Developing a video with a group prior to taking on the task dawned on me as a catastrophe of conflicting ideas and directionless disaster. This was mostly due to the lack of group work I’ve participated in throughout university and high school.There hasn’t been any major projects which I’ve had to develop with other people, since I mostly focused on mathematics, science, and english. These subjects never presented me with the task of developing anything with other people and instead focused on doing things on your own, such as essays or tests. The only real group work experience I’ve truly had was working part time as a line cook, which I questioned how relevant it would be in this situation.
What I found very interesting as we were going through the process of developing our video, was the openness in the group to accept ideas as well as to contribute. The rough idea of the video began with a more metaphorical approach, were hooded men followed a young boy and watched his every move; in order to represent big media corporations data mining social media accounts. However we didn’t find an effective story there, and a goal was to tell a specific narrative. As more people contributed we began to choose collectively which of the ideas we wanted to keep and which we didn’t, narrowing it down to a video with a specific message, which was dark yet had aspects of comedy.
The mindset behind these ideas derived from the naturally dark aspect of the subject since it regards people’s privacy being violated. We wanted to reflect that, however the group collectively decided that we didn’t want to be taken too seriously. The goal was to create a video which could be enjoyed and still send the message that privacy policy and terms of service agreements are binding agreements for a company providing you a service, and should be treated more seriously.
Once we had all of our core ideas, we assigned certain roles in regards to who was playing which character in the story, one person developed the final storyboard and a rough script. At this point in the process we were ready to begin filming. Certain roles such as cinematographer and director were carried out by everyone who was filming the video. Since the storyboard clearly laid out the amount of scenes which were going to be required the filming itself didn’t require much time. Once it was done a few more shots such as the screen capture had to be taken. The final step was doing the voice over narration and then editing all the shots together.
Overall the experience of developing the video itself with the group was extremely valuable. It showed clearly all the different roles and aspects required to successfully develop a video, however the group setting really allowed me to learn how to better develop ideas with others instead of shutting them down simply for being different. I learnt how to better cooperate with others as well as organize my time in order to fit with my responsibilities with the group since we had to meet up after class. Ultimately the experience has made me a better group worker.