The Edinburgh Project

Now onto some serious animation stuff. I have been on holiday the last two weeks and because of this I have rather a lot of things to update here. I'll start with this semesters first project. It was a joint project between all of the years except fourth.

The aim of the project was to create a film about a street in Edinburgh. However you did it, it was supposed to make you think about that street. My team had some trouble at the beginning. We had picked the Grassmarket but we were all to courteous towards each other that no one wanted to push their idea and we initially were planning to make a very bland, historic account of the Grassmarket. Luckily the opportunity to see our idea in the grand scheme of things put us in a place to come up with a better one.

Unfortunately in the end, thanks to an irritating computer error we couldn't get our first edit done. Which meant when it came to the crit we were showing a film that very much could have done with more editing. But time was just wasn't on our side. None the less in the end we created this film as we continued to edit with a better view of things. We decided not to worry about upsetting each other and to just look at what footage and things we had in order to make a film that held together well.

https://vimeo.com/108386861   (Sorry that it's a link, blogger won't let me inbed a video unless it's from youtube *rolls eyes* quit it google!)

So this wasn't the only part of the project, the other half was very much focused on how we worked together as a group and how we learn to structure ourselves to each other. This, for our group, was the successful part of our project. I was in a group with a lot of very introverted and shy people who I feel really came into their own in this project. Initially we couldn't pick strengths and weaknesses, however as time passed we could see each others strengths and weaknesses and learned to stop being quite so extremely polite to each other and push for things we really believed in. Alan believes that it took us the three weeks to learn how to work with each other and I believe he's correct as most of our best collaborative work came from after the end of the project.

I think we learnt a lot from how to work with each other from this. I know we learnt that;

• Rules need established early or things will begin to drift and merge and before you know it, it's chaos.
• Don't be afraid to push for something you really want to do. This is how good films are developed - from passion and a love for what you do.
• Separating people into component parts of the film is how you produce a strong film. Other wise your only as strong as your groups mean.
• Respect is key. But use it wisely. Too little and no one will work with you, too much and you risk making a film no one wants to make, or getting walked all over.
• Constructive criticism is how everyone moves forward. We all need it and we should not be scared to dish it out or to receive it.
• And most importantly communication is essential. There's no point in suffering in silence. If you need something, want to change something, want to compliment someone or are unhappy let someone else in your group know. People should not have to do projects they really don't enjoy and so we need to know how to make you happier. Plus communication makes it easier to keep tracks on the projects timing, meetings and progress.

So that about wraps up this project, I'll edit this post to let you see some pictures of the process as soon as I can scrape enough up to make it worth it. See you all later.