To officially begin our project brief 4, my group members and I decided to meet before class and sign the collaborative contract. By signing this contract, we agreed that we would equally contribute our time and effort to this project. while most group project agreements are non-verbal, the written contract is just a friendly reminder how important it is to be active with in the group. Non-verbal agreements are often overlooked but the process of having to sit down and write down our duties as group members, builds a relationship of mutual understanding.

We carefully wrote our contract but our uncertainty of the topic made it difficult to fill out each section of the contract. In class, we focused on our topic of Institutions. We decided that we would narrow our perspective to Cinema and focus on recent issues surrounding that area. Mimi and Alex are both studying cinema and they felt passionately about the subject, I agreed wholeheartedly as I felt like it would be an interesting area to focus on. We briefly explained our ideas to Brian, who kindly directed us to screen Australia and Sean Parker. We looked into Sean Parker’s most recent project, the Screening Room. The Screening Room is a cinema experience tailored for the comfort of your own home. We are yet to look into the ramifications of such a new system but we came to the conclusion that it would mostly affect cinema going culture and film makers.

We also created a Facebook group as we decided a group chat would be the most effective way of keeping in touch. For our upcoming annotated bibliography exercise, we would try to ensure via the group chat that we did different readings. I personally wanted to do more research before deciding on an institution to focus on, my group members respected that my choice. I found that within a group it is important to respect the ways in which other members gather information and make decisions. Within my group we were very respectful of that, I personally don’t make quick decisions until I have researched and read a satisfactory amount of content. We immediately noticed that we all work differently but the key to group work is being able to combat that and work as a group. I noticed that one of my group members loves to do research and the other volunteered to do the script writing because it is her passion. Working in a group is not just meeting up once in a while, it involves effectively communicating ideas and being able to put together something that everyone is pleased with.