I am the Producer for High Violet Productions. I hold full responsibility of the group by organising and managing the group’s activity. I work closely with the group members to understand their thought process to the work with their ideas and see how we can succeed in our documentary for U-D0C festival 2013.
My aim for this module is to successfully and professionally present our ideas and final idea through our website, audience interactivity, presentation and trailer. It has been one challenging journey developing our Yolasite and preparing for our presentation.
Every week I allocated tasks to each member fairly and ensured all tasks were completed by a certain date. I worked closely with group members to assist with their work and keep them in the loop with our priorities to the site. Communication was key between the group and myself so I arranged regular meetings and contacted through our Facebook group page. I felt it is important to have a good dynamic so I encouraged the group reminding them to keep on top with the work. However it became a challenge controlling the group’s activity and the site, knowing what tasks have and haven’t been completed. I kept prompting group members to extend their research and reach primaries through different mediums. At times I felt I contributed more to the site than others. I had to inform members to maintain the site but I continually worked on the site during the weeks as well as keeping on top of my individual work. But as a group we worked so well except for one member.
Through my research on the site my very first idea focused on spirituality and investigated the subject. I wanted the group to experience the spiritual world and get involved using the participatory and observational mode. I was really enthusiastic about the idea as I gained a contact in week 3 who is still open for us to follow himself and his friend. In relation to my contact I wanted to connect spirituality with music and publicise his and his friends music. However with this idea there was no conflict or a particular different journey. Spirituality is very well known and is followed by many people in our modern society and the subject has been explored many times.
During the development process of the site and recording our research I reminded the group to make references and links to practitioners and documentary modes to our own ideas. In week 8 we deliberated a decision on three potential documentary ideas based on the strongest primaries and narrative. The research we carried out for our own ideas were not strong enough. Some ideas did not contain enough extensive research and proof of finding contacts. With the Rock Band and Taxidermy ideas we had the strongest contacts. However they soon became unreliable and were non contactable during a length of time. For this reason we came together and tried to think of a new possible idea.
Through out our decision-making I found we were not passionate about the ideas we placed on the website and other ideas we were coming up with. We found it very difficult to come up with a fresh subject. Once we came up with the ‘Toilet’ idea we struggled to get our primaries and produce a clear idea. We used my ‘Life as a cleaner – Toilet Hygiene’ as our starting point and began contacting network rail to get consent to film in train station toilet companies and posh hotels to juxtapose our idea of weird toilets and the happenings in toilets. Harry Fisher who works on Advertisement and Promotion had his Father as a contact as he ran a toilet shop and he had many weird toilet stories. This idea did not seem to work when researching and preparing the presentation. We could not work out the narrative and where the journey would take the audience.
However the week before the presentations the idea finally clicked one evening and we came up with the idea of ‘Speed Dating’. I could see an instant change to the group’s attitude and everyone seemed to engage and be clear about the idea.
In preparation to our presentation and trailer I ensured the group understood the level I wanted to reach for our documentary and how we will prove our idea works. As we were further behind than the other groups I wanted us all to pick up the pace and work together in making a Media Storm trailer and improve our sites. We had less than a week to prepare our presentation, find our contact and make our trailer. For this I distributed roles to each member and tasks were completed quickly and sufficiently. As a result we found our primary for our ‘Speed Dating’ documentary idea. We continued with our research to the idea and found unique ways to interact with our audience. Our idea remained simple and we were all confident about the presentation.
We did have a few issues occur during this project. In week 11 I collaborated with the Director to be Co-editor as a group member left our group therefore some members were given a secondary role. At times the group lacked in passion and didn’t leave enough time to search for contacts for our three ideas, Toilets, Rock Band and Taxidermy. I admit compared to other groups we were unorganised with the ideas. All other groups had confirmed their idea by week 8.
Some conflict developed with one group member, Michael Ellery who was in charge of Lighting and Sound. I communicated with him as much as the other group members as I stayed in contact through the Facebook group and phone. He came to no group meetings and he updated his photo essay the night before the hand in date. It was at a poor standard and he continued not co-operate with the rest of the work which was unacceptable. I did not want this to jeopardise our grade and level of work. I was very fair to him as Producer and I reminded him to do the work on many occasions, which he chose to ignore. For this we had a meeting to resolve the problem.
These 12 weeks have been one big learning curve and has boosted my knowledge with the role as Producer. I am more aware of how the group and myself can perform in the future after learning from our mistakes. Time management is key especially for next year. We are planning our project early and I will make sure we have enough contacts and they are secured. I will keep a professional head on and push the group with their roles and I will not tolerate any one not inputting as much work in than others. All we can do is our best so we will aim high and hopefully we will get an excellent outcome for U-DOC festival next year.
