Although there were sections of the project that I liked and I generally got along with all the people in the group, I did find it a struggle at times to participate and come up with ideas/solutions. If I were to do the project again, there would certainly be a lot of things I would have done differently and this is why the process was valuable to me in moving forward to future projects.
I think that if the group had worked closer together when writing the scripts and storyboards this would have helped us to have a more solid idea. I also found that half of the group going home for a week damaged the quality of our final product, especially as this meant I had to go out and film most of the footage on my own, meaning I also had to book and take out all the equipment by myself, which was challenging.
I also found that the group didn’t seem to want to discuss ideas enough. I feel as if a divide grew between people who were working on the website and people who were working on the webisodes. As the webisodes were dependent on the branding of the website it would have been more useful if the group had worked closer together. This also caused problems in not coming up with enough content as it was hard to discuss with each other exactly what was needed without meeting frequently enough and discussing issues face to face. If more content was added onto the website it would have made the idea more interesting. As the group didn’t want to work together or weren’t around to meet the consequence was that the final product lacked and the idea could have been further explored and wasn’t convincing enough. Furthermore I feel as though every time it was suggested there was an area of the story we could work on further no one seemed to understand why it was needed. As director I feel that I didn’t do my job well enough but also found it hard to do so. This project has been a learning curve for me as to understanding exactly how much work you have to put into something to make good ideas turn in to good end products, a good idea isn’t enough in itself.
One particular thing which I liked about our idea, which I found separated it from other teams’ projects, were that it was less fashionable and more conceptual. As someone who is a big fan of science fiction I think my interest in older science-fiction was what made the idea so different from other work which tended to focus more on current trends or possible slight technological advancements. However, I agreed with the feedback we got in the presentation that the idea could have been further explored.
Although it could be argued that our project looked ‘outdated’, I wanted to focus on how the idea felt. It seemed that given the fundamentally artistic nature of the brief it was a chance to come up with something interesting and although I never really achieved what I wanted to I also felt as though there wasn’t any need for the project to mimic something that would be commercially successful. In hindsight this may have been a drawback because I wasn’t working for a client as such and this means that the ideas and work that the groups came up with probably reflected personal taste more than industry related practice. I also wish that someone else did the camera work as this would have given me more space to work on my role as director, plus I generally don’t really like using video cameras. I think in a personal reflection I am a slight control freak when it comes to ideas and I do prefer to work alone so I also understand that I may not be the easiest person to work with at times, so working with other people has been good practice for me because obviously collaboration is important and it is also useful if you can bat off other peoples ideas and work together to make your work better.
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