Oh man, where do I start?

We all know that collaboration can be a tedious process. A lot of good can come out of it, and a lot of bad can come out of it. I guess, when I was working on this project, I noticed two things:

• Working collaboratively opens up opportunities and directions in which you never thought you could go. It also gives you secondary opinions which keep you grounded.
• Working collaboratively can also be messy when there’s two or more minds that aren’t exactly on the same page.

The main thing I learned, however, was that the key part in the process of collaboration is organization. Everyone must be organized, and on top of what they’re doing at all times. Writers need to have a finalized script by a certain date, actors need to be organized as soon as possible, and crew members must be aware of specific dates. Everyone must also be aware of the organization of their fellow group members, so that there is room to adjust schedules.

Being the slightly disorganized person that I am, there were a couple of things that fell a little behind schedule. But because they were minor things, I assumed it would be fine, and that we could just quickly plan it before shoots and such. But by the time we actually got to the shoot, these tiny things that we were planning to quickly organize beforehand completely threw us off. One of the main things that made things a little messy was that we hadn’t finalized the costume arrangements. The night before, we had a minor disagreement about the order of costuming, which resulted in a complete rearrangement of it. This completely threw us off, and so, halfway through the shoot, we realized that the costumes used in the first section of the footage didn’t match up to the costumes in the footage we were about to shoot. So we had to readjust the costumes according to what we had already shot. But in doing that, we also messed up the order that we were supposed to be shooting the scenes in. So, overall, it was a bit of a nightmare.

On top of this, because scheduling was a mess, we essentially had one crew member at a time on set, which made things quite difficult. And so, nothing was logged, the audio files are all over the place, and some of the camera angles look really dodgy. This should make editing a… fun process.

So, in the end, I guess the main things I have learned in this process of working collaboratively, is that everyone needs to be organized, everyone needs to be aware of everyone else’s organization, and nothing is changed last minute.