Come Together, Write Now … Final Draft
Group projects usually make people groan. Personally, I love group projects. Being the social creature that I am, I tend to thrive in a group environment. I like the push and pull of a group dynamic and I like collaboration. Even though there were going to be obvious challenges for an online class to do a group project, I looked forward to it. Fortunately, it was as awesome as I had hoped it would be.
We spend a lot of our writing submerged in our own writing and style. For me, I get quite tired of hearing (reading) my own stuff. I write within a certain box and I do not often wander out of it. Group projects, in general, help with that. This project in particular not only pushed me out of my comfortable writing nest, but took me into a medium that I am not at ease with.
When our group first started discussing the project, at first we weren’t sure what about writing we specifically wanted to address. There was a lot of material that had been covered in the 12 weeks prior; a lot of tips, rules, and theory on writing. Sussing it all out and picking something to make the film about, was the most challenging in my opinion. I was stuck for ideas. Thankfully, this is where the group dynamic helped. The rest of the group was able to get it together and choose a basic subject – grammar – and a basic set up – a family that puts a lot of focus on the rules of grammar. The group collaborated on the script and then we got together and filmed.
I was not a part of the actual, physical writing process, but I was a part of the discussions through our group thread on the class website. It was there that we talked about what approach to the readings – specifically the two style guides – that we wanted to touch on. We each, I believe, had our own “pet peeves” that we wanted to address and we each had very firm opinions on which guide was more helpful to us. I, for instance, liked the concision and clarity of Strunk & White, while Erik (if I remember correctly) expressed a preference for Williams.
I must preface this next part with this: I watch A LOT of television. About seven months ago, my husband and I decided to get rid of our cable and get Netflix streaming. We had hoped that this would curb our television watching habits as well as save us money. It has not worked. I have been discovering more and more new television shows; so many that I think I’m watching more television now than I was when we had cable. At least it’s cheaper, right? I am also a huge fan of the 1950’s and 1960’s sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show, The Patty Duke Show, and Dick Van Dyke (the font I found for the credits on the film is actually called “Dick Van Dyke”. Yay internets.) So when Erik suggested the Style Guide Showdown, his (brilliant) idea suddenly turned black and white and had a canned laugh track in my head. It was amazing. So we moved to our second meeting with that idea and a script.
It was at this second meeting that we really connected as a group and really got into the nitty-gritty of getting our project locked down and water tight. We talked about specific rules that each style guide addressed (thank you Strunk & White for prepositions at the end of a sentence and Williams for concrete language), and what tone we wanted the film to take. There were some edits and additions that were made but, for the most part, there was not a lot of change from the first draft to the final version filmed.
Most comedians will tell you that writing a joke and telling a joke are vastly different. That what looks good and is funny on paper does not always come out to the audience as humorous. The same went for this process. In the second group meeting, we really wanted to include some examples that showed how word choice was important to make sure that the speaker’s message is getting across. We had the daughter in our show use the word “affect” when she actually meant “effect”. On paper, it made sense and was funny. But when we did the read through of the new lines, we realized that it would not work on film. It is almost impossible to ascertain which one – affect or effect – a person is saying unless they really push the pronunciation. We tried it, but it really did not play right. So, we revised and we dropped it from the script. If the point we were trying to make was not going to be picked up, then there was no point in keeping it.
Conversely, we also had to add other examples that were going to play on screen – such as the last scene between mom and daughter. The read through was running a bit short and so we wanted to add time, but we also wanted to make sure that the content we added was not just padding, like words in a paper, but good content that added to the film and also helped to illustrate the grammar rules we were showing.
What I found interesting was that despite my love for writing, I really enjoyed the director’s role. I liked looking at the script and envisioning how it was going to look. My husband, who is a film maker and who helped our group with the editing process, suggested that I use storyboarding as a way to make sure that we got all of the shots that I wanted to get. I did not story board the entire script, but I did use this process as an outline for myself for when we got to filming. It was this process that I found very similar to when I outline my papers before I start writing. It helped to make sure that I covered all that we wanted to cover and did so clearly. We ended up doing about six takes – or drafts, if you will – so that we would have enough shots to be able to cut the film together.
It was also interesting to watch the actors edit and revise themselves not only in words, but in tone and pitch of the voice. It is something that we do in writing when we choose words or add punctuation. The actors in our group would change their pitch, tone, and body language as they got more comfortable with the lines and with being on camera. The first few takes you could see the self-consciousness that was not completely related to still reading the script, but in the last few takes, this fades and the lines become tighter and clearer – much like the revision process in writing. As you become more confident in your work, you begin to see where the weak spots are and you work on fixing them. It stops being a conscious effort and begins to be automatic. As the actors became more confident, they started picking up on the vocal cues and nonverbal elements of the people they were working with. It made the film flow a lot better and made the transitions better.
However, I don’t think that this confidence in our work would have come if we did not have to meet, physically, in order to get this project made. In working together – albeit for a relatively short period of time – we became comfortable with each other and were able to trust each other in terms of knowing that each of us wanted to contribute to the best of our abilities so that we made a, pardon my French, kick ass movie. None of us were students that have settled for just making do. For instance, most of our group members are non-traditional students and we are the ones paying for our education this time around, so making the most and learning as much as possible in this class is really important to us. I don’t think that we would have ever known that about each other if we had not been forced (in a good sense) to meet each other and talk, which in turn led to the trust; the trust then led to the confidence in each other, and that led to an awesome project. It also reinforced what I already knew: That I do better in on-the-ground classes than I do in online ones.
Overall, I really liked this process. I enjoyed the collaboration and really feel like every single one of us contributed so much. We really fit and we found that we had a lot to talk about in our meetings, and not just about the project. We talked a lot about our writing experiences and what we have learned in this class and how that was going to translate into our “real” lives. We talked about our families and children and jobs. For me, this has been a very successful group project, despite what grade we might get.
