Media Literacy and Its Importance
LEAP 5 Individual Reflection
My overall experience of collaborating and creating media while working under deadline pressure is positive! There were a lot of interacting pieces to put together to get this project finished, but it was a huge learning process. From getting over the uncomfortable feeling of reaching out to someone to be a partner, to learning how to use a whole new media platform, I learned a significant amount about how to apply the media literacy skills we have learned in class through this project.
The main highlight of this collaboration and creative media production experience was seeing the finished product. Watching the video over for the first time after having all the pieces put together I was so surprised with what my partner and I were able to create! It is surprising how it started with a google doc brainstorming with comments and bullet points and links to videos or websites to a full four-minute educational video.
One lowlight of this project would be the balancing of each other’s schedules. There were many times that my partner would message me stating he was working on the video, but I would be at the hospital for my nursing clinicals. Then there would be times that I would tell my partner I was working on the project and he had an exam or work. It almost felt like the stars had to align for us both to be on the google doc at the same time. While this may have been difficult, this also may have been beneficial in the aspect that we would put our ideas down, and then the other would look them over and offer further ideas or critiques to combine our ideas.
One last highlight I would like to mention is how this project encouraged us to search and explore not only topics we are interested in but different media creation platforms as well. When I was younger me and my friends in elementary school would create iMovies using our parents’ iPads, and a lot of them. I enjoyed using the Adobe Creative Cloud Express because it is similar to how iMovie works, but it is collaborative so my partner and I were both able to contribute. One downside of this platform is that both partners cannot be editing at the same time. While this wasn’t optimal, this worked out well for me and my partner. He was more of a night owl worker and I was more of an early bird worker. We would reach out over text in between every few additions to keep each other updated and check in on what they thought about the additions. I feel that my partner and I were both very flexible in regards to how we communicated and went about this project which is what made working together so easy.
All in all, my experience of this project is positive, and this may be partially due to having such a cooperative and easy-going partner. While our time schedules did not line up most of the time, a lot of our ideas did, and they meshed well together throughout our video. I absolutely loved this project, I feel that it allowed us to apply and reflect on what we have been learning throughout this semester with a peer we’ve connected with through discussions posts or previous LEAP projects.
