In the week and days leading up to the actual seminar, I was relatively relaxed, thinking the majority of my work was done and I didn’t have to worry too much about what was actually going on in the day. Sure, I said I’d edit together some pre-show footage to project on the screen before the seminar started, and put together a little ‘Star Wars’ style intro and opening text crawl, but that’d be easy, right?

It should’ve been, and in many ways it was, but I definitely didn’t do myself any favours with the amount of time I allocated to the task. Something as getting the right font for the titles and getting them to animate properly took a couple more hours than they thought were needed, and they were a couple of hours I really didn’t have up my sleeve.

There were other blunders too, like when I exported out the opening sequence and didn’t realise I had left a whole chunk of footage in one of the layers that was supposed to be invisible, but wasn’t. This chunk of footage proceeded to obscure the titles I was working so hard on, which would’ve been a pretty embarrassing muck-up if I ended up showing it on the big screen.

Naturally, I ended up having to come in a couple of hours before the seminar started to re-export the videos, and naturally the videos took longer than usual to export. Henry was next to me too also rendering out an animated version of his poster background to use as the background footage for when the guests were talking, and of course After Effects was taking it’s sweet old time too. But in the end, the videos were sitting on our USB drives, and we were making our way across the road to plug them into the screens.

That was when I realised that stuff was getting a bit more stressful than it should’ve been for me. When it came to that moment, I was only focused on getting my USB drive into the seminar room’s computer and getting those videos working on screen. But I wasn’t ready to multi-task, which was the reality for everyone in our group. As opposed to the weeks of preparation for the seminar, this hour leading up to it had everyone running around checking each other’s status, trying to find extra help, or helping out others. Aside from getting those videos on the screen, I found myself trying to work out how the lights worked, testing the microphones and speakers, tracking down other group members who had seemingly vanished into thin air, and helping out with catering.

It was all hectic, but our group held strong, and we pushed through and pulled off what I think was a fairly decent seminar. So yeah. Yay.

The footage that we got from the shoot would only make up a third of the video. Most of the work was still to be done in the edit suite. Finding the right footage of Australian films and filmmakers, cutting everything together, recording the voiceover, grading the shots, mixing the sound levels, finalising the graphics, etc.

We eventually went with using the music straight from the latest trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and also ended up going for the completely over-the-top parody style by incorporating some cheesy Star Wars sound effects over our original footage (e.g. the sound of a lightsaber activating can be heard while there’s a shot of a boom pole getting extended). Chris then loaned his awesome deep voice as the narrator, starting off with some generic cliched lines before giving a pretty impressive delivery of our seminar’s summary.

There were some stresses that came with the process, among them being the fact that we were always in a state of waiting for the guest names to be finalised so we could put them at the end of the video. But with the deadline for the promo video nearing and the guest names nowhere in sight, we had to make do with just not including their names in the video at all. At the end of the day, it worked, and the rest of our group reacted positively to the video. It was a nice feeling after that was uploaded, knowing that my sub-group and I had played our part well and we could trust the rest of the group to do their bit too.

The idea that both Chris and I proposed was, in keeping with the seminar’s overall seminar theme, a promo video in the style of a theatrical trailer for a big budget action film. It would be completely over-the-top with epic music and an epic voice over, all to give the feeling that our seminar was like the next summer blockbuster showing at the movies. The plan was to also mix footage that we shot ourselves of people working on camera, audio and lighting gear, with some found footage of Australian films. The idea and structure was fairly simple, so we were confident we could get it done without too much hassle or stress.

One of the things we were mildly unsure about was the ultimate tone of the video. Sure, it was going to be epic, but did we want it to be over-the-top so much that it was obviously a parody? Or did we want it to just be simply epic, and run the risk of it coming off as unintentionally cheesy?

These were questions we didn’t really have an answer to yet as we went into the day of our shoot, where we set aside a few hours at the end of a Monday for the video team and some other helpers from the rest of the group to shoot the original footage for the promo. It all went fairly smoothly, save for the fact that we didn’t realise that the gear had to be returned within one of hour of borrowing it due to another group having booked it for the night. But we got through the shoot and got all that we needed, we hoped.

My involvement in all of this was mostly as the producer, having organised the shoot time and call sheet. It was an interesting experience, as I’m normally on the technical end of things as a camera op, sound recordist or gaffer. Normally I shy away from being a producer because I enjoy being the one operating gear, and I’m not the type of person that’s comfortable communicating with third-parties when it comes to shoots that require extra locations or talent. But for a small project like this, it was nice to have a taste for that kind of organisational position.

When we first started learning about this industry seminar assessment task, I had my reservations due to the relatively massive size of the group. The past three years most of the group assignments involved teams of three to six, but this one involved about fifteen! It was a bit concerning as I wasn’t sure how we would go about splitting up the work evenly and fairly. With such a large amount of people, it would seem impossible to get everyone to contribute the same degree of time and effort to the project, so there would definitely be some people who would end up doing more than the rest, and others perhaps a little less.

But eventually I learned that, with a good group, this wasn’t too much of a concern. If anything, it was actually a welcome to relief to be delegated a certain area of work to focus on and not have to worry about the whole project. When you’re working in a smaller group, if one person doesn’t pull their weight, you find that you’ve got to do a much larger portion of the work if you want to cover for them. That’s why it was refreshing to be able to compartmentalise, and focus completely on what you had to do and not have to worry on the other aspects of the project.

In terms of my group’s project, my main job leading up to the seminar was to work on the promotional video, along with a small team of some of the other group members. I’ll go into a bit more detail about our process of creating the video, but for now I’ll mostly just talk about how our sub-group worked in relation to the other teams.

As I said, it was a really nice change of pace to be able to focus on a single aspect of the larger project and be able to really hone in on it. Of course, there was a lot of collaboration with the other sub-groups; we were constantly communicating with the poster and graphics team to make sure our branding was consistent, and we were always in contact with those in charge of the guest management and seminar planning so that the information we conveyed in the video was correct. But at the same time if an issue popped up in one area of the seminar preparation, for example the organising of the guests, as selfish as it sounds, it was nice to be able to say ‘that’s not my problem, I’ll let the people in charge of that area take care of it.’

It really came down to trust, the trust that the rest of your group would pull through, and I’m glad we had it. It really did make the process of organising and promoting this seminar much more stress-free and enjoyable, and I’m happy that’s how one of my final assessment tasks in this program turned out.