New Media 4th semester reflection

The speaker had many exciting experiences and opportunities during their fourth semester of New Media. They worked on a project where they recreated a scene from a movie and learned about sound design. They also visited an editing company and realized there are different roles in post-production. For their final project, they interviewed softball coaches but faced challenges with scheduling, filming, and editing. Despite the struggles, they learned a lot and had a great learning opportunity in New Media. For my fourth semester in New Media, we were given a lot of amazing experiences and opportunities. For my fourth semester of New Media, we were given a lot of amazing experiences and opportunities. The first project we worked on was the Anatomy of a Scene project, where we recreated a scene from the movie Air, a story about Nike landing Michael Jordan. The point of the project was to recreate a single scene shot for shot, edit it exactly like the movie, and then re-edit it however we saw fit. During this project, I was placed as head of the sound department, which I'd never really done before. I had to ask a lot of questions to clarify what I was supposed to do and how to do my job correctly. I learned that sound was not an easy job, as I was constantly under the table trying to hold the microphone far out and high enough without having it in frame or too close to the actor. With the editing side of things, creating the shot by shot was easy. When it came to the re-edit of the scene, where I had to take creative liberty, I struggled. Sometimes I'd have an idea or a vision of what I wanted to do, but I wouldn't have the footage to make it happen. Or I'd have the footage, but it would be from the second take with different actors. Even though this was a struggle for me, I tweaked my original ideas and ended up making something I was pretty proud of. One of the many experiences that was provided was going to Cutters, an editing company that edits for most large commercialized companies. This was an amazing opportunity for me as I got to see what it's really like in the post-production side of the industry. I learned a lot from this opportunity, one thing being that not one person does it all. I knew there were multiple editors, but I thought that they just edited different scenes of the movies or the TV shows. I didn't realize one person edited the clips together, someone else did sound separately, and then somebody else also did specialized effects and color correction separately. This was a big eye-opener for me, because even though I knew how to edit audio and do a lot of those other things, I'd rather just edit the clips together. For my final project of the semester, I decided to interview the JD softball coaches and learn their thoughts on the program, the growth they had felt occurred over the season, etc. I learned a lot from this project, from scheduling to filming to editing. With this project, I struggled a lot with scheduling. I knew this sport was extremely weather dependent, but I didn't really think it would impact my scheduling too much for this project. I had to reschedule one of the interviews twice, and the other four or five times. Another struggle I had to troubleshoot was filming the interviews. I had never worked with the camera I was using, so I didn't really know how to tell what was in focus and what wasn't. Both interviews ended up being slightly out of focus, but it was still a good learning experience for me. My final struggle with this project was the editing process. I wasn't able to truly put together a rough cut till four days before the deadline. This was due to not having both interviews, which I later learned my lesson of getting the interviews after you got the b-roll, because you need to know what to film. Which I later learned my lesson of getting the interviews before the b-roll, so I know what to film. Overall, with this project, I knew it would be a struggle, but I didn't realize just how much, but it was a great learning opportunity regardless. New Media has helped me understand how stories are structured and told. They've introduced me to a great creative community. All of the people are amazing. It's also just been great and challenging to me to learn new things and get better at the things I'm already alright at.