There is no doubt in my mind that what I have learnt, more than anything else, during this project, is be confident about who you choose to work with. Any concerns or worries you may have about an individual’s ability, enthusiasm or productivity probably exist for a reason. If you choose to work with them, make sure you have a contingency plan in case things fall through. A project is only as good as the sum of its parts. If one, or more, of the collaborators is unreliable then the parts they are creating could well be unreliable too.

Working in a student environment differs from the workplace in one major respect, and that is your ability to replace team members. In the workplace, if an employee is not hitting their deadlines, or reaching their targets, the employer has several options. The employee must be warned and spoken to about the problem, but if their work does not improve, the employer can take action. They can shift the individual onto other, less important, projects and, where necessary, make more meaningful threats. At university, there is a limited pool of “employees” most of whom are already “employed” by someone else. You cannot remove someone from your project if things go wrong, all you can do is look for someone else to also do the work, and use the most successful version. If every other student is already working on other projects, then there is little you can do but try to encourage those you are working with to work harder and produce something better.

In the workplace, it is also very clear what level of authority an individual has. You know who your managers are, who you need to listen to and who you should respect. As a student director, you may be in charge of the project, but you have no more real authority than any of the students working with you. This makes it much harder to put any impact or strength behind the words of a verbal warning. There is very little that you can back it up with.

These lessons were, unfortunately, learnt through the unreliability of those I worked with this year. Trying to pull everything together has been extremely stressful. Last year I promised myself I would leave at least one project that wasn’t a collaborative effort, so that if anything went wrong I had a project I could drop in an emergency so that I could devote the time to whatever needed it the most. For some reason, I forgot that promise and once again, all four of my projects were collaborative. This meant that not only were other people relying on things from me before they could start working, but I was often waiting for work from them. When there is a personal project to work on, this eases the tension of waiting for work, because you still have something to devote your time to.

Some essential time was wasted on this project due to having to find new collaborators at such a late stage and I wasnt able to start rendering until May. This meant that many of my planned scenes had to be dropped and I cut down the advert to a more manageable format. Unfortunately, in the end, so much time was lost that even this shortened version was not achieved. All three shots were rendered and passed on to the compositor, but with only a week to try and complete everything, she didn’t stand a chance. This was made harder as the animation for the final shot did not match up with the movement of the bear. The new animator had been unable to get things any cleaner in the short amount of time I gave her and my compositor was unable to match move the bear without a lot more time, which we didn’t have.

I am disappointed that I was unable to pull the elephant project through to completion, but I believe that I did everything I could to get it as far as possible. If I were to do the project again, I would pick the team I worked with more carefully. I would respond more quickly to late work and give verbal warnings sooner. I would also be faster to look for alternative collaborators if my team ignored deadlines and feedback. However, this final option would be very dependant on other students having projects they could change/drop.