Tuesday 5th January Show Project Meeting

Today our class met for the second time concerning our Show project. We began by using diplomacy to work out the chairman of the project. The class voted for nominees. Once we had done this the entire class then voted for which nominee they wanted to be chairman. Every time the nominee with the least votes would be eliminated. Eventually it was down to just me and Tim, after careful discussion we decided that Tim and I would both cooperate and be joint chairman. For the first lesson everything went well, I was able to organise the class to do activities that later defined the nature of our micro series of 'webisodes'. In this lesson everyone seemed to work well and I was able to go around the class and make sure that everyone was happy with what we were choosing. We eventually came to a conclusion using voting to get the class to agree on the core of the program. Due to the restrictions of it having to be filmed in college it was necessary to not have a story-line that was too elaborate. One of the suggestions of 'Zombie Invasion', although being a popular concept with the class was decided against as our budget and location restrictions made it near impossible to have any success.

Eventually through voting it was narrowed it down to a story-line of a comedic detention room with the same characters in detention every time, and a school boy who is constantly harassed by an idiotic secret agent. That class eventually decided on the detention theme, but I went and spoke with the people who voted against it and asked them to voice their concern. They made it clear that they though the secret agent story-line would be funnier and that they wouldn't be happy with our decision if we wrote it off completely. After brief deliberation I decided that I should incorporate the idea of the secret agent concept into the detention room, so the boy became one of the characters. I asked the class to go into groups of three and to each come up with three characters. After the class completed this we voted on the best six and wrote them down. These were: A boy who is constantly harassed by a secret agent, a caffeine-addicted paranoid sociopath, a cliché character inspired by the film The Great Escape, A punk girl who disagrees with everyone and a boy who never talks and resembles Chief from the film 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'.

It was in the second lesson when things started to go badly. People became far more talkative and less willing to listen. I found it much harder to get order from everyone talking and people were often not heard. In this lesson we tried to organise roles for everyone. I told Tim to write down a list of all the job titles on the board so that we could use diplomacy to decide who would do what roles. Unfortunately, I spent far too much time discussing with the class the characters attributes, and who we should and shouldn't use in the show that it didn't leave enough time to allocate roles for everyone. Unfortunately this lead to us rushing the process and it wasn't done as carefully as it should have been. As we began to run out of time I began to loose a hold over the class and it all went out of hand. I think that if this project is going to succeed I will have to ignore the fact that I am dealing with my friends and will have to concentrate on keeping them orderly, meaning I will have to become more harsh and strict to prevent a repeat of todays lesson. With so little time to complete this project this is essential.

These were the roles allocated by the end of the day:

Creative Director/Director - Dave and Kirk
Editor - Loz and Matt L
Camera - Tara, me and Matt L
Sound - Philippa and Sam
Titles/Credits - Matt H and Hayden
Casting Director - Mike
Treasurer - Dave
Writers - James, Hayden, Matt, me and Alie
Publicity/Marketing - Tara and Alie
Internet - Ash