The Journey of Discovering Different Aspects of Learning - REFLECTION

It is hard to express your exact thoughts on things you are passionate about. And, my interest in the Making Media course is not an exception.

I used to have a thought of being isolated and getting nothing but boring lessons when enrolling in this course because I had no contact with anyone else in the room and I did not feel the course fascinating to me at all. However, things changed differently from what I had expected. The teacher - Mr Soumik Parida welcomed us with open arms and created a friendly atmosphere in the classroom. And fortunately, although I am an introverted person by nature, having problems with interpersonal communication and discussing things in the group, I had chances to work with supportive teammates. They just came to me unexpectedly and asked me for being their teammate. And for all of these things, I extremely appreciate the time that I have spent with these great people.

In our first assignment, our team had problems with recording our voice because it was our first time that we’ve created a podcast. Due to that, we received a number of negative comments on our voice in the peer review and I was so disappointed about myself, thinking that I could not meet the assignment requirements including the use of recording devices and voice-adjusting tools. However, something within us told us not to give up but deal with the skills that we lacked and started with a small baby step. As Martin Lurther King Jr. once said: ‘You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step’. Thanks to that optimistic mindset, we decided to give it another try - we recorded another podcast. As a result, while we just received an average score for our podcast, we were still satisfied with what we just did and finally understood the working styles of others.

However, the most challenging assignment in this course was creating the 12-page magazine when we both needed to write the contents as well as design our own photos. We were required to achieve critical thinking and aesthetic intelligence, which made me immensely depressed and lose my confidence. Despite being familiar with tools like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, I still struggled with making the most of it and had problems with choosing suitable images for our magazine. After all of that, I decided to step out of my introverted zone to ask my teammates about the solutions to such problems. Surprisingly, they were so supportive and gave me a lot of advice to overcome our difficulties. I then realized the importance of establishing a relationship with my peers, the dedication and responsibility to my demanding tasks. According to Louisa May Alcott, ‘it takes two flints to make a fire’. Thanks to this course, I can now understand how teamwork is capable of making the company successful.

We are always learning and exploring new things on the journey of growing up. As we all say, it is a never-ending process and this course allows me to discover so many things that I’ve known yet. The time that I have spent in the classrooms, with my friends and with the lecture - Mr Soumik Parida was an unforgettable experience. There are no words that can describe how I feel and how much I respect all these brilliant and beautiful people.

After this course, I have just made a commitment to myself that I would always give myself a chance to learn, to observe new things and build a mutual relationship with new people because one person can help to know one thing you have never discovered.

Chasing the future favourite - Why not?

I’m immensely into the quote from Thomas Carlyle that feels like the intellectual enlightenment:

‘Habit is the deepest law of human nature’

I did not even recognize that till I read this quote, then I realized that we all grow up with our habits whoever you are. Some people might prefer to read books, while others’ perennial favourites are playing chess, football, etc. Personally, journaling something then uploading it on your own website is my preferable choice and I probably keep doing this in my foreseeable future.

I love to inspire people. I love to cultivate a positive mindset towards situations when I was just a young kid. So if being asked about what kind of topic I want to write about, it would be motivational vlogs. It allows me to discover the lines of people’s thoughts and their actions towards a situation when bad things happen. I do all these things due to the fact that I’m in love with people’s smile, I act on people’s happiness. When reading my optimistic thoughts on things, I really hope that people will find themselves in my words, and feel an urge to continue their journey of changing their world instead of temporarily shutting the reality away.

Reading tons of books and quotes about life motivates me to write this kind of blog but I don’t want to keep saying the surface things over and over again like: nothing can hurt you, … The things I hope to bring to my audience is the ways to overcome such mental difficulties such as ways to easily start meditating, how to immerse yourself in pages of books, …

I know that the decision of beginning this blog is quite obscure at first. However, I just don’t want to let the fear of the unknown ruin my mood and stop me from pursuing my goal. I’m willing to deal with the tough times because I’m aware of the ups and downs in life. I will always remind myself that I’m staying on the right track, and there’s nothing could prevent me from doing my things.

Can children's voice be heard?

The image was taken by Dannah Gottlieb, who achieved the aesthetic quality in photography and his picture capturing the climate strike of children in New York City on September 20 was listed in Time Magazine top 100 photos of 2019. The image of children standing out to raise their voice against the environmental problems left me a huge impression the moment when I first saw it. It led me to bend my mind to the composition of elements that contribute to the success of the photo and some kind of thoughts immediately sprung up to my mind.

Firstly, the presence of children makes the photo much more emotional and catchier than usual. In retrospect, over the past decades, we always shifted the responsibility of tackling global concerns onto adults and blamed them for what they did to the environment. However, as the people have changed the way they address the problems, children – the new generation – decide to jump in and give a hand to thoroughly alleviate the environmental problems and raise awareness of the community. They make every endeavor to amplify their voice and to show adults their willpower and hope as the way the children in this picture did. Through the lens of Dannah Gottlieb, I could see how brave and enthusiastic the children were when being in the climate strike – it was a clear proof of the children’s powers and that everyone can make a change to the society. From things mentioned above, the impact exerts an enormous impact on me and pursues me to contribute something to the community.

Secondly, I can see Dannah Gottlieb’s talent of utilizing black-and-white photography, which allows the photo to look more formal and serious. In addition, the absence of color could act as a catalyst for the viewer’s concentration on the main subjects without being distracted by unnecessary colors. In technical terms, the photographer was expert at optimizing the use of camera, which allowed him to capture the special moment of the climate strike. By picturing children at the strike with noir setting filter, high speed, aperture and medium ISO makes the photo accurate and perfect.

To conclude, I can see the photographer’s attempts at not only capturing the moments but also spreading the children’s voice out. After all, I concur with the idea that the image can somehow affect others' emotions like the way it affected me.