MI2 Seminar 2

Making it in Melbourne was, in my opinion, a really successful seminar. And to some extent, that surprised me. I expected a fairly generic discussion of how to “make it” in the “media industry” with lots of general “you’ve got to try really hard and be really persistent” comments and not much else. Thankfully, the speakers went into great detail about each of their professions and the seminar became an engaging insight into “real-world” media jobs. I’m fairly into film, and I tend to dismiss any media role that isn’t 100% filmmaking — but through listening to the speakers I gained a better sense of just how much crossover there is within different sections of the media industry. For instance, I thought that Ruedilyn’s job in marketing at Channel 9 would be a mind-numbing job involving number crunching and devising PR strategies, etc. To some extent, this may be correct, but I never realised she’d be directing and producing broadcast TV content for the station under tight deadlines. It surprised me greatly. And while I can’t see myself working in marketing at Channel 9, it struck me that many jobs that I typically dismiss can involve more video production work than I would expect. It was also really interesting listening to the speakers from Bettywantsin.com — the whole multi-disciplined super-media producers who make web/graphics/animation/video deal. It looks fun, but it also looks like a really tough road to go down. They can work from home, the software is relatively cheap and accessible, and the company’s costs are minimised. But you’re competing against thousands of other 2-man production companies who are also working from home, shooting content on a 7D and cutting it on an iMac with FCP.. it just seems like there’s so much of it out there that I don’t know how you’d get an edge.
Anyway. From memory, I gave the seminar two HDs and two Ds for the assessment. I thought that the speakers were all really strong and engaging, and I liked the fact that they were given time to speak on their own. Too many seminars from last year (from what I saw) involved a panel format, and I don’t think a panel allows you to get detailed enough answers from any one person before you’re forced to move on. So, well done for getting the speakers to come up one by one and discuss their professions at length, that was good. The speakers were well-chosen in that they were from sufficiently different backgrounds and could offer differing perspectives and takes on the media industry. Further to this, the use of extra audio-visual material kept the seminar moving and definitely made it more engaging. It would have been good if the seminar host was introduced at the start, as I spent portions of the seminar wondering if he was from RMIT or how he was connected to the media industry, and at times I found that his summations of each speaker’s presentation were unnecessary. The Q&A time also seemed to regress into generic “work hard” sentiments, but that was nothing to do with the structure of the seminar, it’s just the sorts of questions that people ask.
So all in all, I found the seminar to be highly impressive and engaging, especially considering I am typically bored by “non-film” people. I’d give it an HD.

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