The second semester of my Master's degree was a strange one. I was a part of the surfacing team for the short film that was in the midst of production throughout semester one. We had finished the semester strong and the team was a cohesive machine that steamrolled through assets.
Here came semester two and all production was put on halt for a battle royale of intense idea brainstorming. A cohort of 43 was shuffled around different teams for a few weeks and in our final round, before final teams and ideas would be chosen for concepting stages, Strange News Out Of Hartford was born. We had 6 weeks to get a proof of concept pitch ready for a board of panellists from the industry.
I was selected to be placed into the team as a stakeholder, a role that could've been interpreted in many ways. For some it was purely to be points of contact between the team and our leads, for others it was just a title given because they were core people to the original idea but I had subconsciously taken a leadership role for our team. I shared the role with a fellow named Tim but in the end, he was primarily occupied with the final execution of the trailer and later helped another team.
I was then left with the organisation and delegation of tasks. After seeking advice from past alumni, I was able to get the bigger picture in mind and pushed the team in the same direction. It was a very strange experience to be a small team's point of contact for everything in regards to status, how to move along, what their priorities and tasks should be, enforcing deadlines and how to fix issues. Issues and problems weren't immediately pushed to a higher up, I was the higher up that either fixed the issue or directed the issue even further up (the leads) should it be too difficult. The experience gave me insight, leadership is a direction I'd like to go in but it's something to ease into with better experience under my belt.
Alongside leading, I had taken the role as the editor. We had a running edit that would be constantly filled with new shots, new voice-overs (some done by me in my bedroom), new footage and would be tweaked for timing constantly. I had taken part in the initial storyboarding and again in the final script for the narration. The final pitch presentation was a weird collaboration where a member in my team would create it and I could only view what was happening at an extreme delay, followed by several messages of suggestions, feedback and requests.
Ultimately at the end, we didn't win with the panellists. The winning idea was chosen to actually be developed in semester 3. We did, however, win best pitch/presentation with a huge compliment from Pauline Koh (Technical Program Manager at Google) saying that the quality of our pitch was what she'd expect from her staff. (so excuse me while I scream this into the abyss)