My innermost thoughts and emotions on group projects:
Thank you Tsunamarama.
I am an ENFJ. I find great pleasure in leading a group, sticking to a predetermined agenda, and ensuring everything goes to plan. “P’s get degrees” is most definitely not my motto, and success (whether in grades or friendship) is the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, the nature of group projects tend to create a conflict between having a strong personal work ethic and maintaining the peace/adapting to everyone else’s ethos. I can be a bit of a coward when it comes down to calling group members out on their ‘neglectedness’ of the project.
My group, STeve, saw a mix of five very different personalities, all with different work and communication habits. I value presence, conscientiousness and absolutely despise tardiness – these values sometimes leaving me an a “STeve: population 1” scenario. Some members connected with my ethic, others didn’t – but that comes down to the overall experience of group work. While I found it frustrating at times, I’m relieved to have it all come together in the end, and feel as though our different interests and life experiences applied well to the project.
I think reflecting upon our collaboration ultimately comes down to the three Cs:
COMMUNICATION
STeve communicated consistently via our Facebook group, as it was the most effective way of reaching each other. This also aided in keeping the group on the same page, and enabled us to archive any conversations and deliberations conducted for later review. In terms of sharing and working on content, we made use of our Google Drive folder, sharing scripts, storing footage and collaborating on presentations. Although easily forgotten, the media server located in the editing suites also stood as a tool for communication, as we could knowingly access our footage independently, and use this to create a our body of work. While there were moments of miscommunication and missed transport, there were no major issues that affected our working relationship.
COOPERATION
When it came down the the nitty gritty, my group cooperated really well. Once on set, we’d typically get stuck straight into production, often with the motivation of a dying camera battery flashing at us. Every group member was generally always on the same page, and we balanced each other out in the pre, post, and production stages. Although works of fiction, I feel this natural chemistry is present in the footage we captured. There were no disputes or major disagreements whatsoever.
CREATION
Luckily from the very beginning we all had a similar idea of what we wanted to achieve throughout the course of the semester, and the way in which we wished to go about it. In the early stages of pre-production, brainstorm sessions flowed well and our individual quirks allowed us to expand and bounce off of each others’ concepts and ideas. In the creation of our prototype – production and post – we collaborated succinctly and with ease. Although the process had its highs and lows, it was a challenging (in a good way) creative experience.
The biggest part of the Writing For Film studio was the collaboration process between the Media and Creative Writing students, and from the get go the differences between the students were evident. It was a bit of an eye-opener to the way by which we will be working with different professionals and personalities in the industry, and forced us media students to adapt to the creative writing aesthetic. Although I’m still no writer, it has been great to absorb their knowledge and passion, and apply it to my media-centric mind. Upon review, my experience with this studio has been highly reminiscent of the studio prompt: “what is lost and found if we disassemble the conventional relationship between screenwriting and filmmaking?“. By collaborating with different minds, somewhat of a ‘sweet spot’ was found in the breaking down of the conventional screenwriter/filmmaker relationship. It worked well for STeve, and after seeing the other groups present, seems as though this too was the case for the other groups. Hoorah – success!
