I am actually not sure what my expectations were going into the first assignment. I guess I didn’t feel ready for some of the roles, but other ones I perhaps did. I did the host role (which I wasn’t expecting to do initially), as everyone else had a strong preference and I wanted to save being director for a different assignment. I suppose I definitely did consider it an exciting challenge for a couple of reasons, primarily that I enjoy being in front of the camera to a similar level I enjoy being behind it, and in the long-term, being able to do both in a manner in which I have a decent amount of creative control would probably be ideal, so I found this as a good starting point to dip my toe into that aspect of things.

We tried to achieve something similar to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2014-), and me being host probably helped with that. We wanted to create a satire piece which is obviously comedic but genuinely focuses on a topic and highlighting an issue. In that respect, I think we achieved what we tried to do quite well. Our primary challenges were getting the issue across in a short-form segment, as opposed to having a long time to focus on it like they do in that show. Technically, we actually didn’t face many. Watching it back, Darcy did a remarkable job as vision switcher and Coco did also as director. It definitely felt more polished than I was expecting.

Speaking of our group, we had a great bond and I think we did really well in collaboration. We created a document (see a screenshot from it below) that ran through the idea, the type of questions we wanted to cover, and a rough draft. We all were good at building off each other’s ideas and honestly, it was one of the few group assignments I haven’t hated.

References:
(2014) Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. New York, New York: HBO.