OUAN503 - Collaborative, Summary

Over the course of the collaborative brief I feel like I've gained a huge amount in terms of my ability to collaborate and communicate in a group environment. It's different from anything I've had to do before when working on creative briefs and a lot harder. One of the biggest contrasts to me and an obvious one was having to run ideas past the group as oppose to just applying them. It makes for a lot slower process because the element of communication is added and as well as this ideas won't necessarily happen because they have to be accepted. During the idea generation stage I sensed that there was an element of holding back, and trying to be polite so that others could pursue their own ideas. Eventually however you just have to speak up and try to make progress otherwise it's a lot harder. It was also difficult to know what to expect people you've never worked with before, I think I was lucky in regards to the group I got though and everyone wanted to be as involved as much as possible, which was a positive. In addition to this, I've acquired a better understanding about work loads and dividing up work between a team to be as efficient as possible - as well as this making sure everyone plays to their strengths and thus creating the best work possible. In our case I handled the majority of the pre-production and post-production as well as helping out where I could with the drawing and colouring process. Whereas the illustrators did most of the drawing for scenes. It was important to keep everyone updated as much as possible with what you're doing and if you need any assistance so that there aren't any problems with the work flow and pace of the project. I think we entered into this particular brief because we were all fans of storytelling, this became apparent to me with all the great ideas that were generated throughout the process, some of which never came to fruition but were there nonetheless.

In reflection I think that the work we produced was of a good quality taking into account all of the limitations we had and the nature of the brief too. In a short amount of time we were able to create a large body of ideas in which we chose our favourite before pursuing it through storyboards, artwork and animation coupled with sound to create a total of 60 seconds of animation for the Shutterstock brief; divided up into three shorter 20 second stories. I'm proud of what we achieved as a team over the course of around a month. I definitely feel like I've learnt a huge amount and although there are a few little aspects of the work we produced that I would change in hindsight, maybe the stories could of been clearer in parts and there were some story ideas that I would have liked to see worked on but obviously we had to choose one from all of the ideas we had at the beginning. So, given the limitations and time we had I think we did well.