EVENT: Personal Reflection

In regards to my role I think what worked was I was always able to listen to other peoples opinions and problems during the planning stages of the event. I think that being able to hit certain targets on time and keep some organisation in the meetings was also a good strength. I think that some of the problems with my role were that I didn’t have enough time to personally tend to all the activities and rehearsals prior to the event as some problems arose that I couldn’t deal with, the best example of this was the introduction of new software for the green screen room two days before the event. I thought that the team in the green screen room had got to grips with the software but they were still encountering problems and getting to grips with using it during the event, if I’d known that they weren’t confident with the software I would have told them to stick to the original plan which involved using a vision mixer instead. I think during the event were where my biggest weaknesses came out, from before the event I made it clear that I didn’t want to be a main speaker as I felt uncomfortable talking to big groups of people. This meant that during the event I shyed away from speaking a lot when I would have been required to speak. I also think that in terms of planning, in the last session before Easter (and technically before the event) we went through the event and marked down every small detail and made sure the event would work effectively step by step. I think that if we had done this in earlier meetings then the planning and event would have ran even better as we would have had more time to prepare for our own roles. I think it was also a shame that we didn’t have any pamphlets or handouts for the people in the work experience room.

I think that overall there was a good effort from the team from the planning stage to the actual event. During the planning stage the class was particularly helpful when discussing the event and working towards our main objective. I admired the fact that Jake volunteered for a lot of the tasks for the event but it became apparent that he was taking on too much, it got to the point where he was volunteering for every task. I think that overall the class work together really well and some people definitely have strengths that the roles of the event served to highlight. For example the green screen room personnel were Rob, Jake, Lance, Chris and Will, who are for the most part interested in the technical elements of the course so it seemed a good fit that they signed up to do the technical demonstration segment of the event. People like Mike and Balve are confident speakers and this served them well in the Gatehouse for the work experience presentations.
It’s hard to say how well the green screen team worked together as I was not present for that section of the event, I think the general opinion is that they failed to get the students involved with the activity and this is probably because they needed someone a bit forward to take the initiative. I’ve seen them do presentations and I think they’re all very capable public speakers so I trust their presentations for the equipment went well. I also admired the fact that Will provided some hands outs on lighting and green screens. I think that the biggest room for improvement would be that we needed practice and that would have helped us all more confident and assured with our delivery of presentations and the event as a whole.

I think that the experience with event organisation was helpful for me. I am interested in different roles in the media such as producing, editing and writing. I think that this management opportunity has helped me with gaining skills for a producers role, as this role is most similar to a managers role when film sets are concerned. I think I will continue to actively pursue all three of these career paths and continue to learn about the roles into my third year at Paintworks. I would not rule out doing management in a different sector, I think that being an events manager has helped with a more broad experience of learning about management, and I've been told many of the principles are the same. As far as events management goes I would love to do it again, particularly a media event like a film festival or live music event. But at the moment I have produced some material for my showreel, as well as my multiplatform project D.O.A. which was a short film. So I plan to pursue my interests in producing or writing television drama and film.