Self Evaluation- Taking a Look at Myself

This semester was, hands down, the most difficult and stressful semester I have had yet. Between the high workload of my classes and my job I was extremely concerned about meeting deadlines and getting all of the required work done. I’ve talked to some students who did not meet these all of these deadlines and are struggling to get it all finished before time is up. Thankfully, with the somewhat flexible portfolio deadlines, I have been able to get almost everything turned in on time.

The only project deadlines I have left to meet are the final version of the website, 2 more blog entries besides this one, and the final presentation. My website is finished with the appropriate amount of content but I have some extra content that is still in the works I want to add to my site (a wedding video that you can read about here and here, and a full news broadcast). For the blog I still have to transcribe my interview with media professional Brandon Thompson, and my final entry. Every other project I have met the deadline but I kind of messed up when I turned in initially turned in my blog. I did not start on it early enough and only had 2 or 3 posts when I should have had at least 5.

I also had a little struggle with my website at first but that has been taken care of. With all of the stress I just wasn’t thinking straight and set up my domain name (ardvideo.com) to resolve to Medium instead of Wordpress or Weebly like I had initially planned. Medium is a great site for writing and blogging, but it does not cater to the professional film environment too well. I wanted to have my videos previewed with easy navigation. Weebly fits what I wanted perfectly, so I recently set my domain name up to resolve there and I absolutely love it. I have never made my own website or even my own blog before this one and I am very proud of how it has turned out.

I have turned everything in on time, I just needed to tweak a few things to get it tuned how it needed to be.

Slack has been a great way for everyone to communicate effectively and efficiently. Email works, but it is useless when everyone needs to share their ideas and get feedback. I am still using slack to communicate with others so we can help develop each other’s ideas and make sure that we are doing the highest quality of work we can. I guess you could call it “written communication”, but it felt like more than that. It felt far more engaging than just writing to one another and it was very simple to share my content so others could view it and give me feedback. In the future when I am involved in a group effort where we need to communicate with each other constantly I will definitely turn to slack.

My first priority will be school until I am finished, but many times work got in the way. There were many nights where I had to stay up late working on projects when I had things due and I couldn’t get off of work. I had to re-work my schedule a lot and try to fit as much work as I could into a very small amount of time. It was because of this perseverance and priority setting that I did get everything done and the quality was at least decent. There were some things I would have liked to spend a lot more time on, but I was not able to completely perfect them due to the amount of work versus my schedule. It has been difficult, but I’ve almost made it.

There were many problems and struggles I encountered with projects that I really had to think about and apply my knowledge to fix. One was the sound on one of my videos. I was not able to attend part of the filming for one of my projects and the people that were filming did not correctly hook the microphone up to the camera, resulting in very poor sound quality in certain parts of this video. I did the best I could to turn up the volume and remove the bad sound, but it did not turn out how I wanted it and because it was a news report there was no way to re-film it. Another is the wedding video I have been working on for some time now. It is taking me much longer than I had hoped to finish it. I had to borrow a cheap camera that didn’t have a tripod and the recording quality was far from the best. I have been trying to figure what filters look best on the footage to make it look like I used a really good camera, what speed to set the clips at, what transitions I want to use, and what music to use. The wedding video is especially stressful because it something this couple will keep with them as long they are together. I want to make sure it is as good as it can be so they really like it. However, it is coming together very well and is looking far better than I thought it would.

At the beginning of the semester I did not think I would be able to do any experiential activities outside of class. However, as I mentioned earlier, I filmed a wedding and am working on editing the final product, and filmed a reunion for a reality TV show. Both of these activities required me to bring out my professional side. There was no one giving instructions on exactly what to do, I had to figure it out for myself. That being said, there were many things that was I was unsure how to do. Whether I needed help from other students or the professor, when I reached out they were there to assist me.

In summary, I am extremely proud of what I have accomplished this term. I knew I loved film production but the past few months have really allowed my passion to come to fruition. I am extremely excited for my future work in the professional film field.