I teamed up with a graphics student who is also a friend of mine, thinking, in my infinite wisdom that that would be a positive thing and would help the process.
It was not a complete failure and was not all bad but it was surely an eye opener and an educating experience, I learnt a lot and took may lessons from it, and I shall attempt to explain what they are.
Firstly me and my team mate sat and discussed possible ideas through text, face to face meetings and via email.
We were flying through and the ideas we had were starting to excite us as a team and we began to expand the idea of faking a UFO crash landing in a local forest.
As we began to build on our initial ideas we started to lack direction and have difference of opinions in what we should do next and with the delegation of jobs.
The work didn't suffer from our bickering and tired eye rolling as we managed to work past our problems but I feel that with a little more compromise from both sides would have seen our project flourish.
The problems, in my opinion stemmed from us both being strong willed and confident people who like to lead, with neither really wanting to step back and allow the other to take control.
Although this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does not help when working in a team.
The work was coming along, we had some good ideas and some others that just felt like a waste of time in the end as we scrapped them, and felt it was time we could have used doing other things.
We mocked up newspaper headlines and 'top secret' documents from 'eye witnesses' each with a back story and biography.
We also had a lot of fun with the project I don't want to push the idea that we spent the whole time disagreeing, as we had agreed while writing our team manifesto at the start of the project that the main thing we wanted to do was have fun with the project.
Filming Witness interviews in a spoof manner allowed us to really open up and just behave like a pair of clowns, and during the presentations to the rest of our group, the videos (which were one of the ideas we scrapped) the interviews proved quite popular and made 95% of the group laugh, which was what we wanted more than anything, thats the reason we had chosen such a far out idea with no imagination barriers.
In the end, we had some good ideas but due to the lack of direction and maybe due to us being so familiar with each other we did not have a big a body of work that we would have liked but the work we did have, we both felt was good and we were happy with.
A lot of the work we ended up with though, was not work we could physically show but was more mental, we found out a lot about each other and ourselves.
I for one found out what it must be like to work with me in a team, and so on the next available opportunity to work in a team I will make a conscious decision to sit back and allow somebody else to lead unless asked or nominated, just to see if the outcome is any different.
So in hind sight it was not a bad experience but a rather valuable one, with many important lessons learned about myself and about the ethics and compromise involved with team work, which personally speaking I think was what the brief was about more so than the final outcome.
