Yian Lin
Podcast Project
Hello, visitors! This page is my reflection on our group's podcast project, a multimedia project that aims for answering the course question: "How Disney represented the norm of gender roles for the social construction?" Our group's project is consisted of a microsite and a podcast. For me, It is an interesting and educational experience to involve in this project. Through this project, I attained some inspirations for the final essay, also, this podcast is really helpful in improving skills on collaboration and coordination. In the following page, you will explore more interesting facts about our project.
Pre-Production--Preparation and Planning
In this session, I am going to choose three moments that are most inspirational for this podcast project and reflect on them.
Moment 1
This is week 3's explanatory writing assignment, which requires us to watch and annotate Beauty and the Beast. Although I did not closely follow the instruction, I think it is my best explanatory writing in this course so far. Through this writing, I attained an in-depth understanding on the movie, and my citations did played an important role in my final podcast. I feel that it perfectly fits in the "openness" and "creativity" from the course objectives.
Moment 3
This is week 6's Outline/Script for Podcast assignment. In the discussion page, each group member shares their outline. Through creating my own outline and reviewing other group members' outline, a basic structure for the podcast is formed. This assignment fits in the course objective by improving the collaboration skills and developing effective habits for your own writing process.
Moment 2
This is week 6's podcast annotation assignment. In this assignment, I listened and annotated a podcast called "Discussing Disney: Mulan". By listening to this podcast, I gained a basic understanding of what our podcast should be like, and the way that the speakers organize their ideas is also helpful to our final podcast. The work fits in course objectives as it improves my collaboration and communication skills.
Production--Creating the Podcast and Microsite
In this session, I will share about the three most important things that I contributed to the production of the podcast and microsite.
Script
For this project, we created a Google doc and every group member adds their own script into the document. I mainly work on the first part of the second segment, which is about the gender role represented by Disney Princesses in 1990s. I also added an additional point about the cultural perception of beauty. Through the creation of the script and podcast, I strengthened my communication skills as well as my writing skills.
Microsite Editor&Researcher
I am the microsite editor and researcher for this project. I basically did the following three things during the creation of the microsite. Firstly, I created a basic framework for the microsite. Secondly, when our group members added their profiles and sources, I re-edited the materials to make them more visually pleasing. Thirdly, I researched for some pictures and added them into the webpage. From the creation of the microsite, I think it is a great practice for improving my creativity and research ability.
Reference Page
One thing that I most satisfied with our microsite is the design of the reference page. I attained some inspirations from the design of model microsite "Cultural Shock". I put the authors, titles and links into rectangular boxes, which makes the page more visually pleasing to the audiences.
Please click the arrow above to access the microsite page
Looking Ahead in Three Paragraphs
Reviewing the whole process, I think one thing I can improve is the communication with the host in the podcast. When discussing the gender roles represented by Disney princesses of 1990s, I didn't have much conversation with the host, which makes it sound more like a presentation instead of a podcast. Besides, I need to read more carefully about the instructions. When creating the microsite, I did not realize that there is a page limit for microsite until my groupmates reminded me. When making a podcast for next time, I need to keep these two points in mind.
This podcast project is my first group project at UCI, and I think the collaboration of our group is better than my expectation. From this experience, I have a deeper understanding on "flexibility" part of our course adjective. In order to keep the podcast going smoothly, every group member makes some adjustments to their scripts. As for myself, I deleted some important points from my script to limit my speaking time into 4 minutes.
In my speaking part, I use Beauty and the Beast and Mulan to illustrate women's gender role and society's perception on women. In my essay, I plan to use Mulan(2020) as an example to analyze women's gender roles in recent-day Disney fairy tales movies. I chose Mulan because she performed a very progressive gender role in the movie. She is the one who challenged and eventually changed women's gender role of ancient China. I believe that Mulan is a representative film of reflecting contemporary society's perception on women.
