after this course. Academically, I got to study all the fundamentals to create a proper Magazine, which was also about the topic of our previous Podcast: Speakeasies in Vietnam. Every week getting to the Making Media classes was such an eye-opening experience and an enjoyable time to me as I was brought into a whole new world of Creativity, Designing and Generating practical media products. Although "Creativity is limitless", there are still borders for it; with the help of enough Designing rules & theories, Creativity is under controlled to not passing any professional ethics. Specifically, I was also mind-blown after obtaining in-depth knowledge about various fields of the Mass Media industry, namely: Photography (How to work well with the digital Cameras: Aperture, Shutterspeed, ISO, etc & What makes a good picture: Rule of thirds, Leading lines, Lighting, Coloring...), Typography (differentiate Serif & Sans Serif...) and Graphic Design rules (Layout, Grid, The use of Shapes & Lines, White space, etc). Personally, what makes me remember the most for the rest of my life is the tricky situation that my team had pushed ourselves into. Because of our poor time-management skills and dangerous hesitation, we unintentionally left the deadline for the Magazine draft consultation with our lecturer: ms Linda to the last minute. Ms. Linda's particular, clear, and straight feedbacks towards our draft was the foremost "slap in the face" for us to seriously rectify ourselves. We had no choice left but to either redo the magazine from scratch or get the lowest marks for this second assignment. Subsequently, we stayed awake that whole night before the deadline to work on the magazine again together. We even had to hire a motel room to continue our highly-concentrated flow since there was no working space (coffee shops...) available for us at midnight; we were so rushed with nonstop phone calls from our parents, urging us to get home as soon as possible. At the end of the day, after submitting the magazine, we all deeply realized the significance of having good time-management skills by prioritizing our tasks.

OUR NIGHTLIFE PHOTOSHOOT FOR THE MAGAZINE (17/12/2020)

Thirdly, here I am, working on my website for the final assignment. I've never expected that one day, I could build a personal website like this; it's like a dream comes true. Thankfully, I can access Wix editor-a powerful website builder tool by using RMIT student account. I like this assignment the most due to its unlimited creativity for each student to freely create a personal website/portfolio that best describes their identities and preferences. Simultaneously, I'm also gradually accumulating all the basic & advanced knowledge to generate the BEST website ever, based on my capability.

Me working on my first website

In conclusion, these are valuable lessons that I had to pay for it. They are not free, yet worth learning:

1. Sometimes, "Simplicity is the best policy"

2. Good time-management skill is the key to Success in every aspect of life

3. For the next semesters, I should choose responsible & trustworthy teammates. They don't have to be excellent students but they MUST show enthusiasm in every group assignment

4. Don't be dependent, I should not trust anyone wholeheartedly. It's the BEST if I can do everything on my own

5. BE QUICK !! "Early bird catches the worm"!

6. PREPARATION IS GOOD. Therefore, I must either self-studying more or taking extra courses (about Using all Adobe tools, Photography, Video editing...) to obtain all the necessary skills & knowledge for these upcoming semesters at RMIT as well as for my future career path!

P/s: Ms. Linda Austin, if you are reading this; Thank you for teaching me throughout the last 3 months! You might not remember me but you are one of the most admirable teachers I've ever met at RMIT! I'm really looking forward to seeing you again as my lecturer for the next courses <3