Did you have any issues in the making of your work? If so, how did you overcome them?
The only issue I can think of occurred in the editing phase. It would have been beneficial if I made myself more available to meet up and edit the piece as a pair, rather than doing a lot of editing solo at home and bringing it to class/to our occasional meetups. Obviously, it’s impossible to do everything together in class and so there will always be some measure of balancing what you do as a group physically and how you can edit by yourself. Perhaps we could have skype called while editing to include Jana a bit more in what I was editing at home. However we were constantly communicating on facebook, so that made things easier.
One way we overcame the difficulty of not being in the same room when editing as much as we would have liked to, was outlining what we need for the next week/session. Whenever we met up, we left with very clear, specific goals of what each of us wanted to get done before our next meet up, which in my opinion made for a very efficient editing process.
What makes a good collaborator?
I think being open to new ideas is an incredibly important facet of collaboration. It’s very well to have your goal and a picture of the piece of media you want to create, however very rarely can you bring that exact idea to life to-the-letter from the pre-production phase. There are always things that come up or interesting new ideas to incorporate and one should always be open to hearing how they can change/adapt the piece to improve it.
Another important element is gratitude. If your aim is a successful collaboration (and thereby creating a successful film) it is incredibly important to make sure your collaborator(s) feel like their input is both important, and received well. If you continue to disregard someone’s input, they will stop giving it. Fostering that open floor in a group is always essential to getting the most out of the collaboration.