To paraphrase Styx: it’s high time I (we) gave you an update on my RMIT journalistic educationary ventures (start a revolution). Ahh… great album.
Yes, so as I was saying… I’m now in week 4 of uni, studying my post-graduate diploma in journalism at RMIT and it’s going pretty well. Pretty, pretty, pre-tty… pretty well. I believe I’ve now established myself as “the funny guy” (or at least, one of the 3). It’s great. Going to uni is a ball! I’d forgotten how fun it was. Everyone else in the course is awesome. We all get along like a school on fire and coffee, baked goods and doing the various daily newspaper quizzes as a group has quickly become a regular mid-morning ritual. Such is my future-focused mind, I already know I’m going to miss this in 9 months… All the more reason to make the most of it.
You may be wondering what these photos are. You may not be. You may not even be reading this. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. These photos were actually taken on our first day. We were given the task of going out and finding a few notable Melbourne locations, swapping contact information and taking pictures to prove we didn’t just go and drink. I like this one in particular. It looks like the anchor team from a TV newsroom:
Might help the illusion if we were standing in front of a bank of cameras or a news desk instead of a tenant index…
Speaking of TV, we did vox-pops last week! For the uninformed, vox-popping is when a guy takes a camera onto the street and sticks a microphone into a stranger’s face to get the opinion of the man (or woman) on the street, often to hilarious results. Despite my years of community radio and various straight-to-the-Internet video experience, I’d never actually performed a legitimate vox-pop. Indeed, I’m quite a novice when it comes to the field of vox-poppery. So I teamed up with fellow “the funny guy” Lachlan Cowlishaw and headed down to Burke Street Mall (not far from where I had lunch with Richard Marsland 2 years ago, actually). We had no interest in examining a serious issue, and so asked various street-walkers (as in “people walking by,” not “prostitutes”) “if you could have a dinner date with anyone in the world, who would it be?” It was A LOT of fun. Damn it was great to get back in front of a camera again. I really love it. And we got some pretty good responses too. A few dud ones of course, but that’s to be expected. This week we’re editing them and then in late May (apparently) they’ll actually appear on C31’s “Newsline” (which I also get to host!). THIS is why I came to Melbourne!
Oh and just by the by, yesterday whilst waiting on Swanston Street for the tram home, I noticed 3 separate RMIT vox-pop teams setting up in the vicinity of the Victorian State Library. Undergraduates. They have to do vox-popping too, evidently. So, knowing that THEY don’t know who I am, I went up to each of them in turn and provided joke answers to their seriousy-type questions. Hehehe! Someone sometime is going to watch back all that footage and see the same idiot (wearing the same white cardigan) being obnoxious on a variety of issues! And then later down the track still they’re going to see me actually hosting the show that’s broadcasting them! Hehehe… ahhh… Meg doesn’t find this nearly as funny as I do…
Oh yes and one more thing… I was ACTUALLY on Seven News Victoria Tuesday last week! My good friend and fellow RMIT “journo” Ben Hagemann and I hopped off a tram (again, at Burke Street Mall) and were accosted by several Yarra Tram ticket officers. There was also a TV news crew on the scene. Now, whether or not we were actually fare evaders on that occasion is irrelevant, but rest assured, the situation resolved itself appropriately. That night I switched on the box, delighted to see myself (from the chin down) in the background of some story about the disabled and passengers with prams having difficulty boarding some of Melbourne’s older trams. I have a recording. It’s available upon request. Here’s a still though: (that’s me in the red shirt and black pants!)
Kind regards,
TV’s David M. Green
That’s right! Ohohohoho… hmmm… mmm…
