Individual Analysis... Back >>>
I elected to be Producer for this project when the group first formed, as I had already had experience acting as a successful Producer and found that I was confident with organization, talking and de-coding the briefs we were given! I also felt comfortable in the role, as I have found in previous projects that I work best in a leadership role.
The first thing we as a group had to do was create a name. A name, an identity- the thing I felt we needed most to help us start feeling like one unit. We went through a lot of different ideas, and a lot I was not keen on. At one point we were leaning towards ‘Digital Voodoo’, but I was pretty sure that at some point we may come across a copyright issue, and did not feel that the name reflected us best. I remembered a word my father used to joke about, ‘Rugulent’, he had invented it with a friend whilst teaching a degree course on music technology, and had tried to get his students to use it in their work to describe music. I spoke to my group about the name idea and after a few test runs on the pronunciation (I preferred rug-yew-lent whereas Kayleigh liked roo-gew-lent), we found ourselves liking the name so it stuck.
My next task was creating the group a logo. As the most experienced and confident using Photoshop, I was allowed to have free reign in designs. I created quite a few versions and with the input from my group, narrowed it down to the current logo which seemed to work well with our tone- “rough but elegant”.
After this had been created, I kicked forward on the work, made our group website and started to build it. It took me several days just to de-code the brief and form the site layout. I did not get any real help from my group as none of them really seemed to know how to use Yola and were starting to focus more on the Drama module. This was ok to begin with though, as I found myself enjoying designing our site and was granted free reign to do what I wanted. Even though I was the Producer, I did still care about my group’s opinions, so often gave them the option to give input on the site design. Toby and Graeme especially helped with this by helping me form a better navigation system as the one I had initially made was a little complicated.
As a group we started to form our documentary ideas and to help with this, I set each member the task of coming up with three good ideas each. This went really well and we ended up with a diverse range of documentary focuses to explore. After being told that one of my own favourite ideas of doing a documentary on Poly-cystic Ovaries Syndrome, (as I am a suffer of it myself), would work better as an FYP, we narrowed the rest of our ideas down to three main ideas. Boys dancing, dog shows and interviewing a man about his live in sex dolls.
I immediately got started on sourcing primaries and locations for the dancing idea, as it was one of my three main ideas. I managed to secure primaries pretty quickly through my own clientele list (I work as a photographer with my family’s recording studio business and regularly film two different dance school’s showcases), I gained permission to film and transport, but after talking with my group, we were all leaning more towards the sex dolls idea purely because of how controversial it could be.
Unfortunately for us, after working out where we would need to go to film the man involved, we realized that it would be far too expensive for us to travel and the idea quickly fell apart. After this, instead of taking the safe option with my back up, we decided as a group to go with the dog show idea.
Graeme and Louise were proactive with finding primaries for this, and I also struck lucky with a family friend and also a lady whom I interviewed for a different module. She had a wealth of contacts and potential primaries for us, so became one of our main sources.
At this point I encouraged my group to start researching different documentary processes and promotional and technical design content for our site. It became a bit of a struggle over the following weeks to get all of the work I required for the site from each of my group members. They all seemed too focused on the one Drama module and I think that because I was happy at the start to be the main website monitor and editor, they may have misinterpreted that a little in that I would also be happy doing the bulk of the work required for each page of the site. I did not really know how to tell them about this and get it across that I was starting to struggle. This caused quite a rift in the group for a long while and I ended up cutting into sleeping hours to get work done on time, which made me ill. The promotions page, which was not my role, was one page I worked a lot on, as well as the Database documentary page and various parts of the other site research pages.
I tried to make sure that my group were aware of what was needed, and would repeatedly message them on our Facebook group, talk to them in person and upload detailed to do lists on our page, but nothing really happened. I think perhaps my style of writing may have been confusing to a few group members, as I like to go into detail, but I was never really approached about it. Louise was probably the only group member totally 100% on the ball when it came to doing work on time. No matter what the time, or the topic, if I asked her to cover an area on the site, she would do it without complaint and I would receive work back within a few hours from her. I think perhaps this was because she, as well as myself, did not have too much to do with our other module in its planning stages.
This reflects poor time management on the entire group and perhaps a communication problem in that we never seemed to be able to all make meetings at the same time and messages were lost or confused along the way. I as a Producer should have arranged tutorials with lectures for our group, but stubborn and perhaps too willing to trust things would improve, I did not. I realize now that my group and I would have benefited greatly from outside help at this point.
I think this then was why our pitch was a disaster. I wanted to start it a while before the pitch date, but it was never picked up by any of the group. Everything became last minute and the pitch was poorly planned. My role was to present the promotions slides, but due to the fact that I had been spending my time sorting work for the website and other modules, I had not rehearsed properly, so I ended up speaking for too long, which was most likely why our pitch went well over 10mins.
After our pitch had been thoroughly torn apart and it’s flaws pointed out, I decided a serious re-shuffle of ideas was needed. My group and I immediately went into a meeting with one another and aired all of the things that had been irritating and worrying each of us, and we managed to clear the air on a lot of issues. Kayleigh and I proposed a better time management schedule and Graeme and Toby spoke about arranging proper meetings at the same set time each week so we would have more stability as a group as to when we would be able to speak about group work and issues. We all agreed upon this and also started to plan work we could do as a group over the Xmas holidays to help strengthen our bonds. We did not feel as though we had interacted enough socially and thought that perhaps this was an added reason to why our group was not functioning properly.
The disaster of our pitch, I think, worked greatly in our favour as it made every group member, including myself, realise just how badly time-managed and thought out our work for our documentary idea was at that moment. It was also not right that one or two members would work on the website and it’s content consistently with the rest of the group focusing on our other group work based modules.
I think that with the support from my group and the understanding we now have with one another, next semester will run a lot smoother. Already since having the meeting after our pitch we have all been working more proactively as a team. I have been able to talk to my group properly about work and have steadily updated our website with more and more content from each member. I have also found that I am being listened to more and my ideas and advice has been taken on board a lot more readily than before.
For a long time I was feeling very negative due to the workload I had, but now I am feeling a lot more positive.
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