Unit 15: Developing a Small Business in the Creative Media Industries - The Production Project Individually Managed

As part of the Ufilms Business, we all worked to manage at least one project each. I was set as a project manager on two different projects, namely the Prevent Project and the #YOLO Project for Connections. I'll talk of the Prevent Project in a Social Action assignment, so for this I will discuss my work managing the Connections project.

Firstly, the Connections project was a joint management between myself and the HR manager of Ufilms, Matthew Taylor. We were asked by the proprietor of a local youth theatre company to film a stage performance of a play (named "#YOLO#) about a teenager dealing with the news of cancer, and the dark thoughts that follow. The performance was being entered to a national competition, and they had specific rules we had to follow, which helped alleviate a large portion of necessity to communicate, as we knew from the start we had to do a 1-camera angle, unedited recording of the whole play. There were going to be two performances, so we offered to film both to make sure we got the best version possible, and that we'd then trim the edges off, so there's no sitting around, and we'd render, export and upload it to their competition. It sounded like a simple job without any hassle.

We did both recordings, it was very simple and quick, and it came out looking great. We took the best one, trimmed off the edges and started to render it. When this was done, we exported it. Each export took about 3 hours, which isn't too unusual for over an hour long performance. What we didn't anticipate was that we had to keep to very strict file formats (.wmv, .mp4 or .avi), but due to the computers in college, .avi didn't behave properly, .mp4 came out as .mp3 and .wmv wasn't an option, so we had to export it in .avi. As I said, it didn't behave properly, and so it came out in strange resolutions (often in 4:3 size) several times, cutting off the sides of the stage, or warping it to be smaller, and it blocked off options to change the resolution.

We tried to decompress it, which made it better, but it decided to undo the render and the quality was gone, so it needed to be rendered again, then compressed, which ended up taking over a week to do, leaving the project very close to not being handed in. There were a lot of issues with this that, if done again, would not be taken, and the management and handling of this was fairly loose and not handled the best, but it all boiled down to unfortunate, unavoidable circumstances and a lot of compromise.