3rd Blog Post

Teamwork Makes the Stream Work

Using Gibbs’ Model of Reflection (Jasper 79) I am going to waffle mostly in the second person (which wasn’t even intentional, at this point it’s just a reflex when doing reflective writing to avoid actually talking about myself) for over 800 words about how I felt creatively challenged when it comes to figuring out how to set up a stream on my placement with the SARC Video Team.

Gibbs’ Model of Reflection

Description (What happened?)

Thursday mornings tend to start with me rolling into wherever we’re streaming from, be it the Harty Room or the Sonic Lab, usually with hair still at least moist from the shower and coming into the unknown. No week tends to be the same, is there one person playing the piano on stage? Is there a person by a synth board and someone doing spoken word poetry into a mic at the same time?

And you as the team running the stream just have to roll with it, make sure your cameras are set up in good places and give you good options for shots throughout the duration of the concert, all around whatever is required for whoever is currently performing. This means solving different problems creatively from week to week, with your shot compositions having to vary wildly depending on who is performing, which all have to be sorted within the short amount of time that before the concert begins, preferably whilst the performers are rehearsing.

Feelings (What were you feeling and thinking?)

This can prove daunting, though in many cases exciting as well. You don’t want to make poor choices, or spend too long making those choices that you run out of time to solve any other problems down the line. You also don’t want to feel like you’re in the performers’ way, or that during the concert your equipment will be a distraction for both them and the audience. Despite this, it’s exciting going in every week with a sense of the unknown ready to problem solve creatively.

Evaluation (What was good and bad about the experience?)

Sometimes you want to get an interesting and creative shot that looks really nice (in previous weeks we’ve attempted to get shots of the inside of pianos and from behind the performer), but these shots don’t work out for whatever reasons, be that because the camera stands out and is a distraction, or that the room layout doesn’t allow for what you’re wanting to do, or the audience is in shot. This can prove demoralising, with your hard work not paying off, but you just have to roll with it, and find a different alternative, that can prove to be better than the original idea (not always, but hey, what are you going to do?).

Analysis (What sense can you make of the situation?)

At this point you just have to be collaborative, working with the other people in the SARC Video Team to find a compromise or simply a better alternative. In the case of the livestreams this usually happened with the fourth camera, the other three tending to stay in roughly the same positions across all the streams (one right, one left, one wide).

This part of the process is just about listening to other people’s inputs, and finding something in there that will work for everyone. It may not be what you specifically want, but it’s less intrusive for the performer and the audience, and may do the job better than simply not having it at all. Especially in situations like these where options for where to put a camera may be fairly limited because most of your options are covered by the other three cameras, it’s easy to get stuck in one line of thinking and you need those external suggestions to get you all to a place where you’re happy.

Conclusion (What else could you have done?)

I don’t especially know whether you could really ‘do’ much else here. Being in a placement like livestreaming with the SARC Video Team means you’re consistently on your toes from week to week, it’s all different which means different creative challenges from week to week. The most you can learn from this is just to listen from the outset and make these decisions a discussion at the start of the process rather than towards the end. Doing a creative placement like being a part of the SARC Video Team inherently carries collaboration, and ignoring that is to ignore a big part of the process.

Action Plan (If it arose again what would you do differently?)

Just talk to the other people in your team, don’t think that you can go off alone and figure out the best solution for every creative decision, that’s not how teamwork works. After all, teamwork makes the stream work as has become something of a saying within the SARC Video Team. Without this you don’t have a stream, even when one of you is directing from the vision mixing desk, if there was no communication and it was just you, all you’d be left with is the same three of four shots, without any dynamism to them that comes from having a full team behind the scenes working on a stream.

Works Cited

Jasper, Melanie. “Frameworks for Reflection .” Jasper, Melanie. Beginning Reflective Practice. 2nd Edition. Cengage Learning , 2013.

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