Upon receiving the project brief, I think I can say confidently that most of our group seemed pretty confused about what we were to actually do, and how to start. We were assigned to the media idea of “technologies” and at first we thought more literally about the topic, such as the evolution of technology and focusing on how far we have come, but then we started to think more about the impact this new technology has had on our society.
When we actually had our whole group in class, we started to do some brainstorming of ideas. We needed to start thinking about what we could do for our final media artefact, which we all agreed on doing video. We were having some mixed ideas of what we wanted to get out of this. I was thinking of doing a similar thing to what we were to do in project brief 3, and use both a mixture of our own footage and found footage, but Jack was thinking more of making something really big and with our own footage, something he could use in his “film reel” thing at the end of the course. Helen was pretty neutral to ideas at this point, being open and suggestive to things we could do with both ideas. After some research we did in class, we found a music video that had lots of TVs on its set and showed different footage on each TV. We all seemed to like the idea of having this sort of layout for our final product, filming in one take and having this sort of screen dominated set, as our media idea is technologies, this would relate our content with the projects intention. For our annotated bibliographies, Helen was going to focus on virtual reality and social media, Jack was focusing on film production and editing techniques and I was going to be focusing on desensitisation caused by technology, and violence in video games and television. Because all of our topics weren’t really connected we were struggling to figure out how we could all connect them in script.
The next week we asked Dan for advice on how we should connect all three ideas into one artefact, and he suggested that we focus more on one idea. We started to focus more on desensitization at this point, and the effects media technologies have on audiences. Jack started writing a draft script, and Helen and I gave input on ways it could be improved.
For our shoot, we were unsure whether it would be a draft shoot or our final shoot, but it depended on how things work out in editing, turns out it was our final shoot. Something I definitely learnt was to always leave time for a reshoot, because if you don’t think you need one in pre-production when you are planning your schedule, and you leave no time for a reshoot, there will probably be no reshoot and your final product won’t be as successful. Our script wasn’t completely finished, but we did the best with what we had at the time. Jack and I both did the camera work, and Helen was working with the audio recording. We wanted to use two cameras so that it would take a shorter amount of time to film as we could have more of a variety of shots. There weren’t many changes made to the script during the shoot, which I thought was pretty strange, but I guess because we needed to have a fair amount of research in the script, there wasn’t much improvisation we could do and improvements on the spot.
The most successful part of our group work was compromise. We had many different ideas that were very different, because we are all very different people, but when we were getting into script writing and really having a concrete idea of what our final will be, we really worked well together on both using each others ideas and having the restraint to let some ideas you had, let slide, and I think that it very important with group work, you need to be able to accept some things and adapt on others. Although it took me a few weeks to realise this, because at first we were all pretty set on what we each wanted to do.
The most problematic aspect of our work was probably post-production. Helen offered to edit the rough-cut of our media artefact, but because she did it at home, other members of the group were able to contribute which made things difficult when there were errors and things we wanted to help with. Although in the end, Jack wanted to do the final edit of the video and I think Helen and I just had to trust that Jack would be able to create what we all wanted, because we couldn’t all edit it.