Final Project

This video project was an experience, perhaps with a proceeding adjective of learning, collaborative, transcendental? I approached this collaborative video with an intention to be truly collaborative, as I like to be a sole creator of my art. However, when I started considering what collaborative actually meant, I kept coming back to the notion that the work would automatically be lesser than what I could have done myself. And although our video turned out great, and has equal merit as any video that Kelly, Steph, or I could have done on our own, my personal vision was not realized. Collaboration essentially means compromise, which means no one gets what they want to the degree they want. Which is an interesting way to approach art. Early on, I decided to prepare for sacrifices, prepare for someone else to tell me what to do. So I did that. Now I don’t have to do it ever again.
The second issue was production. If this video was a first draft of a story, the second draft would be written in half the time and be twice as good. We ended up scrapping half our shots because the wind ruined them or because the microphone was too far away to hear me speak the lines. Oh, but it only begins there. I also discovered how hard it really is to act, to memorize lines, or even improv lines. If we did my vision of this project my delivery would have been completely different, with a fast-pace, rote quality to them, instead of the lazy, rolling delivery which my group preferred. Then when we got into the computer lab, we had to learn this program, which frustrated us for quite a while before we got the hang of it. Even then, Final Cut Pro can do a million things which we never figured out because we just didn’t have the expertise in using it. Finally, we started stripping away every extraneous clip and editing cuts because we couldn’t get the damn program to do what we wanted. So in essence, Final Cut Pro is our fourth team member, one with a lot of influence on how our project turned out.
However, I don’t want to sound like nothing turned out how we planned it. Since we were three fiction writers, we all preferred a project with a narrative. We all agreed on the progression and the tone of the piece, which is half the battle right there. There wasn’t a single part of this project that we didn’t do together. All three of us met for storyboarding, filming, and editing. The final product turned out well, although how well it turned out compared to what we each would have done if we had our ways is something we won’t know.