So. Another Brief has finished (almost as of writing this piece) and a lot of different things learnt. Working within a group environment certainly has allowed me to experience something which I’m fairly sure will be a large element of my future employment. It definitely had it’s fair share of excitement, gunfights, explosions, and cars driving between multiple skyscrapers in Dubai… that might have been slight exaggerating, it wasn’t like Fast and Furious 7 that much. What it was like however, was initial confusion to the project, but eventual cohesion towards the final outcome we’ve worked towards for mediums.

The first thing I have to say is that the project from my point of view had initial conflict. At first, I think all three of us struggled with the idea of how we could convey the idea of mediums, and also play to all of our strengths. We decided early on to create something, which would consist of writing, as all three of us had little experience in creating videos. I feel like that was a strength that we had in ourselves choosing. The initial idea within our group was to consist upon the recreation of films from previous mediums like books or short stories into another medium. I feel as if this idea would have had some interesting ideas, but I feel as if this would have become a struggle for us to have three different people working on to create a strong argument for it, or against it. We were fairly open in reflecting as we were going, and were able to realize that we should not only play to our strengths, but have an artifact which reflected diverse view points and ideas. That’s how we decided to evolve the adaption of films, to the adaption of mediums between written word, film and the internet/social media.

I feel that this idea helped us launch into a better argument than what we may have gotten. Also, the idea to interpret ideas about mediums into a website allowed us to make a very interactive artifact which would include videos and photos much more easily than our other idea to have our piece on a PDF. Also, when push came to shove, we were also able to communicate honestly, especially in selecting a video, photo and written extract. I had one and so did James, but we were able to agree upon James’ due to it’s more diverse form compared to mine which was of my dog running into a camera at slow motion speed. Which I’ve got to admit, was awesome, but we were right in choosing the other for this assignment. Another example was when we were compiling our pieces together. James had a piece which initially lacked many other intellectual’s argument. I told him it would help all our pieces if he incorporated some more external arguments from intellectuals, which I felt help consolidate all the pieces and he did that. In short, I feel as if the strengths were that we as a group played to our own strength of writers and were honest when the time came to give each other feedback and compromise.

We also had our fair share of shortcomings though. Our main method of communicating was Facebook Messenger, which does allow instant messaging in theory, however our different schedules often meant some of us didn’t look at things for hours, and confusion and frustration could happen often. I think one way in which we could have improved upon this, is meeting face to face. We did get some valuable minutes through Facebook, but I feel our communicating process would have been less confusing if we met face to face. Also, I feel we left a lot of key communicating, in which we were compiling our Production Dossier, to the last minute as well, and that didn’t help with the stress levels one bit. In all, one of our big weaknesses was perhaps time management, I feel like we left too much to do in the last few days, as well as choosing to communicate in a digital medium which could cause each other to be confused.

Finally, this project has better taught me about the value of communicating and compromise, especially with people you don’t know too well. I was still quite used to the school situation. Either way, it was really beneficial I’m sure, Media practices almost always have some form of collaborating with people you barely know, and I think that was the biggest strength of our piece. Despite the sometimes difficult communicating, we found a way. I feel as if all three of us compromised at some point, and that we found a good way to convey mediums. Hopefully.

Also, heres the link to that site and the final artefact:

– http://projectbrieffour.weebly.com/