Polly and I met today to film our collaboration shot. Our plan was to find an empty space in RMIT with a mirror so that we could proceed on with our shoot. However what we didn’t realise was that the location needed a permit for us to film. We managed to only shoot half of what we needed, which was enough material for us to work with. Set up was fairly easy as we had a plan and roughly knew what outcome we wanted. I had already planned out how the lights set up should be, thus we could complete the shooting in a short period of time.

During our editing session, Polly focused more on the masking of the videos as she was more familiar with that. I focused more on colour grading and colour.  It was an interesting experience for me as I was really intrigued by her video during the Thursday screening. We shared our views and gave opinions on how we could edit and improve on our work. I liked how we could learn new skills from each other during this collaboration.

For Ways of Making, I honestly expected more collaborations among our classmates outside of class time. As I’ve been reflecting about it the entire semester, I still feel that filmmaking is a collaborative thing itself. While one person might be able to create something amazing, sooner or later they will still have to end up working with a crew, actors or actresses.

Collaboration really worked for me this semester, especially since I was investigating on lighting. Whenever I was stuck, having fellow media friends on set gave me ideas on how I should move on with my investigations. It was definitely more enjoyable bouncing off ideas with Polly when we were doing our collaboration. I definitely also needed help moving huge equipments, or even having assistance on set so that I could solely focus on shooting what I needed.

I think the only main problem I had was trying to arrange to suit everyones timing together. Since we are all students and we have our own individual schedules, it was hard to organise shootings where everyone could attend.

I think ultimately collaboration is necessary for improvement, because your eyes are opened to new things. Seeing things from another perspective or even experimenting with something that you’ve never thought of before.