Partner Reflection

 Reflection on working in a team 

Working on this project helped me learn more about myself and a lot about teamwork. I am a natural leader and love to work as hard as I can to succeed in things. This project was very important to me, and I worked as hard as I could. I even spent time on the weekends and spring break to make this project perfect. Over the eight weeks I feel that I experienced unequal efforts and communication from my partner.  

 

In pre-production, my partner Charles was not very involved in the process. He had a hard time getting work done, so I motivated him by making a list each week of what he needed to do, and I created a calendar to help him stay on task. He ended up just doing the research during pre-production. I still did a lot of case studies of my own, but I also made the script and checked it with him. I did the mise-en-scene, got all the permission forms, made the calendars, made the mood board, shot list, risk assessment, location scouting, poster. After assigning Charles what to do he conversed with me about the script, primary roles, the list of props and music, the story board, and some research on movies. 

 

During production, Charles helped a lot with filming. Since I was nova, I could not film as much, we collaborated on what type of shots we should do and production went very smoothly. I think this is because Charles was motivated to do the filming. A difficulty during filming was that Charles did not film the dolly zoom correctly. He pushed it off and said it was fine, but I encouraged to refilm; we eventually had to move on without a result. The rest of the filming went smoothly, and Charles and I collaborated well together.  

 

During post-production Charles continued to not be involved. I worked hard on watching videos on how to color grade, use transitions, and use adobe. While I was able to develop my technical skills, it was also very hard to balance blog posts, editing the whole movie opening, and other classes. I finished editing and it was not to my standards. I mostly did not like the order I put the clips in. I asked Charles for help for the second time, and he was very excited and happy to help. He told me to send him the color-grade clips, and he would do the rest. I felt very relieved that I was getting help from my partner after trying to support him the whole time. However, this led to another problem, the sound quality. Charles explained that he wanted the movie to be artistic, so he added a lot of sound. He also said that he would use adobe, but he ended up using Cap Cut. The actual sound he used wasn't the problem it was the fading of the music. When I asked him to send me the clips that are together without the music, he was very hesitant and stated that he had too much work in other classes to do this again. I supported that comment and said that I will edit all the sounds. He was still hesitant and said it was fine. Since the sound was not up to my standards, I said that he could submit the copy, and I would edit and submit a new version. We have decided that I will be editing all the sound and sending him the new movie opening.  

 

Overall, during this project I learned a lot about reliability, communication, and collaboration. In future teams I will advocate for myself, collaborate on clearer roles, and check for consistency. Charles was very kind and helpful when I begged him to be it was just hard balancing the project and supporting him to keep working, especially when the project meant a lot to me.