1.

Going over the project as a whole,

This project was a bit of a difficult one to get through, but we did have our
parts finished in the end, ready for screening. As seen in the video here, I had
started out with quite a basic melody as an idea for Denzil, our composer, to
create a more rounded piece of music. I had also taken a small amount of
footage for a train ride myself as a kind of placeholder, for Logan to get a feel
for what he had to record, which he did get a fair few videos that were all used
in the final production. Dan did have a bit of trouble doing his part getting the
foley work done, as I did want him to be the part of the fake announcer being
an important part of the production as it goes back to our original concept of
the mundane and eventually insane, though because of certain personal
problems he could only get some background sound effects of ambient train
or carriage noise, which was fine though there could have been a bit more
desired there.

2. The event

The screening event had unfortunately a small turnout, and I had put a decent
amount of posters around the campus, particularly one put near the door of
the screening room which was disappointingly taken down for whatever
reason, and so with that and due to the end of term coming up there wasn’t
too much of an audience that we had hoped for. We had played the video
more than what was scheduled and though people who walked past the
screening room did look in, they didn’t join in with the screening. Advertising
the event could have been done better and I will take responsibility for this,
but because in all we were caught at the wrong time in terms of the date this
should have been addressed much better than very last minute timings.

3. The feedback from viewers

On screen will be a couple of feedback sheets that I had made up, and while
there wasn’t too much I’ll go through them, talking about their comments.

4. Looking at positives & negatives

The positives here were how, though it was quite haphazard in the way we
gathered our materials, that we eventually managed to get everything
together in time for screening. Probably the strongest thing here was the
composition, and though personally I would have liked us all to work on it as a
group instead of splitting up certain roles, Denzil did do a good job. There was
plenty of footage to work with, which I had cut up parts in the editing phase,
and a nice thing I found was the edits matched up with certain parts of the
song, especially the beginning where the song kicks in as the train starts
moving. Negatives could be the way we didn’t exactly liaise as much as we
 should have, and we could have done with having more spoken meetings
where we would talk more about the project, but the way this was done was in
our first zoom meeting where I laid out the overall project and our roles and
that was it, but this very much could have been expanded on as the weeks
went on, where communication is definitely key here. Going back to before we
could have had a better turnout audience-wise, advertising on facebook and
the like though for those of us with not too many contacts this was difficult in a
way. You would expect for use of a screening room for movies and stuff there
would be a good amount of people turning up, but this was not the case.

5. What worked, what didn't

What worked was our video being fairly strong, perhaps it was closer to a
music video in a way but everything that we did came together and worked
quite well, and if I want to say something I was quite happy how the AI
generated voice came out, though this was a last minute addition with a script
coming from the top of my head. If the song was a bit longer I could have
gone down a darker route of the voice talking more towards insanity or
something like that, though in that it might have lost the original idea of not
just going into that but a person using their imagination to make something
like a train ride more interesting. As one person said in the feedback the
music didn’t work against the backdrop of the voice but I would tend to
disagree but then everything is subjective towards this kind of thing. I suppose
as well the song could have used more chords and melody but honestly
simplicity seemed to be key here, though again this is completely subjective
and so my bias doesn’t speak for everyone.

6. Group dynamics, methods

We had our roles split up into specific things to do, one of us to do the music,
one to take the video recordings, one to do foley work and one to make the
overall edits at the end. I felt this was a good thing to split us up into those
parts so we all knew what we were doing, though we could have cross-
pollinated in a manner of speaking, where we gave feedback on what each
person was doing but because of time constraints this didn’t really become
the case. I can’t say much on our methods though if it came down to
recording I would use a DSLR camera to get footage, though that might seem
a bit strange especially when being used on public transport. But other than
that for the song I would have liked to get the stems if we had time to go
through them, where I noticed Denzil used a bit of train sounds in his
composition which wasn’t necessary as that was Dan’s job to provide, though
that was helpful in the long run and did add to the atmosphere of the piece.
7. What you learned from the project

What I learned from the project was that I need to work on my leadership
skills very much. A group should be parts of a whole, and this was a bit
disjointed, mostly because we weren’t exactly intimate with each other and so
this could have had an effect on the way we worked, just getting our roles and
then going about doing our own thing, but ideally a truly good, professional,
group of people working on a project should be down to earth as soon as the
pitch has been brought forward and ready to work with each other very well. I
think most of us were quite used to doing things by themselves, which is fine,
and personally I work better that way going by my own nature, but taking the
leadership role has the clue in the name, and so next time this sort of thing
happens I should become more charismatic and vocal in a way, instead of just
letting people get on with it and hope that there’s a result in time for the
performance.

8. What you would do differently next time

All in all if I were to do this project again I would get everyone on track doing
their thing and keep tabs on them, guiding and advising our group as we
went, providing feedback and listening to theirs. I would get us advertising our
wares a bit more than what it came down to, having prepared material weeks
before showing, like promotional work and on the other side giving people
more ideas and such to work with so they know exactly what they’re doing
and have more things to be inspired by, instead of more of a haphazard way
of doing things where I’m just waiting for material to come through and work
with whatever I have because that doesn’t do any favours for workflow. If I
had a chance to make a mockup of this vision I, or “I”, had, then I think things
could have worked much better, like a demo tape of sorts. Though overall
things turned out fairly good, but the most frustrating thing was audience
turnout, though this was due to a small myriad of reasons. I am happy with
our production in the end as we all came together to get things done, though
perhaps something on a more grander scale could have been made.

Thank you.