Media Coursework Progress - Individual & Group Evaluation

Looking back on myself as a media student as well as our group at the start of our project, I would say that my group and I were blind as to what we were up against. However, this was a long time ago and I feel my group and I have made dramatic steps in the right direction to create good progress. As an individual I feel I have grown in my skills, understanding, leadership and teamwork within my project. At the beginning of my project I thought I could just get along by just posting to my blog every now and again and just steadily keep up with the work. I thought just because I knew how to use Adobe (Premier Pro & After Effects) well and had knowledge of camera and filming I would easily be able to complete my project. However I then realised that it was much harder than it all seemed. This realisation came when we started our continuity task. We set out as a group going to film with not a lot of research to begin thinking it would be easy and we would have completed it within a day. Nonetheless the group and I then realised we had to completely up our games if we wanted to get a good grade and do well in a project. This was because we had nowhere near enough footage. Everything was wrong with the filming, the story was terrible, the shots weren't good enough, we didn't have enough research, planning or blogs and overall we weren't putting enough in. I then started to take much more time to learn all the different shots and what we needed to do as a group so I could improve and also help my group improve with our research and planning; this is because my teachers helped me to understand what my group and I were missing. At this stage, in my head I knew this is where I had to take lead of my group and start to get things done. This is where my group and I made huge leaps in progress due to this change. I then started to post all the research, planning and other blog posts. As well as personally create brainstorms, intros, music, storyboards and shot lists to show the steps and additionally what I wanted to do. This is where I felt the rest of my group still hadn't realised what was needed etc. Therefore needing me to do most research, planning and blogging as I was afraid if I didn't do so and start doing this work we needed to do, it would never get done. We then started to film, I had created a good story line with a very detailed storyboard for us to follow as a group so we could get as much done as quickly as possible. On our first shoot literally everything was unusable and not good enough. I then realised my group and I both needed to become more knowledgeable of our camera skills and just my group on their editing skills. We then all overstepped this with some of us learning more and progressing more than others in the group. We filmed more with only certain group members making the effort and then me perosnally editing whilst trying to teach my group how to use Premier Pro so they could edit also if they wanted to. When filming and editing it was clear who wanted to do well in our project and made efforts to try and film, edit, blog, by trying to meet up and taking part in editing, research, blogging and filming itself. This was only done by myself and certain other group members really, which I felt was a shame as our group had great potential and were doing very well, whilst looking towards a good grade, but this was hard to lice up to with some of my groups low efforts. However, this was not because of the entire group and as I said, some of us progressed more than others at this stage. On the other hand, we then went on to film and edit even more and we have now come to a very strong position in our project as we near the final stages of it. I feel individually I have progressed considerably in my understanding of what to do in research, planning, camera skills, editing skills, leadership and teamwork etc. I feel much better about myself in my media work now and feel I can take on next year well with my knowledge. Although as a group we haven't all progressed together at the same speeds and some of us have been putting a lot more in to the project than others which shows in the final piece and our blogs; however I feel overall our actual groups work has completely shifted and come to much higher level that is able of a good grade. I feel as a group everyone has made progression, just some more than others. I also think as a group and individually everything is going well now and we're where we should be.