The trials and tribulations of another collaborative project are at an end. Although the actualization of the initial briefs were never realised, I strongly feel we achieved something of high quality and worthy of some distribution. Albeit maybe not television standard, perhaps something more suitable for a promotion within Social Media.

 

Despite the fact I have participated in group work before, since articulating into this degree mid-year 2017, this was the first assessment which I have completed that focused on the creative output being the most critical element. On the contrary, it also happened to be the most staggered in terms of conception to action. This was attributed to multiple reasons, although mainly surrounding talent availability and his degree of commitment to the project. Unforeseeable yes, however on my behalf, we perhaps jumped into something far too gradiouse to begin with. Stepping back and finding an artist that everybody had the same degree of interest and conviction in could have provided a better outcome. This would have allowed us to be much more creative and experimental with our filmic/cinematic techniques (something which I personally regret not furthering throughout this semester).

 

Artist commitment slowly became the crux of our group, which led to further difficulties leading into the formation of roles and consequently disruptive/dysfunctional actions of some. Despite producing something which doesn’t look entirely amateurish, we never reached the heightened level of performance available by all members. Nothing ever normalised and the project/group felt somewhat un-adjourned.  Ideally, initial time should be focused on the forming of the group to remove subjectivity in the latter stages.

 

Unavoidable constraints also came from things such as; time we had available, family/relationship commitments, weather etc. After determining the initial days to shoot, the artist cancelled on the day of, due to car/mechanical issues. From this we rescheduled, however ended up cancelling a further two days of shooting due to incremental weather (Melbourne’s random ‘Summer Superstorm’). We managed to lock in one day of shooting (retrospecitivly grabbing much more footage than we originally intended). Finally on the last day of shooting with approximately 60 seconds of footage to collect (Date of submission also), the artist cancelled on us once more due to time constraints/moving commitments.

 

From all of this, I ended up juggling between production and directing. I was the direct contact for the artist in question, therefore I felt obliged to both him and the group. Therefore not having enough time to flesh out what I envisioned, took away from the susicintness of the narrative which we intended to present within the video. Special mention to Luka for being so encouraging, intuitive and technically proficient. I knew initially from the outset we could produce something together that would would satisfy us both creatively and aesthetically.

 

Moving forward I hope to shoot more music videos like this in the future. Hip-Hop culture is something I have always been drawn to and i’m interested to see how it progresses, especially in the ever changing context here in Australia.

 

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.