Goodness me….it’s all done!!
What a crazy week it has been…but we made it and I couldn’t be more proud of our efforts!
On the Monday we had a meeting just to go over everything and go over job roles during the seminar set-up, production, pack-up and post-production. Not everyone could turn up to this meeting, so I went over everything with those who were able to attend and we decided to have a second ‘last’ meeting on Friday morning. Also it was good to schedule another ‘last’ meeting so that Shelley was able to attend and help us out with any last minute questions.
I wrote up again a little list of job roles (similar to the way we organising the seminar pre-production job roles) and everyone signed up to what they wanted to help with. I thought it would be a good idea to do this so that on the day, everyone in my team knew exactly what the had to do and we could maximise what little time we have to set up and pack down all our equipment!
Set up and Pack up teams!
Our production manual was completed by Sam many weeks prior, which also included everybody’s job roles during the seminar. Most team members were signed up to a job but I made sure everyone had something to do during the production of the seminar. Sam also devised up schedule for the day, which we did end up editing slightly but overall it was perfect and I was very grateful to have Sam on the ball and handling the production side of things in the week lead up of the seminar.
On the day before the seminar, I quickly sorted out the last minute details of the seminar which included printing out the brochures that I designed with Mia and Kim earlier in the week. I also made everyone a badge to wear, (I think the gold and white texta on pink badges really stood out in the end!) and also my group thought it would be nice to get our guests something extra, apart from the presents the steering committee provided us to give to our guests. We initially decided to get flowers as a group but I personally did not have the money to afford 3 bunches of flowers and I didn’t want to get them cheap sucky flowers. So I got creative and made up some homemade cactus pot plants for the guest! I know this was unnecessary to do but I just think it would nice to give that something extra to our guests, to show how grateful we are that they were part of our seminar!
Cactus pot plants are surprisingly easy to make!
Now for Seminar day….must say my memories of this day are a blur as I was in a constant state of panic (ha ha!). We had our last meeting the morning, ran over everything as a group and spoke to Shelley and away we went!
My idea of having the different set-up/pack down teams worked really well and we all met in the seminar room as soon as we could get there around 3.20pm. Then it was mad rush time! Sam, Matt and Alois were absolute whiz’s in the lighting setup as well as everyone else who helped set up the props onstage. My idea of using black material to cover the chairs actually worked! That was surprising but thank goodness it did!
For a moment before we started we thought we almost had a no-show from one of our guests as it was past 4pm and she had not arrived. I had this moment of panic that I might have to decide to begin the seminar without her…but then literally 20 seconds after that she appeared in the room! And finally we began the seminar!
I gave an intro speech to our audience before we began and it was a bit of a nightmare to say the least. No matter how much I practised the speech, it did not come across on the day as I managed to pronounce every word wrong and I was mortified! I apologised to the guests afterwards and they were very understanding, pretty certain they saw how my hand was about to fall off because it was shaking so much every time I raised my hand to read my notes 😛
But in saying that, It was literally the only thing that went wrong on the day, so many bad things could of happened but they didn’t, so hooray for that!
The actual seminar was so fantastic and everything ran smoothly as it possibly could have. Prani was an absolute star, we could have not had a better host. We were all so proud of her efforts! The guests had fantastic advice for our audience, I particularly loved Helen’s point about how everyone needs to be watching Australian content, even if you don’t like it. AS IT IS SO TRUE! You got to start somewhere, so support the industry that your from!!
I think we really blew our audience away in terms of our organisational skills and fantastic guests, that seemed to be the overall comment we got from our feedback. I am glad those two factors stood out to our audience because as a group, we worked out bums off for this project!! And everyone in the group deserved that recognition!
Overall I think we did such an amazing job. I am really really proud of how hard everyone worked, as like I said before, it really paid off! I think most of my group members felt the same as I did about the project and that is what motivated them to want to work as hard as they did. Personally this topic really matters to me, so when it came down to it, I didn’t feel like I was going out of my way to work hard for the seminar, I just so badly wanted it to be good as it is such import topic that matters to everyone who wants to be apart of the Media industry! I would say half of our Media 6 cohort is female, and we all plan to enter the media industry ,so we need to understand how it currently is for a women in this kind of workplace and hopefully work together to overcome this massive gender issue! And of course this applies to the males, we need to have awareness from all genders to promote a cultural change! I’m glad to see from our feedback that his point resonated with our audience, as we had a lot of feedback about our content being inspiring, which I am also so proud of!
I am happy with my job as team leader (apart from the intro speech), everyone seemed pretty happy with my efforts and kindly told me so at the conclusion of our seminar. I think I was able to delegate jobs out fairly and make sure everyone contributed in some way as well as steering everything in the right direction so it was as organised as possible. I think taking on this role was a really great challenge for me, it’s something I wouldn’t have done about a year ago but I thought it would be a great opportunity to gain more leadership experience and I am really glad I did it. I understand now what it is like to work in such a big team and I feel that I really benefited from it. I hope to be able to adapt these skills into my skill-set for future career opportunities. I also learnt that I really need to practise public speaking more, especially if I want to have a career as a film academic! I hope I made the process of our seminar as smooth and stress-free as I could for my team members!
Go team, we rocked!
