Teamwork is a fundamental idea in achieving feats that have never been possible before.

Today’s lectorial (18/04/2016) took on two ideas: one, was non-narratives; whereas the second idea was the idea of collaboration. Now to be one hundred percent honest – I got nothing from the first talk about non-narratives. Why? I found it hard to make connections with what Seth was saying and what was being presented on the screen. I also had learned about non-narratives in my cinema studies classes, so it was all old news to me.

The second topic however – collaboration, was something that has inspired me to make videos for a long time. In one of my previous blog posts, I touched on my old videos that I made with friends for YouTube. Long story short; one of the reasons I made videos was so that I could work with my friends. Sure, the videos weren’t anywhere near perfect – but they were really fun to make, and I definitely learned a lot about media production.

One very important thing I learned from working with my friends to make videos was this – THERE ARE THINGS YOU SIMPLY CAN NOT DO ALONE! There was no way in hell I could have held the boom microphone, operated the camera, acted as a character, and edited the video without their help. Collaboration opens doors that working solo never did before. In saying that, I do realize that there can be difficulties in working with friends.

The difficulties I encountered, is that having fun can be quite distracting. Now I’m not trying to be bureaucratic about and say that you can’t have fun when making videos. What I am saying is that having too many inside jokes and mucking about can waste a lot of time in producing a video. And it’s especially critical when you’re trying to cram all the recording in one day. Including all the breaks you have to take in between shooting, you end up not having a lot of time to work with. So when we take all this extra ‘mucking about’ into consideration, it can be quite detrimental to the project itself.

Thus, I’ll make sure that the group I work with for the upcoming project brief four uses the time we have as efficiently and effectively as possible. With a sprinkle of fun on the side as well… maybe.