communication & organisation

 This blog will demonstrate how my group and I organise and communicate throughout the process of our music video project.

Our group consisted of three members, all of the same gender and very close friends. For us, organisation and communication are extremely important, especially since we are frequently in contact. Because of this, we used multiple methods to stay organised, share ideas, and support each other throughout the process. This made ir easier for us to exchange thoughts quickly, give feedback, and ask for guidance whenever needed, ensuring that everyone stayed on the same page and contributed effectively to the project.

WhatsApp

The most powerful communication platform we used to stay connected was WhatsApp. It allowed us to easily communicate through group chats, voice chats, and video calls, and even stay in contact with our teacher when needed. This made it much easier to share ideas quickly and keep everyone updated. The app played a major role in bringing our ideas together and supporting our overall teamwork. Without WhatsApp, our discussions would have been much slower, and managing tasks as a group of three would have been more difficult and less efficient. However, sometimes it was hard to get everyone online at the same time, and the group chat could fill up our phones with messages, making it difficult to keep track of important information or reach out quickly. Here are a few moments from our conversation through WhatsApp that highlight how we communicated and worked together as a group.

These are links that we sent to each other in our WhatsApp group called "Media Music Video," where we sent teacher tasks, feedbacks, and collaboration links.

We also used the same group to communicate with Ara (casted actor), updating him on the filming schedule and making sure he understood what he agreed to. We added Gusde (extra help) to the group chat to improve efficiency, so he could understand our plan without needing information to be forwarded to him. We also invited Kirei (extra help) to help us and to send some pictures she took for our behind the scene blog post.

We also used the group chat to share ideas and give each other feedback to ensure that our intended ideas were correctly reflected in our work and to avoid any miscommunication. We also like to go on calls, especially since Lamiya was away and unable to be physically present so we had multiple video calls to make sure we were actively shaping and developing our ideas together.

Not only in group chats, I also had a few private conversations with Lamiya to help guide me with the editing and understand her vision more clearly. This helped me ask questions, clarifying ideas, and making sure the editing matches to what she had in mind.

Apple Photos (Shared Albums)

This app was used to store all our footages through its shared album feature. We used it to upload pictures and videos we had taken, such as behind-the-scenes content, and other memories from our music video project. This feature is only available to iPhone users, so we were lucky that everyone in our group including the actors and extra helpers used iPhones, allowing them to join the share album and viewing videos and uploading their own footages. This made it much more efficient for us to share files without reducing the quality of the videos when someone needed to edit them. It also meant that we didn't have to rely on messaging which could slow down the process and instead all the footage was easily accessed because it was already stored on our own phones. However, it sometimes took a long time to upload videos and invite people to the shared album, which slowed down our overall process.

Google docs

This feature was used to help us store all our work and tasks for the music video project. We also used it as a guide and draft before transferring our work to the blog, making the final version cleaner and more presentable. It allowed us to collaborate in one document so everyone could access it, contributing ideas, discuss, and add their own planning in real time. I personally found this tool very helpful for guiding my planning, keeping tracks of task, and writing notes to remember important points. Overall this feature was very important for organising our work and ensuring everyone stayed on track. Google Docs was sometimes hard to manage because it needed internet and worked better on laptops than on phones.

Pinterest

Pinterest was a tool to guide our creativity and inspiration. It is an app where you can search for ideas, view images, and upload your own content. For our group, Pinterest helped us share our imaginations through visuals by finding inspiration and sending it to each other allowing us to combine our ideas and agree on a clear direction. We also created mood boards for a music video which helped us visualise specific moments we wanted to recreate which made it better and much easier to explain our ideas as using visuals was more effective than just describing them in words. However, downloading pictures sometimes took up storage space on our phones, and we had to waste time deleting old images before we could download more.

Note App

This was an app we used on our phones as an off-line version of Google Docs. It made it easier for us to take notes, especially when we didn't have any connection on my laptop or when we're out and wanted to quickly write down ideas. Sometimes we forget to use it because we are used to Google Docs, but we eventually remembered that it was a part of our original plan. In the end, we made sure that Notes app was still an essential platform by sharing what we wrote there in our group chat. We barely used it since we usually send regencies or ideas through WhatsApp, which sometimes made this app feel quite useless.