FINAL EVALUATION
Evidence Of Problem Solving
One of the major issues which i encountered throughout this project was my lack of organisation when it came to files. This project was one of the heaviest in terms of sheer images and videos taken as evidence to support our claims. A lot of the footage was also very long meaning that the file size was large, this meant that because i didn't organise very well it was hard to find specific files when i was needed them to support what i was talking about.
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I combatted this issue and therefore solved it by instructing the other people in the team to put the files in either folders or name them what they are rather than the generic automatic file name. This began making it so much easier to find the files that i needed, it wasn't just limited to evidence files however as it started becoming difficult to find planning docs etc as evidenced above.
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It is important that i take what i have learnt in regards to this forward into the next project to prevent it from happening again, some of the negative impacts that this had before i fixed included longer times necessary to complete simple tasks and an increase in stress levels. If i want to prevent this i need to follow the steps i took to organise better.
Post Mortem
Introduction
In this project I faced a variety of challenges and problems but it is important for me to be able to recognise them and reflect on them now that I am at the end of this project. This is so I can learn from them and ensure that they don't happen again in the future and that if they do, the effect won't be as great. I will ensure that I take on board the feedback that arises so that I can make sure that when I come to do my final major project I am in the best place I can be to achieve the grade that I want.
Walkie Talkies Not Working Or Missing
This issue was something that was experienced on a few separate occasions due to lazy staff in charge of the equipment not bothering to put them in charge despite multiple reminders from the management of the show. This issue caused significant disruption to a few practices and a live show as it meant that the control room and myself as the floor manager were without communication for a small period of time. I fixed this issue by instead ringing the vision mixer on my personal phone while a solution was found by the person in charge of the equipment, it turned out that he had also forgotten to put the spare batteries on charge so we had to run the rest of the live show through a phone call which meant that we didn't have the luxury of the push to talk feature. Although this was inconvenient it was also a majorly important learning curve and I will go forward to future projects knowing what I know and therefore ensuring that this doesn't happen again.
Crew Members Absent On Important Days
This was a forecasted issue as highlighted in my pre-mortem, that although I had a conversation with the whole team to express the importance of punctuality and attendance throughout this project to ensure the smooth runnings of our live shows, people still were absent on multiple occasions. It is important for me to expand here, on one occasion we had a member of the team who was genuinely really unwell with a virus and therefore had to be absent for a few days while he recovered. This was fine as he communicated that with me and I could make alternative arrangements. However on a separate occasion there was a member of the team who didn't show up on one of our important practice days just because he couldn't be bothered to get out of bed, he told me this himself which caused me to feel frustrated. The issue of missing staff members meant that important roles were left unstaffed and the workload had to be picked up by others. For example one of the people who were absent was in charge of the audio mixing for the show. We solved this issue by instructing the internal floor manager to pick up this additional responsibility and the live show went smoothly, this was however not without additional strain
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Audio Mixing Deck Malfunction
In one of our live shows the audio mixing deck went down just 2 minutes before the scheduled live show, this live show wasn't something that we could just push back as it was our covering of the esports match. This was a live match that was being played semi professionally and with another team, this was at the latest agreed time so it wasnt able to be pushed back any further. There were two routes of problem solving ongoing at this time, one route by me which was the emergency use of a handheld microphone to try and allow the show to go on while the issue was being fixed and the other was by the internal floor manager who was rerouting all of the audio channels in to a different numbered deck. He had managed to fix the issue before me and therefore the show was able to be continued only 2 minutes later than what was originally scheduled. This just meant that a miniscule amount of gameplay was missed and that the presenters had to improve a small piece of dialogue to explain what happened and catch up with anything that was missed. I will learn from this fix and use it again in the future should anything like this happen again.
Confusion During The Show
This was one of the issues that we almost knew for certain was going to occur, in the early shows there wasn't much content to cover. We were all finding our feet within our roles and figuring out what worked and what didn't. Towards the end of the project however the shows had a lot more content in them and were therefore much longer, this meant that more communication was necessary between the different roles. During one of our final shows a moment of confusion occurred when I had instructed the presenters to talk about a topic to stall us some time to fix an audio issue. Obviously I had to do this without making any sound or distracting them too much so as to not make this noticeable to the audience, the presenters took this as me telling them to move onto the next section of the show. We fixed this by just going to the title screen and then fading to black where we then fixed the issue and came back afterwards with a small explanation communicating what had happened to the audience. This is something that I will learn from and try to make my communication easier to understand so that it doesn't happen again should I do this in the future.
Accidental Stoppage Of The Live Stream
In our final live show there was an incident in which we needed to close the stream for a few minutes for a break in between the matches that were being played by the esports team. I, as the floor manager, tried to communicate to the presenter that we would be going for a break, however he phrased it like the show was ending. When the control room saw this they closed the stream thinking it was over, this was all due to a massive miscommunication between outside on the show floor and inside the control room. We solved this by fading to the title screen and for the few minutes that we were off air, coming up with a small piece of text that we were going to read out to the audience explaining what had just happened. It went something along the lines of “Sorry about the temporary downtime there, we were experiencing some technical difficulties with the stream”. This seemed to be enough as the chat picked back up again and the live show continued. I will prevent this from happening again by ensuring that any breaks in the broadcast are known beforehand by both the studio floor and also the control room.
Conclusion
In conclusion it was beneficial in a way for these issues to occur as it allowed for me to learn what was good and what wasn't about the processes taken to achieve the outcome of this live show. I am really happy with the outcomes that we managed to achieve as a team and will ensure that everything highlighted above will go towards learning how to make the best show possible if i was to do something similar to this in the future. Although it is important for me to learn from my mistakes it is also important to not knock myself down because of them and understand that actually they are there to help us improve.
Final Evaluation
Introduction
Within this project everyone in the class was given a job role within a team. The team's job was to produce multiple final outcomes, 2 of them being live shows. The first of the two could be shorter and not include very much information, it was more to show a technical understanding of all the equipment, the second show was more focused on ensuring that the content was there also and that we knew what we were covering and why. I feel that this was achieved and done to a very high standard.
Context
This stage of the project was very much so based on looking at other peoples work to allow us to gather an understanding of what good examples of the work we were expected to do looked like. I found this really helpful as it allowed me to explore techniques etc used by other people within the role that I had applied for to confirm to myself whether that was the right role for me. I am really happy with the output of work that I managed to achieve within this area of the project. There are definitely areas to improve on such as looking into a wider scale of things within my work to ensure that my knowledge isn't just focused on one area and that I can instead have the ability to work within multiple areas or sectors and adapt my skills as required to do so.
Research
There was only one task to complete within this section in this project and that was a lengthy research report into our two chosen job roles that we would be applying for. Although this report had a very high minimum word count I was able to quickly find my rhythm within this task and superseded expectations by writing around double of the requirement while ensuring all of the content being spoken about was beneficial and wasn't just there for the sake of meeting a word requirement. I am really happy with how I managed to complete this task, not only with the quality but also the length of time that it took me to complete it. Saying this however there are areas of improvement to be found such as the fact it would have been good for me to evidence a plan before writing this so that i can demonstrate the journey to reaching the final outcome. Although I had a plan it wasnt evidenced afterwards and was instead deleted meaning that potential marks may have been missed.
Planning
Within this project the planning stage was very much so our preparation stage for the live show, it was an opportunity for us to identify potential issues that will occur in an attempt to prevent them from happening and allowing us an easier time when producing our outcomes. Additionally however there was an area of this which was based on us preparing for our job role interviews. This was something that I found extraordinarily beneficial as it allowed me to understand prior to the interview what was required of me and therefore make a plan of how I was going to demonstrate that I have the ability to achieve that. This was what I was worried about the most within this area of the project and I feel that I managed to complete this to a really high standard which allowed me to get the first choice role that I applied for. Now at the end of the project I can confidently say that I made the right decision applying for the role that I did and hope that I have demonstrated to the interviewer that I was the ideal candidate for the role. There were of course improvements that could be made such as the length of time that it took me to complete certain tasks with this area however they are easy fixes.
Experimentation
In this area of the project it was our opportunity to take some risks in the sense that there was no fear that if it went wrong it would ruin everything. The early tasks in this section were to do with evidencing that we have an understanding of the technical side of creating a live show or studio based production. We did this by explaining all of the different pieces of equipment in the studio, what they did and how they worked together to create the desired outcome. My area of improvement for this area would be the signal chaining task, I found this quite difficult as it required a combination of memory and understanding of sophisticated equipment and this was something that I found difficult. Towards the end of this section however the tasks became much easier and consisted of simply evidencing our practices leading up to our live shows.
Final Outcomes
My final outcome stage is an area of this project which i am extremely proud of, usually in these projects i feel that my outcomes often don't show the passion or effort that i put in to creating them and working towards my desired grade however in this project i feel it is blatantly clear how much effort was put in by me to achieve the outcome that was seen. I do however wish i had gathered some more behind the scenes footage of me actually working in my role while a live show was happening, i could have done this by tasking a member of the team who wasn't doing anything at that moment to go around with a camera and film everything while the show was going on, although i did this once or twice i feel like i could have done it more if not every time to ensure there was plenty of evidence there to support me and my claims.
Evaluation
This area of the project I feel is actually done at all times during the creation of our work, although there are two areas in this project where this is seen ( Final Evaluation And Weekly Reflections ) it was actually done by me every single time I finished or began a task. I feel like this was a major piece of feedback which I gave myself in other projects and I am therefore happy that I listened to it and have been achieving what I wanted to in this project. The only area of improvement I would give myself within this area is to actually evidence this evaluation at the end of every task as I only did this after some of them which usually ended up being the important tasks. I should have realised how each task plays its own important role within the project and therefore given them all the same amount of effort in terms of collating my evidence of evaluation.
Conclusion
In conclusion I feel that this project is the best one which I have managed to produce this year in terms of the quality of work, quantity of work and overall the amount of happiness and enjoyment that I felt while working my way through it. I feel like my work is a fantastic tribute to what i set out to achieve in week one when we started this project and i intend on taking everything both good and bad into future projects to ensure that i am working within the same quality and therefore working towards my goal of achieving a merit in the final major project that we will complete at the end of this year.