This project has been a very big learning experience for me, in terms of dealing with other creatives as well as production work. However, this project has taught me how to observe and assess social and political issues in the world, and incorporate them into the stories that I write.

I think that our project was somewhat successful in provoking thought into issues surrounding refugees and government action. However I don’t think we focused enough on refugees, as our characters just seemed to be characters that were screwed over by the government. I do believe however that we explored issues regarding government cover-ups and controversial people in power to a good extent. I think adding in the storyline of the native tribe was a mistake as it took too much of the focus off of the refugee issues that we originally intended to explore. This wasn’t a great choice, especially since we were unable to cast anyone for the tribe so we were decided to not show them on screen, which I think lessened the audience engagement with the story being unable to assess the threat to the characters. That being said, I am happy with the end result that we achieved.

This project itself definitely had a slow start, as it was apparent to me that my group and I weren’t very comfortable with each other, in the sense that we had many ideas but we were reluctant to voice our opinions or commit to any of them. This ultimately led us to divert from our original concept to pursue a ‘cannibal island’ story and allowed us to overlook the original themes that this concept was based around; of refugees and dystopian issues in the media and the government of the current day leading into the future. Fortunately the feedback from our pitch set us back on the right course. I am now happy with where our end project has gone, but I have learned to speak my mind more in times of group uncertainty, and to always refer back to the key themes of the project.

As we are approaching our deadline it is becoming a bit concerning that we haven’t started filming until now, but thankfully our filming schedule assured us that we would have enough time to film everything and edit with time to spare.
This hasn’t been without setbacks though; as we weren’t able to finish filming everything we wanted to on the first day and had to schedule another day to film. However the second day of filming still gives us plenty of time to edit before our final deadline.
Also, casting has again been an issue as even though minimal actors have been required for our project, we have struggled to find actors for the few supporting roles we do have. However we do have some people who have agreed to act for us so thankfully these problems are in the process of being solved.

We have agreed on our concept and written out an in-world timeline of the events of our story, in which news reports and constant reminders that the characters are being watched by the government serve the purpose of diverting the focus away from the native tribe, while still keeping it as the most immediate threat for the characters, which I think balances out well. However writing the script has brought up issues regarding casting, as our minimal casting causes us to think more conservatively about how some scenes will play out. We have to think about how we can imply that there are more people in the story than there actually are, which has proven to be quite difficult. However it is looking up and we as a group are able to agree on most ideas

Following our concept pitch, we’ve had, and still have many details of our concept to iron out before we can start shooting our project. Firstly, our concept has had to go through some changes as we have spent much time trying to figure out how we can emphasise the significance of government control in our story rather than the native tribe, in order to focus on the themes of refugees instead of mere survivability.
We have been discussing our production roles for the shoot and we were able to agree on where each other’s strengths lie. Being one of the only people in the group with experience writing scripts this task fell to me, but I am helping out as well with other areas such as filming and acting as well where I can. We’re a bit behind schedule as finalizing the concept needs to happen before I can write the script, but since we have planned a timeline of deadlines are still able to catch up.