This was my first project with the new Fresh@CU Media Production company within our department. After the initial few emails about the brief, a meeting was arranged with Spencer James and everyone who was interested in working on the project.
I was actually surprised by the number of people who turned up – I expected a few more people to come to the meeting, considering this was a paid project (though I had to specifically ask about this, so maybe not everyone knew), but only 6 people showed interest. Another thing, however, that surprised me more, was the way it was decided who’d work on it.
The initial message had said a team of 3 people was needed, and it was stated in the meeting that our involvement would depend on our engagement with the brief and pitch. As it turned out, there was no selection process, and in the end everyone who showed interest automatically got added to the team.
I felt this wasn’t quite the best thing to do – first, because the more people you add to a project with an (arguably) fixed budget, the less each team member is paid. What concerned me more though, was the fact that we weren’t selected by any other criteria rather than just showing up, which isn’t a good enough way to decide who is capable of delivering a project. I did expect even the most basic selection process – but maybe it is also a learning curve for our tutors to be giving students more ‘serious’ projects, and they keep running the pattern of trying to give everyone a ‘fair chance’ to get involved. I do think that from a project management / working with clients perspective this isn’t the best way to handle things, but I will expand on that later in the blog.
So at the initial meeting, we were given the brief and we started discussing ideas, how we can approach it, how to keep the video relevant to the client’s needs, etc. In essence, we were expected to produce a 5-10 minute video that shows top 10 things to consider when creating a video. It was intended for internal use of an engineering company, so that when their employees use video to communicate between each other, they can use the medium of video more effectively. It was meant to be aimed at beginners, and to be informative, but also entertaining – so it can keep the viewers’ interest for its whole duration. The idea we agreed upon was using the QVC concept – we’d be ‘selling’ a camera, whilst demonstrating what it can do and how each function can help you achieve a good looking and informative video.
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