Evaluation of a group work

This project has been a struggle for my team in parts due to several of reasons such as not being familiar with video compression settings, sometimes lack of demonstrated effort in the team towards the goal and time constraints. However, I have enjoyed working in a team because I have learnt new things from my colleagues and have had an experience how to collaborate with other people.  

In my opinion, we have not developed fully as a team because we could not finish all of the group work, such as storyboard, creating the video about legal and ethical issues surrounding Interactive Media and production schedules, on time. The reason for this is a lack of effort in the team towards the common goal. I was the team leader in the group. I organized all of the group meetings and constantly provided direction and leadership to the others. For example, I organized both of the video meetings preparing suitable material for it. Before each video meeting, we had at least one discussion in order to clear what we are going to talk about in the video. All of the team members presented at all group meetings. In my opinion, the first video meeting was more productive than the second one as all of the members were more prepared and successfully contributed to the development of the video script as well as resolving an issue about video production which consists of three stages: pre-production, production and post-production. Everybody expressed their opinions and the team came to a consensus agreement. For example, when I designed the company logo using black and white colours, Firat insisted on red and black colours. Then, Shane suggested the colour of the zigzag line of the logo to be changed to a red colour and everybody agreed to this consensus. Working with Firat was harder for me than with Shane because Firat cannot concentrate for a long time on studying and he can easily be distracted from other things. I and Firat had a few small conflicts when I was trying to make him to work under the pressure as the success of every project depends on how hard the team works. I had several conversations with Firat in order to create a positive climate in the group. I explained to him that I understand that he is too young to work under the pressure and I just asked him to give a little bit more effort as his future also depends on this. In my opinion, these conversations have positively reflected on our work as Firat has really showed his cooperation. He was responsible for filming and editing the video. Firat brought his camera. He has already had the knowledge how to work with a camera and tripod which really helped for filming the video. Firat was also working at home editing the video on his laptop.

I shot the scene with Shane and Firat where they smoke and drink and I brought some props for the video. I also was responsible for publishing the video, using DVD Studio Pro. I shared my DVD cover and menu designs with Firat as he did all of the video editing. After the assessment feedback, I re-edited the video improving some bits. All of the evidence of my working process is uploaded in my blog.  

Shane was the main character in the video. He was also responsible for choosing the song as he is more familiar with this kind of music. Shane explained the reason of the song choice on the Shock & Awe blog. He did not motivate the team to work more productively. Shane was just waiting for someone to tell him what to do next in the project but he never showed his disagreement that he did not want to work.

We also communicated through a Facebook. I sent to them different ideas and materials about the project in order to motivate the team to work more productively. Most of the project materials I published on my blog so they could see it there and gave their opinions and ideas.

Overall we produced a very good work fully completed after referral. We shared tasks and certain roles within the team. We also overcame communication difficulties and learnt to listen to each other which are very important things for any team work. The lack of effort within the team prevented us from achieving best results and managing the time properly.