Team culture pays off

It's just over 12 hours to go now until the final deadline for submitting films for assessment for the course, and some of the students are clearly under a bit of pressure.  This is not helped by the somewhat complicated compromise we negotiated with exams and LTS to keep the submission options as wide as possible and deal with the bottlenecks and limitations of OpenStudio when it comes to directly hosting video (as opposed to linking to external media).  Definitely something to attend to for the next presentation, but for now there are a number of things each student needs to do to make a complete submission and not everyone is finding it straightforward.

The team culture of the course is making a real difference though, as evident in this exchange in the forum:

Many large organisations would be very happy to have help at hand on technical issues with such a quick turnaround time.  It's certainly making my life easier as a moderator as this is the kind of query that does need to be picked up.

Our students are getting noticed

It's the start of the last week of the course, and tunnel vision is getting very easy for me: It matters how many students submit an EMA and I know there are some emotional barriers involved. There's been some really good films posted up on OpenStudio, and if you're just starting out it gives a deceptive idea of the standard required.  It's not necessary to be brilliant to pass or even do well in the course, but it can be harder to see that when really good films are being shown.  I'm thinking about how to handle this better in the future, but for now the focus is on the forums and making the point whenever possible that good is good enough and even OK is OK.  For a beginner making something and posting it publicly is a big step.

So the fact that some of our students are getting external recognition is on one hand good evidence that the best we're seeing is very, very good indeed.  On the other hand it's a welcome reminder of the incredible resources that come from getting a group of students to open up what they're doing to one another.  Here're two examples of films that most of us could learn something from:

Conan Coatsworth has been one of the course characters and the humour and energy in his films makes them a treat.  His parody about barefoot running is getting hits on YouTube and I'd say it's down to a good script, sound production values, an excellent actor and all about a popular topic online. Near 4,000 hits in 4 days and the shape of the curve looks good too.  I'm very interested to see how the interest and reaction shapes up and if he did another film starring Rory there'd be a fanbase out there already.

The second example is from someone who's had other stuff on his plate than the course and I'll make no claims at all about the relationship between what he's done and anything that we've taught.  The point though is that he shared this with us through the forum and gave thought to what his experience might say to the other students.  Adrian Petty's film won first place in the Disposable Film Festival, and it's not hard to see why.