When we started the project we were all allocated different roles. It was a whole class project, and everybody had their own individual role to play. Generally each person had one job. I was chairman, along-side Tim. We were chosen as these roles by a whole class voting nomination. This voting system played a big part in the first couple of lessons. We chaired the class using order, we all came up with ideas and gave input and tried hard to make sure everyone has their say. Unfortunately some people are not willing to voice their concerns in front of the whole class as much as others. Due to this some people were inevitably left with their wishes not met.
After only two days of having class meetings like this the teachers decided to split the whole class up in to two groups (or 'production companies') each of these group was set the task of creating their own mini-series and using the other group as motivational competition. At first I was very skeptical about this as I found that we were working together well beforehand, and felt that even though things weren't going perfectly I was learning from all things that went wrong and was able to adapt due to knowing my mistakes. I also felt a bit cheated out of my chairman position, I felt that I had been elected by the class, therefore I had a job to do and when they took that away I felt I hadn't yet given it all I could offer.
However, I quickly came around to the idea of this 'two group' project. I found that it enforced the necessity to work everyone to their hardest, almost doubling the workload for each person. What happened in the whole class project where everyone had only one or maybe two roles, became each person having at least two, and often more. This was worsened by the fact that our group was actually the smaller of the two groups, and the other group had two people more than us.
We quickly set about working together efficiently, making a 'Blogger' website to post information and work about our show. Hayden went about customising and editing this to suit the atmosphere of the show. Subsequently we made Twitter, Facebook and Vimeo accounts as a increasing marketing campaign. The whole group worked on these but they were mainly designed by Hayden and myself. By this point in the project we had scrapped the 'chairman' leadership and had opted for an equality approach.
James wrote the script almost single-handedly whilst Matt H designed the title sequence and we voted Phillippa as Production Manager, which induced a lot of paperwork on her part that I did my best to help her out with when not too busy with other jobs.
Eventually we were given a deadline and we organised ourselves a filming shoot. We shot the first episode, our teamwork was very good when filming, despite some disputes about trivial things we worked perfectly as a team. The only let down was when we were interrupted by a teacher and sent out of the room, despite having checked and rechecked our booking of that room. It wasn't our fault but it was a good learning experience that it is very difficult to rely on information acquired from third parties (in this case, Reception).
After filming we set to editing, I edited most of the footage whilst Hayden added effects such as beeps to the video to censor it and adding sounds and zooms to it. The most successful bit of our final cut of the video was actually the title sequence. It looks brilliant visually and the sound goes just brilliantly with it. So I take my hat off to Matt H and Philippa who designed, edited and got rights to the music for it.
As for the finished result I like it, but I still think that it feels far too 'studenty'. We need to tighten up the notches for the next episode, however this is growing ever more difficult as we are constantly being pressed for time, and being forced to squeeze out another episode rather than giving each one the time care (I think) it deserves.
Next is to log audience feedback...
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