Week 7 - Group Forming & Merging Ideas

During our Transmedia session in the seventh week of term we were presented with the opportunity to form groups based on initial ideas, experiments and concepts we had prepared individually over the course of the first six weeks. Personally, I was keen on using the original script given at the start of the module - though not in its original form. To prepare for the group formation, I quickly adapted the visual concept of Joe’s original storyline to portray a theme of gender identity in an attempt to make the character reflect more personal experiences and themes. However, I was aware that as a student film, the idea would be too ambitious to recreate in the span of 4-5 weeks and therefore used the makeshift concept as a way of showing my research, artistic skills and newly found interest in set design. My initial research, concept art and more can be found on the website below:

Weeks 1-7 Blog

Already having paired up with Beth prior to the session, we decided to look for other members within our module to form the group. Finally, we have settled on a seven person team, having an almost even number of members in each of the three pathways and thus ensuring at least one person from each pathway would be available to communicate with the directors.

The roles within our production are loosely defined as having a small team often does result in members working multiple roles at the same time - though we are sticking to our designated pathways for most of the project. There has been an initial state of confusion regarding elements of the moving image and production design pathway that have been crossed over, such as storyboards, but we have decided to designate those tasks to two members at most in order to avoid confusion. As such, me and Aiza ended up working on the storyboard with the help of our director Anastasija who kindly provided us with a detailed shot list.

The remaining two members in the moving image department have been assigned to assist Anastasija on adapting the script to better reflect her ideas (with a general sense of what they will be working on, though we have been deliberately vague about specific duties).

There has been some confusion surrounding the role of the group in terms of overall production and development. While we have agreed to be flexible in terms of our role and the final product, we have also agreed to work in a relatively autonomous way, especially when it comes to our final product. As production designers, our tasks were made clear to us by our pathway leader, Jane, but it seems this was not the case for different pathways.

During our first online meeting we went over ideas and experiments each of us had completed during the first seven weeks and tried to find a way of merging them into a workable script - more on the topic in my next blog. The second meeting, which took place in person, allowed us to make changes to the script as a team and discuss the character of Joe in more detail - as well as the implications of having a character like Joanna appear on screen.