Overall, I found co-lab to be a really fun and engaging learning exercise. I definitely feel that being able to work collaboratively across disciplines is a skill I could use more practice on, and was grateful to have the opportunity to experience this while working on incorporating more mindfulness about social justice into my own design practice. Despite only having 3 people on our team able to put in work consistently, I think we nevertheless did a really good job at turning what started out as a fun idea into a serious pitch that we got generally good feedback on from industry professionals. I also found it really interesting to talk about our favourite animated cartoons with my classmates and analyze them to work out what makes them so successful. I think this helped my groupmates feel more involved in the project as all of us could recall fond memories of the cartoons that spoke to us the most growing up and now that we are older, we had fun dissecting those cartoons to find parts that we could adapt for our project.
For the recording of the final pitch, I definitely felt that I was the weakest of the group when it came to making our own recordings as I am not very comfortable in front of a camera or voice recorder. Luckily, my teammate who was putting together the recording was very patient with me and gave me tips on how to keep my recordings short and to-the-point by writing down what I needed to say so I could sound more confident. We had many slides with lots of information on each so we had to limit how much time we spent talking on each slide to keep the whole recording under 5 minutes. I ended up having to record many takes before I got my portion right, and I still feel like I left out some information that on hindsight would have helped make our pitch clearer. Even though it was the most challenging part of the project for me, I’m glad I was able to go through with it and contribute to it because I feel that this is something that improves with practice. My filmmaking teammates confirmed this by telling me how they got used to adapting a “presenter” voice for the camera by filming documentaries. I feel privileged to have worked with group mates who were so talented and committed. I feel we handled everything that was thrown at us with professionalism and good attitudes, and the feedback we got for our pitch made me realize how rewarding it can be to work out a show idea to a professional standard, though I feel that if we had more time, I would have liked to have made some more art and visuals for our pitch, as I saw with many of the other groups’ presentations.
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