20/10/2023

Video essay for university.
For the student negotiated assignment, I immediately chose to do the video essay option due to my previous experience with editing. I chose to focus on the question “What kind of films should be produced in Australia? Which films have been and are likely to be “successful” into the future.” I chose to focus this around how Australian media can become successful hits internationally. I began with extensive research into some examples I thought of that had succeeded internationally, Crocodile Dundee (1986), the Mad Max franchise (1979 - 2015), and Bluey (2018). I submitted the first part of the assignment and committed to this option. I planned to speak almost continuously throughout the video essay to deliver my research. Over the week, I amassed 8 pages worth of research notes to create a script from. I don’t experience cultural cringe when watching Australian films and thought this might play some sort of factor in films being unsuccessful, so I conducted six interviews with my friends and family to get other perspectives. I also thought I could integrate the best of these into the video essay if time permitted. However, when I reread the assignment guidelines, they had been changed and now stated that voiceover should be kept to a minimum, ruining my plans. I spent the weekend stressing over this. I either needed to save my research and convert it into the written essay option, or save the video essay and change to the landscape question. There was no possible way that I could deliver a presentation on internationally successful Australian films without voiceover. Thankfully, when I raised my concerns with Julia, she told me that another student had already protested the assignment changes, and Julia had removed the ‘minimal voiceover’ section. This allowed me to go all in on the video essay. I began immediately by writing and recording my script, then gathering and editing together relevant clips. Part way through, I realised that I really wanted to mention how important distribution and marketing is when sending a piece of media internationally, but my video essay was already nearing the maximum time. I wrote a brief comparison of The Dish (2000) and Cast Away (2000), and re-recorded my entire script while speaking as quickly yet naturally as possible. This just scraped under 5 minutes. While I am happy with the final video essay, I feel that the topic I chose was too broad to thoroughly explain in only 5 minutes, and I perhaps could have chosen a more succinct topic to relax the pace of the editing.