Vintage fashion trend

Not in a million years would I think there would ever come a time where people could wear the clothes our grannies used to wear back in the day. I remember, growing up as I would browse through my granny's old pictures and I would just be like “what on earth were you wearing, I’m glad that fashion has evolved because your fashion sense sucked". Little did I know that I would be in the year of 2015, where the clothes I used to mock are the "in thing". 

Vintage clothing has made a comeback as a trend among young people and I have based my last feature package on the fashion sense trend.

Basically, the inspiration behind me choosing this topic is because almost every day I am surrounded by people wearing vintage clothing around campus. As versatile as City Campus is, this style of clothing is trending among students. So the main question here is “Are young people pulling off the vintage look better than the previous generation?”- Well the documentary and the crowd source opinions will help shed light on this.

By the way, choosing this topic was not as easy- even though the inspiration was right in front of my eyes. With this being the last assignment and all, I wanted to exit New Media with a bang! Yes, a bang because I did quite well in the previous assignment and this time I aimed to do better in every aspect. I noticed all the minor errors I did in the previous documentary and all I wanted to do was correct all those mistakes.

Okay, this was my initial thought but as always there are mishaps by the way. Well, I own my personal video camera so usually I do not get frustrated in terms of booking equipment and everything. This time was quite different, I discovered that my camera doesn't work- for reasons not known to me. I had to borrow the school camera and as I was shooting I discovered that the battery was low and that led to me having to cancel the shoot.

In terms of the shoot, the sequence was quite simple- taking a few shots of people on campus wearing vintage clothes, take a few shots at a vintage store ( to witness the reasonable prices) and getting at least one interview. This initial sequence of events was simple and straight to the point with no exaggeration but I had to change everything in terms of sequences but the ideology is still the same. I did not get a change to shoot at the vintage store because they refused.

All in all, as challenging as it was- it was interesting and YES I now have interest in vintage clothing and seeing how reasonable the prices are, I’m going vintage. Who knew an assignment would be such an eye-opener in terms of my fashion sense? Well now I do. That’s it for New Media 3- it’s been real.

Feature Documentary Clip

Telling a story in the form of documenting someone's life has got to be the most interesting thing about television production. This method of storytelling not only allows you great execution, but you get to hear and see the story from the horse's mouth.

For our first documentary this year, we had to produce a feature package on an accomplished South African who has not been given media coverage in the mass media. Taking my first look at the brief, the words "undiscovered talent" came into mind. Well it was not entirely true because with undiscovered talent, the person is not yet accomplished, because their talent has not been discovered yet.

I had a lot of searching to do in order to make sure I stuck to the brief and found an interesting person to base the documentary on. I then found William Zondi, a street kid who has travelled the world due to his talent in surfing. He basically learnt surfing after he spent some time hanging around the shore in South Beach, Durban. William still lives on the street and hustling while trying to get another sponsorship after he lost his previous one. He is a positive young man who does not let his background define him as a typical "street kid".

I really enjoyed doing this documentary on William, because I am hoping that the little exposure I gave him will somehow be of great help. He was not a difficult person to work with, even though sometimes I would go all the way to South Beach, only to find out that he is nowhere to be found. This was caused mainly due to communication breakdown because he does not have a cellphone. We overcame this little obstacle when I decided to take all the shots I need the next time I saw him.

I would have loved for the documentary to be longer than it is, because due to the brief, we were only allowed to shoot for a maximum of 90 seconds, which was quite a challenge.

All in all, it was once again a great assignment and I hope I did justice in telling William’s story and who knows? Maybe the mass media might cover him eventually.

Online speech -based news package

 A speech is a spoken expression of ideas or opinions, which is delivered by someone who is speaking in front of a group of people. It is usually based on one ideology. For this news package, we had to find an online speech on YouTube and thereafter produce a news story based on whatever speech we chose. We had to access speeches not older than five years. I initially had no idea which speech I was to use because I had to consider the angle I would use to write my news story and I wanted something that would relate to people and get people discussing, especially since I once again had to use social media platforms.

I therefore chose a recent speech. I took the budget speech that the Minister of Finance delivered on the first week of March. I knew this speech was going to be relevant and I was going to achieve my goal in terms of telling the story. As much as I would have loved to base my package on the whole speech at large, I could not due to the word count. I had to choose one angle and I finally chose the one with regards to the increase of social grants due in April- specifically the child support grant.

The grant is due to increase from R315 to R330, which is a R15 difference. With the rise in teenage pregnancy and the high number of dependents on the grant, I thought I could tackle this issue especially this slight increase for such a huge demand of the grant. As always, I took this to Facebook and tongues got wagging. I knew I had hit home when the comments kept coming. All was not smooth, especially since we all know how people on Facebook tend to find something to joke about even in the most serious issues.  But that did not phase me at all because majority of my Facebook friends are intellectually opinionated.

I think since I have been doing New Media for a while, especially since I am now focusing on it, people actually recognise the things I post on social media and this helps build up my multimedia journalism profile.

The news story I had to write was quite short- which was limiting. I managed to get quotes from people who are dependent on the child support grant in order to make the story more interesting. My interviewees were quite co-operative and everything went well in terms of the story execution. The rest of the story was the facts and quotes from the minister’s speech.

This was another package that I believe I gave justice to in terms storytelling, engaging with the audience and choosing a working angle. I am already looking forward to the following feature package which includes producing a documentary.

                                                                                                                        

Data Journalism

Reflective Piece

As we got introduced to data journalism, I got to familiarise myself with the type of articles that are based on data from reports. For our first assignment of the year, we had to find a report from any organisation and thereafter write a report-based article after we had done our crowd sourcing and polls. I chose my report from the World Health Organisation. It is a report based on statistics on the rates of child homicides in South Africa. The research was done in 2009 to determine the child homicide rate in the country. The WHO defines child homicide as the death of a child at the hands of a person other than the victim, with responsibility for the death having been determined through police investigation and a judicial enquiry based on the Inquest Act of 1959.

 After analysing the data on the report, I had to figure out which social network platform would be suitable to execute this package and get effective response and feedback from the general public. I therefore used Facebook to crowd source because I had used it before and for the first time since I did New Media, I did not have to inbox people in order for them to comment and engage on the topic I posted. I guess my topic had hit home, because even if a person is not personally affected, but child homicide also has an effect indirectly to immediate family members or friends.

In terms of the topic choice, well, it did not come as easy. I had initially thought on writing my report-based article on non communicable diseases. My lecturer had approved on this topic but I later realised that I would not do it much justice because it is a broad topic and I somehow had to be limited in terms of which angle would work best.I had a problem with my poll. Basically because people do not normally pay attention to links on Facebook, so when it came to my poll I had to ask people to vote. It was no issue finding links to related stories on the topic; I discovered how big an issue child homicide is as I read through articles and the websites created specifically for it. 

All in all, this was an interesting assignment, mainly because I was not just required to write an article. I had to analyse information, sift all the relevant statistics and thereafter figure out an angle which would work best and be of human interest. This was a learning curve because I know have knowledge in data journalism, who knows? I might just pursue it in the near future.

News Package 2- Street name changes in Durban

I had already got used to how New Media works and thought it would be a piece of cake. This time around, having done television in the first semester, we had to show our video skills in this assignment. This time we had to produce a video package and the other different thing this time around was that we had to work in pairs. I chose to work with my friend Nomfundo Mlaba and we were such a great team even though it is never a walk in the park doing school work with a friend.

We did the crowd sourcing and we used Facebook as the social media platform.  Even though I had said I would consider Twitter for my second package, but due to the limitation of characters, Facebook was the only sensible option. As much as it was a better option, this time around, there was not that much number of responses from the people on Facebook as before, so that was somehow of the negative thing about the crowd sourcing on Facebook.

So basically this task was based on the street name changes in Durban. Many of the major streets in Durban have been renamed to honour heroes of the liberation struggle. this commenced back in 2012.the main issue here or rather the focus was how ordinary citizens feel about the changing of the street names, taking into consideration that they used the names of Liberation struggle heroes. With September being heritage month and 2014 being the year we as South Africans celebrate 20 years into democracy, we wanted to find out if citizens regard the new names or they still use the old street names.

We chose Broad+ Grey Street, which is now called Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, with this combination; to be honest I did not even know that they were combining to be named as one street under Dr. Yusuf dadoo. This kind of ignorance in me made me question- if other people were aware of the combination or Dr Yusuf Dadoo himself especially since these two streets are one of the busiest in Durban...

We took a walk from Broad all the way to Grey Street, just observing the street in general, the businesses there and everything around. It is quite full of crime and that is another reason why we could not take shots feeling safe because we were scared that someone would steal the camera. 

We only secured one interview because people refused to talk to us, let alone speak on camera. The interviewee we got agreed to speak to us- off camera, we had to use what we could get and we used his voice as a voice over in our video.

I have already mentioned the challenges we had and they were so minor to the extent that we actually did enjoy the experience, especially combining our television and interviewing skills into one subject. 

News Package

While going through the study guide in the beginning of the year, I came across this subject " New Media" and it was quite interesting in a confusing way but I got in the first class  and i just knew that I would love it, mainly because I want to pursue my professional Journalism career in the print media path.

My News Package was based on the elections and was mainly focusing on the "Born Frees" because it was quite significant that they are not only turning 20 this year- in line with our Democracy but it was also their first democratic vote. It was also about the current political system in South Africa and how much it has improved.

What I enjoyed most about this assignment was that I had to interact with my social cedia friends.  It did not even feel like  that much work or an assignment at all because I had to use my Facebook to get people's opinions. However, most people regard Facebook as a platform where only fun is to be had and if you post thought-provoking status messages or opinions, people tend to ignore it because they do not regard what you are posting as fun. So what I did not enjoy the most about this assignment was that as much as some people actually gave attention to my posts, some would just send me private messages on how they find what I am asking my Facebook friends as irrelevant. I then had to explain that it is for school and I was doing it for marks, that was quite my only challenge.

When selecting my story angle, I did not find it as an obstacle because I was aiming on focusing on something that is current and something that most people think about, so I somehow made their thoughts a reality by bringing it out there and making them voice their so long kept close opinions about our 20 years of democratic freedom and how they think the overall elections will go especially for the first time voters. This was a combination of how the born frees think that they deserved to be called "born frees"- whether they are really free or they are in love with the idea of sharing the same number of years with the country's democracy.

As for the interviews, well that was quite easy because I knew my target market because I am also in their age- range so it was quite easy to interact with them seeing that this democratic vote was significant for both me and my interviewees. I took my picture for my News Package on the day of the elections- 7 May 2014, because i found it relevant to capture the young South Africans in action of making their marks at the polling station in my institution at the Ritson Campus.
 
Overall, it was quite a great experience for me, I enjoyed this assignment- flaws and all and I learnt a lot of things during the process, which includes creating a poll on Facebook. Trust me, I have been on Facebook for four years now and I only learnt that during this task. Next time I might use Twitter for my crowd sourcing but I am skeptical about the 140-character rule even though it would be nice to view people's opinions on a different social media platform.