deekhoo

This week has pretty much revolved mainly around getting my PNR first draft done. While I initially began wanting to write my PNR on travel journalism, I explored greatly my passion for television and possibly working within a big network. This, I have to attribute, has been sparked quite largely by the Start Me Up seminar. Finding out how close these jobs that seemed so far away before, (like a dream or ambition you make up in your head when you’re say, 10), sometimes make it that much scarier to reach for and possibly grab. That said, I spent two days researching the XYZ network after listening to Carlos from last week’s seminar talk about their wide umbrella of channels -including the travel channel. After all that research, however, I have decided to head back to my initial drawing board and I will come back to my passion for television in time to come I’m sure. But I have to work on ONE thing at a time I reckon. And letting go of travel journalism is not a good way to uphold that. That decision made, I’ve started to go back to what I had before and have tried to get in contact with some people I worked with on a Japanese travel show a few years back. This way I could incorporate travel journalism with television. Also, I’ve looked at some local travel magazines and television shows. Taken note of some of the people involved and will shoot them e-mails to ask if it would be alright to interview them. A good person I reckon I can interview for the moment is Karen Trist. She’s already agreed to an interview to I’m excited. She’s teaching Intro to photography  at RMIT and I remember her talking about how she’s contributed to a number of travel books and magazines to I’m sure she’ll have a ton to share on the topic and hopefully give me some insight into how to get myself started up in that industry. Looking forward to the interview. I love traveling!! 😀

till next week…
-end-

What an apt way to start the seminars. haha. alrighty. Notes from the seminar:

GUESTS:
-Carlos Sanchez aka the [V] roll Application Video dude! (Nickelodean XYZ Network)
-Annie Fox (TheVine.com)
-Jonathan Lim (Freemantle)
-Ed Howley (Advertiser<-> JUNIOR Website)

lifeatthebottom.com

“Tea Party” once a month meet up to talk about advertising. Networking opportunities
-set up group discussion topic.

[V]roll.
-classifyed advertisements prove that advertising revenue is there to be made. Presenting the opportunity to be more creative and allow companies to get out there more.

-look for jobs even when they aren’t listed
-don’t be afraid to fuk up.
-internships can go a long way.
-never underestimate freelance work <website/cards>
-social engagements
-networking> start a website, form meetups.
-freelancers: think about WHO you’re pitching to.(i.e who is the company and who is their TARGET AUDIENCE?

ALSO IMPORTANT: SUBMIT INVOICE (unless you don’t want to get paid.)

Ideas for festivalheads website:

-research: Baybeats 2006 theme? (note style and sections)

steering committee needs:
-bio
-brief
-reflective video.

-circus theme?
-curtains?

sections
-bio
-info
-video of seminar
-photos
-highlights
-reflective video

seminars start next week. i don’t believe it.

-end-

Very glad to be in my festival themed team. Everyone is enthusiastic about out topic and many ideas for guests and areas within festivals that we’re all curious about. I can see how we can make our questions revolve around these areas. Guests wise, I suggested bringing in Matt Crute. He manages one of my friends- Tim Mcmillan. So I’ll e-mail him within the coming week or over the weekend. Imogen also suggested her father who works at ABC radio. Andy also suggested someone who he knows who’se involved in music festivals as well. And with MIFF wrapping up in a few days, getting someone from that would be amazing. I think Miriam might be able to get someone from the angry film festival as well. We’ve also listed roles within a festival that would be ideal to have
-store manager
-publicity (PR)
-Event Creator
booking agent (Matt!!)
-ex-graduate in any of the above areas.

it would also be good to put together a showreel to play at the start of the seminar. But right now priority lies in confirming our guests. Also, we’ve delegated roles and confirmed our group members. ( I know, I know, it’s a bit late….) The areas we’ve been split into are (1)Tech team – this includes the web team as well as the members in carge of the technical equipment on the day of the seminar. (2) PR team – in charge of sending out invites as well as printing and putting up the posters as well as sending out e-mails to invite people to come for the seminar. (This includes creating facebook event). (3) seminar host – in charge of researching guests and regulating conversation as well as topic relevance on the day of the seminar.

The date has been set as well! Week 8 -September 18th. As well as the name of our seminar- festivalheads.

So my task this coming week involve e-mailing Matt Crute as well as the steering committee to let them know I’m the contact person in our group. AND start on the design for the website.

oh what a week.

So the seminars have been decided today and it got a bit messy because I suppose everyone’s in the same boat- not really knowing what they want to do. Also, I suppose a lot of people wanted to be in the same group, no matter what was being done. It happens from primary school, all the way till we hit the working world. I suppose somethings just don’t change. Not that I’m terribly affected by it (or that I don’t do it myself). In fact, I will openly state that I do exactly the same thing. Back to the seminar topics though, everything got slightly confusing because making a definitive decision that would steer the rest of the semester (and the next 10 weeks in fact) isn’t something you just plonk yourself on a seat and hope everything will work itself out. So I did chair hop a little. At first I placed myself in a group with Rachel and Jaquie as I really wanted to get into film and they wanted to work on a seminar revolving around starting up an independent production company. Which I thought was fantastic. I really want to learn about making sound for film and possibly writing for film soundtracks. But about ten to fifteen minutes into the discussion did I realize that I probably could be or should have been doing something a little more related to music. Since at present that is my #1 career choice.  Scanning the room I foud a web/internet group, two starting up groups, another film group, overseas distribution group and (cue bright lights and epic drum roll) a festival group. So I quietly apologized and excused myself from my sear and made my way over to the unassuming festival group in the back corner next to the door and found that I had finally found my group. Talk was made on setting up a google group and I was assigned to and offered to come up with IT development and the design component. I reckon we’ll lock down roles next week or in the time before that. It’s going to be awesome!

-end-

Today we were split into different groups and were asked about what subjects interested us within the media industry. It’s scary to think that I’ve spent the most part of the past (almost) five years studying how to work in different areas of the media but now, when push comes to shove, I find it hard to put my finger on one thing. To be completely honest I have come a long way in that time, and I’ve slowly but inevitably had my passion for not only media, but the importance of communication increase ten-fold. But back to the issue at hand, there were a number of things my group brought up that were written down during the mass discussion that happened later on. Amongst there were:

-video might have killed the radio, but the internet will bring it back to life.
-freelancing: how to survive
-starting up a freelance production company in the digital age
-getting a job overseas
-how to market yourself
-how to market yourself (& make money) as a musician in the digital age.
-Web/communication 2.0

It’s going to take a while to find out what field I really want to work in after graduation. But I suppose that’s what these seminars are meant to do. Open doors and give us a better idea as to what goes on in different industries. Next week we have to officially decide what group we want to be in and what roles we want to take up. I’m seriously considering doing the website for the whole thing, but I do reckon it’d be good to experience what working in a group of about 10 people would be like. Decisions, decisions.

-end-

This is exciting, while I’m extremely tired, (as I’m sure a majority of the cohort is during this period) the finish line is in sight and this is indeed the last sprint -for this semester at least.
This blog post will reflect within my Digital Radio Research group [consisting of the very talented Mr Daniel Greenwood and Jim Thompson] the grades I feel I deserve as well as reflections on
•my Role,
•the Progress my group has made over the past four months,
•the Strategies in which we conducted our research and came to forming the content on our website,
•Problems we might have faced along the way
•and last but not least, Connections and intersections.

Before I start on these sections, there are some reflections I would like to make about the course itself: Media Industries One. This probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway- no one gets as excited about research as we should. Well, not media students anyway. The enthusiasm when the term research comes out in any brief for a project can sometimes be brought to an all time low. This is an observation I have made even while I was getting my Mass Communication diploma at Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore. An argument I have made to a couple of my friends (some of whom are studying communication and some who still have no clue at all what it is I do) is that as aspiring media professionals, or media creative directors, or more simply put media content providers, we crave to [magic word:] create. Give us a blank canvas, an empty space, medium or vessel and we will find a way to create something out of nothing. But give us books to read and/or theories to study, and we will, more likely than not, shut down. While essentially requiring research, Media Industries has, in fact, the element of research -but when it boils down to it, what the course has pushed as all to do (and I think, after the presentations in week 13, we did) was to indeed make that connection as to how this research we have done can become knowledge and something we can use to become media experts in that particular area. And just like that, with a little change in perspective, the whole project transforms from a boring research assignment, to an adventure to find out what lies ahead and the potential for us to be completely employable, simply for the passion we emit while we talk on end about the topics we have so lovingly and interestingly tried to find out more about.

My Role [HD]
It makes me smile thinking about the first tutorial when everyone gave suggestions as to what they wanted their projects to be about and things they were interested in. James, Daniel and I knew from the beginning that radio was what we wanted to get into, and from there the collaboration began. Recognizing that my role never started out a fixed one, I have noted the process of how it has evolved, and where it’s at now. When first being asked to name our roles for the initial project brief, we decided I would be the project manager in terms of bookkeeping and editing- I requested for such a role as I know I’m relatively skilled in formatting long research essays -be it in word, google docs. or just online. Also I was in the middle, having met all my members -Daniel G, James, Daniel Z and Marianne, before this course. You could say I was the team coordinator as well, trying to get everyone to come for our weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 1:30pm. Simple a task as it sounds, proved to put me time and time again, in an awkward position. Sometimes people would not show up, or worse, say they would and then not show up, which is fine but there was no call or warning that it was going to happen. As the semester wore on, I grew to expect these disappointments. After a time it became clear who the core members of the group were, and work was redistributed accordingly. I believe that between the three of us, there is no need for a team coordinator as we’re all relatively close and the importance of the project is felt mutually. We always make time for DAB, and the boys go crazy (I love it) with their theories, and ever growing knowledge of what might happen in the future given the crazy potential of DAB. More on this later (if I get into it I might not stop! Their enthusiasm is contagious) as I continue with the second role I fit myself into.

All of us had to do research, so this was a role I braved with hyped enthusiasm, and my expectations were very much met as I explored BBC Digital Radio and was blown away by what they had done with their new channels, as well as their online presence. This was what we (The future of Digital Radio group) had to achieve, if not better. Soon after, we started working on the website, and while I’m still dipping my feet in the shallow end of flash, I must say, it looks pretty good. Hopefully getting it up online won’t be too much of a chore, and you enjoy the interface as much as I had fun designing and creating it. Here are a few pictures of my initial planning and Daniel and James’ scribbling what they had in their heads for the home page:

initial messy ideas. puttin' 'em out there.

james and danny's drawing skills displayed

What it turned out to look like:

Digital Radio group home page.

So this was my last and current role – webmaster (and encourager, or so I’ve placed that upon myself. Positive attitude is everything). I wear it with pride.

PROGRESS [HD]

As I’ve mentioned in the section above, my group recognized changes that needed to be made and roles that needed to change, responsibility that was never pushed around but rather taken by the horns and dealt with. Dan and James never cease to teach me life lessons throughout this semester, and while there have been, on more than one occasion, times where I was lost and confused, they never made me feel too stupid to ask to be kept up to speed. (Unless they were joking.) (I hope.) That said, in a previous post I mentioned how our meetings got pretty out of control in terms of coming up with ideas, concepts and getting passionate about Digital Radio which were indeed infectious and even just working on the website I felt part of a group that was not just researching or creating theories for the sake of a project, but saw how this was relevant to their future and this was the time they were picking up and creating tools, skills and knowledge that would make us assets to the Radio industry in the future.

Being a group of musicians (yes, Daniel included), Radio is in so many ways part of the career that we so hope to build on and understanding the potential of Digital Radio and possibly having an influence on it gave us all the more reason to push ourselves to the next level. James has come up with a section on the website that explains why he believes there is a need for a new Radio culture, not just between the audiences and Radio, but also between the Radio and new artists, weather they be indie or pop. Side tracking a little I know how difficult this can be as I released my album as an indie artist in 2007, and being independent, I refused to use a big label to distribute my album as I knew the cut they would be getting, from not doing very much at all. For them, that is. To independently distribute the album I had to call as many CD stores as I could to ask if they would either let me sign a consignment with their store, or ask them to buy a certain number of CDs. While tedious, it did mean that covering the costs of my album was not hindered by a middle distributor and all I took was a couple of drives to a number of places (Singapore’s a small country) and some less-than-heavy-weight lifting. Getting in touch with the radio DJs was also crucial in getting the albums sold, thankfully they put my songs on relatively high rotation and I attribute a lot of my sales to the radio airplay I received, as well as the CDs the station bought to give away at road shows. All this is said so I can prove that James’ theory would work out in a positive monetary manner for indie bands or artists and I’m living proof that it can happen.

As a team we know our strengths and weaknesses which is why as the semester went on, we slowly defined our own roles and took on responsibilities which tasks we knew we could perform the best and there has never been dispute amongst us in terms of anyone doing more than someone else and this made our progress that much smoother.

STRATEGIES [D]

I can say for a fact that Daniel G and James have somehow ignited a flame in me for radio that while I thought I had before, completely switched me around, turned me inside out and opened my ears to the infant screams that is Digital Radio, waiting to be nursed and cradled into the world. Our consultations with Rachel were so helpful as we had the main idea, which was to find out what the current situation was in Australia with regards to DAB, find out the full potential of DAB and figure out how we could bridge the gap between traditional FM/AM Radio to Digital Radio, making full use of the knowledge we found about the potential of DAB and applying them in terms of content and business models. With our minds clear with the objectives and what needed to be done, Rachel always had an amazing way of rearranging our thoughts into a cohesive map, in which Daniel would Omnigraffle to make look swanky and ‘digitized’ (or rather electronically organized- colour coordinated too!) and these formed the skeletons to the huge amount of theorizing James was about to get into after Tony Walker’s talk about the participatory culture and the evolving audience. That monster comes in a little later. We based our research around case studies of Radio stations in countries that have already started to take on or make the transition to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). James also created a wetpaint site for us to put all our findings in! The two main countries and radio stations that we have focused on and found to be relevant to the Australian Radio industry are NPR from the United States of America and BBC from the United Kingdom. These two stations are the leaders in Digital Radio as it stands and a huge reason for this is that they are state-run and their bottom line is not the first thing on their minds. BBC Radio also has really good and clear-cut policies that they work within for the better of the people. As more research was done, it became evident that when listeners are placed in priority, a station will flourish. This is the post where I list these policies out.

As theories such as understanding that audience loyalty and participation is key to success we came to realize the multitude of implications this had. We went on to finding out that the actual box that used to be the radio is slowly but surely becoming redundant. I still remember the meeting when this breakthrough occurred. I’m pretty sure we called this realization: ‘screw the box’ or ‘to hell with the box’, you get the picture. This is when convergence culture and James’ theory became even MORE relevant as we decided that now, instead of there only being two set backs of Digital Radio; the first being DAB’s lack of sturdiness as compared to the more hardy FM/AM has and the second being the ridiculously high price for the receivers, there was now only one (this is if we adopt the ‘screw the box’ idea). The realization that people were receiving radio through their laptops, mobile phones or pretty much anything that had a connection to the internet just proved that digital radio was pretty much already in use in Australia. It just hadn’t been channeled in a more obvious way. (If that’s confusing, what I meant is that if we listen to the radio over the internet, we’re technically listening to digital radio!)

To get to these amazing realizations though, we did hit a couple of walls. First when it came to research, all we had to go on academic wise was pretty much the projects that had been done on digital radio by previous groups (and Rachel had provided those links to us), so to be honest we (or at least I) had for the early part of the semester performed rather dry and uneventful research. Also, I realize that if I started working on the website and there was something the boys didn’t agree with, I would have to redesign everything again, replacing animations, stages and layers. So after a time I realized that even though there are times I feel like I’m doing nothing, I’m saving myself time undoing it and redoing something else, I’ve mentioned in my PP1 final blog on creating the AVA logo, is something clients are guaranteed to do – therefore, good learning experience for me.

PROBLEMS [D]

To be honest I love Daniel and James, and working with them was a joy for me (although sometimes I don’t understand the jokes and just laugh along, the point I take note of is that I’m laughing). They work hard and play hard- this in itself is a skill I have tried to hone and they have it pat down. So, as Daniel would say, I ‘watch, and learn’. I supposed the only two problems I can think of was the initial group members whom we did not get the chance to work and collaborate with. The project is a pretty heavy one and two extra people would have meant a lot more could have been done. In conjunction with that is the second problem- the lack of interviews. We had initially lined up a couple of interviews with industry experts, however this the work load that eventually piled up, especially for James in terms of PP1, there was suddenly a huge gap of enthusiasm and we had to make up for this later on.While I go over it in my head I wonder if I did enough to keep us all together, I can’t help but regret not being a little more annoying in hopes that would have made a difference. From this I learn and will be more persistent next time!!

CONNECTIONS & INTERSECTIONS [HD]

As I have mentioned before, and pretty much throughout this blog post, I believe my group has indeed shown, beyond even the research factor, the passion they have for the topic we chose: Radio. I guess some innate part of me has always been devoted to radio, having majored in it in polytechnic- in fact attending a radio conference two years ago in Singapore where they talked about the possibilities that radio was, or right now is, taking. It’s amazing how the things you love are right in front of you and you never realize it. Having been part of this group and seeing the professionalism Daniel, as a DJ for SEN, and James, as an experienced performer and also radio major student, have shown me convict me that much more of how much I love Radio and as I continue and aim towards working closely with radio or in it, these is no doubt in my mind that having done this assignment has helped boosted my credentials.

On working in radio with regards to our website and it’s content –
Even though our suggestions for Digital Radio is to completely recreate the structure, understanding the past/history of it and what other countries are doing is essential to avoid mistakes, further exploring what has worked and becoming more daring to take risks. I have taken pride in creating the website that houses our findings and suggestions/visions and believe that this re-introduction to flash will also add value should I choose to take up a career in radio. As Rachel stated at the first tutorial, by the end of this course we should be experts in the areas we have researched in, and I believe that my Digital Radio group has not only become experts in the history and current landscape of analogue radio and digital radio (as expert as we could possibly be at this point, that is) we have become theorists and hopefully influences to the future that is to become Digital Radio.

As a side note, i must make mention of Webbed TV. I have to say, this is indeed my favourite MI groups aside from my own as I’ve watched their process and progress, it’s very clear and enviable, the passion they have for web TV. Garner never ceased to astound me with his blog posts, and his gem of awesome webshows that he never ceased to share or at least make the rest of the bonza lab aware that he is enjoying something new –through his infectious laughter. Also, now I can, with their research, tips and suggestions, work on reviving my failed attempt at a web show (which has now turned into an acoustic web series – an inconsistent one at that) (that’s right, I have no pride, please visit and leave your comments and requests ^.^).

In conclusion I beleive overall I deserve a HD for the effort and heart I have put into this project, contributing where I can, the best that I can, and believing, in turn receiving (what I believe to be -in full), all the course has to offer.