Leadership and Teamwork – InnovatED

I, along with three other people were assigned the task of recording and editing a video documenting the process of several service learning projects; dubbed ‘innovatED’. These projects ranged anywhere from a scrapbook to building a buggy for various not for profit organisations. Although the members who were taking part in the documentary were personally selected, I was the only one in the group with experience in making videos and with editing programs. As such, I was given the responsibility to lead the project and use my expertise to make sure the documentary that would be presented at the end of the term would go smoothly. I assigned myself with mainly the role of editing the footage into a succinct documentary, as my experience leaned towards that field. My group and I came up with a basic storyboard of how we want to cover each project, interview and the pitches and decided to start recording the footage. It was important to split ourselves to record the footage more efficiently as there were four of us and four projects going on at the same time. This demonstrated the coordination and teamwork that the group needed to have to understand what type of footage was wanted for the documentary and to trust each other to be able to get that footage. When that footage of the first day was recorded I decided to start the editing process, as this would mean that by the next session of InnovatED, I be able to get my fellow group members to criticise and give suggestions about what could be improved in the documentary and would give the time for me to make the changes while my teammates were there. This demonstrated proactiveness on my behalf, as starting the documentary at home would make the entire process of making the documentary much more efficient and make it so that we would be able to fetch footage for the documentary during that time instead of editing as there was no other time during the day where we would be able to record the footage. When our next session was over, our group had decided that we would need to start recording interviews to not only provide and explanation on what is going on in the footage but to also enhance the as-of-current lacking auditory elements that consisted  of bland stand-in background music that would be changed when we found a better song. I had prepared a set of standard questions that would be asked in the interviews before the session so that our group could get to work straight away, after we had done that we had to find a good song that I would be able to sync with video so I could use audio queues to indicate something was happening. This left the final part of the documentary to handle, which was recording and editing the pitches, however this part was the most difficult, due to one of the members of my group having a habit of not putting the footage that he recorded on our shared folder, leaving me nothing from his side to edit. This meant that I had to chase him up on footage that he had either not given me or not recorded entirely. In the InnovatED documentary project, my group and I demonstrated teamwork and leadership in a joint effort to make a documentary that was enjoyable to watch for the entire cohort.

A visit to one of the sites that one of the projects was based in