End of Year Reflection - Video

End Of Year

In this post I will go through the guarantees presented in eComm, something I will takeaway from each, and talk about those for a bit.

Technology

This is where I definitely learned the most, lots of technical skills and techniques for both animation and video. This would be skills like making titles in Premiere, green screens in After Effects, and camera/tripod usage and physical techniques. I learned these skills in the numerous projects we did, and the skills I learned were both part of the curriculum and self taught. These are important because they help me do better, more professional work, in eComm and in my own personal work. Some challenges I faced were in working with the cameras, some of them get stuck or don't work or break when you use them. My strengths in this area would be my editing skills and a weakness would be that I have some trouble when recording audio at correct levels and without background noise. I have improved my editing skills a lot from last year, and learned an entirely new program, Premiere Pro. Something I need to work on is making sure production equipment is not in the shots for a video, as that accidentally happened a few times. With what I learned I will film and edit videos for family members and their acquaintances.

Collaboration

In the area of collaboration, I had a lot of practice in setting up work days outside of school for filming. I learned it just through the course of doing the projects, as nearly every one required filming outside of school. This is important because if you can't figure out when to get shots, you're never going to get the shots and the video will never get done. There were some challenges, as there always are in scheduling for multiple people. Sometimes 3 of 4 people in a group would be able to film on a day but the last person couldn't so we'd have to figure out another day and keep pushing it back. A strength I have in this area is my open schedule. I don't have lots going on after school or on the weekends (during the school year, at least), so finding days to film is not too difficult for me personally. A weakness would be in forgetting to secure transportation to the filming site, so it might happen that I miss a shooting day because of that. Another part of collaboration is brainstorming and teamwork to create the final product and make ideas to begin work. I definitely need to work on my level of involvement in groups, I am usually quiet and let other people present ideas and then I refine them. I wouldn't really change anything in this area as it pretty much worked out. 

Communication

A takeaway I learned from this guarantee is the importance of having outside methods of communication with group members on projects. It gets very hard to collaborate and set up stuff when the only time you can talk is one hour a day 4 times a week (in class). Comparing the different group projects I worked on, the ones where group members exchanged phone numbers or other methods of communication seemed to go better with scheduling and delegating tasks. There's not really any strengths or weaknesses in this part, as it doesn't encompass much besides what I've already talked about, and anything else that could be included is in the Collaboration section.

Project Management 

What I learned from this is how to effectively use the whole project process: brainstorming, working with group members to do preproduction like storyboarding, scheduling the camera work, filming the shots with proper sound lighting and scenery, transferring files from one location like an SD card to all the group members, talking about edits and how to compile it into a finished product, and presenting it as a finished project. I learned this by repetition in all of the products we did this year, because I had to use it every time. My strengths here are in the post production portion, and my weaknesses are in pre-production and planning. I wouldn't change anything as it worked pretty well all this year. 

Leadership

In relation to leadership, I learned how to take a small position of leadership when everyone is slowing down and work isn't happening. Specifically, for the short film project we were missing a group member during pre-production and the rest of use were a little confused as to how to work with such a small group so I took a bit of charge and presented some ideas and we worked on from there. I don't really have a greatest strength in leadership because I'm not strong in it at all. Similarly, that would be my weakness, that I'm not good at leading at all and it definitely is something I need to work on in the future. If I could change something, I would change how I lead, because I feel like it isn't effective or good for anyone.

Conclusion

To conclude, this year was one where I learned a lot of new stuff, both technically and interpersonally. I made a lot of neat work that I'm proud of, had lots of fun in the program, and I am excited for next year when I can focus more on video and learn more advanced stuff.