Who are the Writing Team?
Liam Morkham – Team Leader
Jordan Williams – Literary Coordinator
Michael Liberale – Editor
Niklas – Production Consultant
Angus Strachan – Storyboard Generator
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What did your group aim to do during the Digital Director?
We endeavoured to create content in the form of scripts, storyboards and other content sent to the other delegated teams. Across the span of the semester, we endeavoured to achieve our aim of understanding how filmmaking has developed in the 21st century. We tried to experiment with our content through a variance of stylistic choices and ideas in each episode to find what worked and what didn’t based on how many views episodes would receive. Feedback was received on what the others teams liked and didn’t like. We also tried to to get an idea on what transposes well to film from the paper. Our primary focus as a writing team was to understand the abilities and means of our colleagues to help achieve harmony. Another focus was to utilise each person’s strength and try to create the best quality content we could in the time constraints. In terms of deliverables, our aims of crafting, writing and distributing the actual scripts for each episode was relatively easy to achieve retrospectively, having an estimate of 4-5 days for each script to be produced, edited and then finalised.
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What did your group learn during the Digital Director?
- Understanding of general script-writing and storytelling ability.
- Learning formatting conventions and structural style of genres.
- How to generate scripts that can be further edited and written in a way that other groups can understand (consistent writing style).
- Character development and story structure.
- How to work on a large production with a big team and maintaining correct and efficient communication within this team.
- Co-operating with a medium sized team of writers on ideas and characters and being able to reach a clear consensus on the production’s narrative and concepts.
- Understanding the means and capacities of our members and colleagues in order to create a product that is achievable.
- Methods of researching, understanding and maintain an awareness of the target audience, their interests and attitudes towards our content.
- Communication between all of our operations in order to ensure maximum efficiency, ie. having all materials stored in a centralised folder.
- How to manage disputes and how to operate with a dispute resolution process in place.
- How to find compromises with other groups regarding any differentiated views and how to find middle ground.
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What was the best thing about the Digital Director? This can be a few sentences as a group or individuals.
“For me the best thing was also at times ironically the worst thing, this being observing how the vision and understanding of the overarching aim can change and warp over the course of a project depending on what works/doesn’t work as well as what the majority prefers.” – Liam
“Being a part of creating a show was simply ‘the best’ (Borat voice). Because we literally got to create something from scratch, our ideas turned from paper into reality. This is a rewarding experience for any artist. Additionally the course was fairly flexible, which allowed us to choose what we learnt. Overall, if Digital Director dropped a mixtape, it would be straight fyah!” – Jordan
“Seeing the amount of effort a project of this scope requires to get produced. The more people involved, the more complex the production becomes – not simply because of the variety of roles, but because of the differing opinions within the group. Nonetheless, it was interesting and rewarding to see these differences play out, and be part of the negotiations around them.” – Michael
“This studio was a great learning experience on interacting with other people to make a web series. It can be a rewarding and also a frustrating process at the same time. It made me realise how important it is to nail the style and the tone of the show you write before putting it to production. I also enjoyed the creative freedom we were given by Mark to create this series.” – Niklas
“The best thing about the Digital Director Studio was working within such a large group and being able to see a singular project evolve from a multitude of people and their visions. Being in such a large group it was easy to branch out to try other things that were outside of the norm or comfort zone.” – Angus