Daily Archives: April 28, 2016

Teamwork or die

Posted on by

I think that if you believe in a Hell it would look something like this. You’d be put into a group with Satan, Hitler and Joseph Stalin and assigned a task that’s due in a week about the difference between amphibians and reptiles.  You’d have to make a poster with your members and you’d be marked individually. Everyone would probably try and lead while you sit there in a pit of fire trying to make up a realistic bibliography fake dates. The stuff of nightmares.

Today I experienced what I’d like to think of as the most preventable and unnecessarily complex issue I’ve ever faced when it comes to group work. We had barely begun our first meeting when tragedy arose. The situation snowballed into a horrid melodramatic debate fuelled by impulsive jabs worthy of a heated episode of Dr. Phil. The meeting ended as quickly as it had begun. If you’re wondering what had caused the chaos it was something very controversial indeed. Yep, it was our meeting place.

-gasp-

Each group member had staggered their arrival into the city and up until this point we had had consistent and reliable contact in our group chat on Facebook. I sent quite an innocent message inquiring where everyone and quickly received a message with someone’s location. I waited with them for more than an hour for the others to arrive assuming they had read the chat. But as it turned out they had been waiting together in the opposite building tempers rising at our tardiness. But we weren’t late we were just blindly waiting for them close by. Apparently they didn’t have any internet to check the chat and had gone by the original meeting spot, not having seen the update.

Of course a group member stormed in, eyes watering with the the sting of betrayal as I retracted in fear.

“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”

“H-here…?”

And so the interrogation and accusations began. Never have I longed more for clarity and good communication.

If nothing else, I’ve learned that a steady online connection =a steady team.

an optimistic update 3rd of May ’16

Things seemed to calm down very quickly after we had a quick chat and decided to not let history repeat itself. Group project: today was astronomically better in terms of work distribution, idea sharing and general progress. We all arrived on time and got started very quickly. We had a list of things to do and we checked them off as we went. A group member brought along a friend to play devils advocate and randomly throw questions at us to help us full proof our idea.

wk 7 Group Meeting- institutions

Posted on by

I’ve been put in a lovely group of 4 (the one and ONLY group of 4) with Isobell, Kris, Joss.

We quickly established an overall group goal to achieve a better grade than our previous one; which for us was a distinction at least. I personally would like to think of a creative way to approach this and have a lot of fun with it.

After receiving our prompt INSTITUTIONS immediately the discussion of typical corporations came to mind like schools, prison and the ABC. We wrote these down. But then we started talking about less obvious organisations that act like institutions such as UFC, talent scouting agencies and churches.

We agreed that kpop factories have a great media presence so It would be interesting to have a look at that as an idea.

wk 7 feedback

Posted on by

I’ve always had a terrible fear of showing my work because unless its “perfect” the thought of anyone seeing it is too cringeworthy. And my work is never perfect so of course viewing our PB3 portraits in class was a challenge. The class was so friendly and accepting of the great work we saw I started to feel a lot better as we went down the roll all the way to “v.”

After getting into groups I received some great feedback that I will use to improve my next project

Since I dealt with a sensitive and controversial topic to some, it was suggested that I should tone down my portrayal of Charlotte as a raging gay. I decided not to because I felt that it is an essential part of who she is. I suppose I could next time find a way to not seem like I am criticising others (ilke Christian youth groups). In retrospect I should have asked Charlotte to emphasise that it was just the one incident. It was also mentioned that I should have used more stock footage as I was meant to have at least 30%.

The others appreciated my choice of colour using orange in most of the frames. I managed to somewhat create a sense of unity within the short film by keeping the colour pallet similar in each frame. They enjoyed my use of different music to change the moods during the film.

In reflection:

Personally next time I would cut out some of Charlotte’s responses so I have more room for relevant questions. I would also cut down the audio intro at the beginning (with all the news reports and speeches so I can have more of Charlotte’s voices. I thought the over laying of voices was done to a satisfactory level but I hope to make it smoother and more natural next time. Making this made me realise the difficulty in balancing the magic of spontaneity and organisation. I did have a rough storyboard but that got discarded pretty quickly. Next time I’m going to storyboard after I film. Maybe I will organise all the shots by naming them on sticky notes then arrange them on my wall like in Mistaken for Strangers (2013) directed by Tom Berninger. Another thing with organisation is placing the footage into folders. I should have done that as I was adding them after each shoot.