Week 12 has come, and it is still astonishing to me how the Making Media course can pass by so quickly. Thankfully, within its 3-month duration, I have been able to learn many things and grow both as a student and as a professional.
To recap, Making Media is a course offered in the Professional Communication program. The aim of the course is to introduce students to techniques used in creating a range of media, both individually and as teams. Being a highly hands-on course, the assignments in Making Media include creating a podcast, a magazine, and a web portfolio.
Every class in this course was held in a lab room filled with iMacs containing the necessary software to produce a variety of media. Specifically, Audacity - an audio editing software - and InDesign - the industry standard for editorial design - were the two main tools that we were introduced to. These tools were not taught on their own, but in relation to two broader areas - audio production and magazine layout and design.
A few key concepts in both of the aforementioned areas were presented to us to accompany raw software knowledge. In terms of audio production, we were introduced to the process of producing a podcast from start to finish, as well as technical jargon like ‘dead spaces’ or ‘soft’ surfaces. With regard to magazine layout and design, we were familiarized with the principles of photography and graphic design, along with some useful vocabulary to describe elements of a magazine such as ‘masthead’, ‘lead article’, or ‘margins’. While not directly involved in the creation process, these concepts helped guide us in the right direction during our work for the course assignments.
The first assignment in Making Media tasked groups of 3-4 students with creating a podcast on a culturally relevant topic. Aiming to get a headstart, I created my group on the first day of class. However, it was not until week 3 that we began to put in some serious work.
The first challenge we encountered in producing our podcast was simply choosing a topic that was broad enough to be used for both this assignment and assignment 2, which involves creating a magazine. As the leader of the group, I soon realized that I was handling a diverse pool of personalities who each had their own ideas. Thus, the solution was to give everyone a voice to pitch their own thoughts and see whose would fit best to the current circumstances. In the end, we all settled with travel and tourism, a topic that was both broad enough and extremely relevant to the changing tourism landscape of Vietnam. We also figured out a fitting name for our podcast: ‘Xplore’. To me, this was both a relief and a valuable experience in terms of leadership.
Another obstacle we encountered was the 5-minute time limit for our podcast. Admittedly, our first cut went over double that length, and it was not until after several rounds of feedback and revisions that we were able to shorten it down to just short of 5 minutes. Achieving that desirable duration meant we not only had to re-record the audio several times but also ruthlessly edited and cut parts of our well-researched yet lengthy script. A lesson was learnt, and it was something brought up multiple times by our lecturer Professor Jonathan Felix: ‘Being a creative professional means learning to work within constraints.’ At the end of the day, we were able to produce a highly informative and entertaining podcast that met all the assignment requirements. It was the first piece of media we created as a team, and it is still the one I am most proud of to this day.
After the submission of our first assignment, we had less than a week of break before work started on assignment 2. As mentioned above, assignment 2 was all about producing a professional-level magazine with feature articles and covers. While we did not have to work out a topic for our magazine, we were struggling to define what our articles would be. As with any creative work, everyone started out with ample yet unrefined ideas in their minds. Therefore, I encouraged everyone in the group to spend some time doing deeper thinking and research on how they would turn their ideas into actual articles. The result was 4 rather fleshed-out article outlines, each belonging to a group member including me. In retrospect, this highlighted the importance of planning in any creative process.
With clear outlines, my teammates started writing their articles, while I began laying out a few pages. The first draft of our magazine contained a cover and back cover, along with placeholder articles. Having put so many hours into this first draft, I was expecting some favorable feedback from Prof. Felix.
Yet, what I received was almost the opposite. Not only was the name ‘Xplore’ (that we carried over from our podcast) exactly the same as another magazine found online, but our visual style was also highly representative of it. In short, Prof. Felix’s advice was to redesign our magazine from the ground up, as striking similarities like those could mean copyright claims and even lawsuits in the real world. And thus, I was back to square one.
It should go without saying that I was extremely frustrated, not because I had to basically throw away what I had been working on, but because I was shortsighted enough not to have done thorough research on existing travel magazines before I started. Looking back, I realized the crucial role of research in creating a unique identity for my products.
Thankfully, I soon found a way to revise my designs by changing the magazine name to ‘Explor’ and establishing a new 3-color palette, along with a visual motif utilizing the arrow element present in the magazine masthead logo. Just as I finalized my magazine layout and design, another problem cropped up.
To provide some context, the article that I was in charge of was an interview with a woman who worked in the tourism industry. Having edited it to the final draft, I was shocked to receive her rejection to provide me with the right to use her photos in my article. The reason for this was that I did not state clearly where I would use those photos. This was a painful way to learn the importance of clear communication in any working process, but I had to accept it and began looking for another interview guest with just 2 weeks left before the deadline.
Fortunately, it did not take long to find a new guest. Needless to say, I made sure to be very clear as to where his images would appear, and eventually got his signature on the talent release form. Having solved this final problem, I quickly worked with everyone to produce the final draft of our magazine and submitted it on time.
From then on, the only thing left to do was to complete the website created for my third assignment. As the first and only individual assignment in this course, the web portfolio accounts for 50% of the overall assessment.
Luckily, there were no major challenges to come up against in this assignment. The only difficulty was to decide on a suitable web builder. While Wix was the popular option for the majority of my classmates, I wanted to look for something more technically demanding.
As someone with a personal interest in web design and development, Wix was simply too simple and limiting for me, and it did not inform me how the web was actually structured. After going through a plethora of web-building platforms, I settled with Webflow - a tool that allowed me to design websites visually while still aware of the underlying structure. With Webflow, I could enjoy the ease of what-you-see-is-what-you-get yet still picking up some key concepts in HTML and CSS like ‘div blocks’, ‘class’, ‘margins’, ‘padding’, among others. Thanks to Webflow University, Webflow’s all-in-one tutorial platform, I was able to learn the ins and outs of this tool within a week. It then took me less than another week to finish my website and submitted it to Prof. Felix for feedback.
While most of his feedback was positive, he did note that I needed to make my contacts section more accessible and my site layout more responsive to different screen orientations. This brought to my attention the need to always account for every potential audience who might be on the receiving end of my messages, as this is part of what makes me a communications professional.
In summary, along with the technical knowledge of Audacity and InDesign, I have gained so much more from the Making Media course this semester. As I overcame the challenges that came up during my work for all 3 assignments, I not only learnt to become more resilient and solution-oriented but also developed a clearer idea of what it takes to be a communications professional. Team leadership was another key skill that was fostered during this course, as I was responsible for directing and maintaining a team of four. In the end, while the journey so far has been rather bumpy, it was through my mistakes and failures that I learnt the most.
With my newfound insights into the process of working professionally to produce media, I feel more prepared than ever for the coming semesters. My improved capacity for problem solving will certainly come in handy in handling tough assignments in future courses, while my experience organizing and delegating tasks will help me better manage my time and workload. I am also much better at working collaboratively now than I was before, which will allow me to cope with any group assignments in the future.
Furthermore, I believe all of the above-mentioned skills are in one way or another applicable and transferable across a multitude of real-world working environments and disciplines. Besides that, my software knowledge and mindfulness of the qualities of a good communications professional will help me become more competitive in the industry. In conclusion, it would be fair to say that I have grown both personally and professionally through my experience in the Making Media course.