Northwest Institute for Social Change: The Blog

Welcome to the real world.

Lessons learned producing a 5 minute documentary that college doesn’t teach you:

1) Communication, rest, and food make groups work better.

2) The clock doesn’t stop for incompetence, no matter how hard you’re trying.

1) My documentary group has worked 9-12 each day this week.  Broke after too many food cart adventures, we delegate shopping and cooking.  We crash at eachothers’ houses, or bike through deserted streets at 1AM, relieved to have a solitary and unthinking moment.

With so many hours of working together, we’ve learned to accommodate each other in a way I never had to in college – even while upkeeping an apartment with two roommates.

For example, it became clear that some of us shouldn’t function past 11. “I’ve learned that I have a bed time,” said one group member. After that point, hilarity, or caustic urgency ensues.

Some of us can’t think when hungry.

In our storyboarding sessions, two group members started cramping each others’ creative processes.  The tension mounted until one of our seminars gave us the language to work through it. On Tuesday, we met wit Jelly Helm, a former Nike advertising guru. He explained that during brainstorming, you should shut off the judgmental, evaluative part of your brain and use only the creative side – and then you should go back and evaluate the ideas, using the other side of your brain.  In our group conversations, we weren’t being clear about which phase of the creative process we were at, and thus, when one group member was throwing ideas out undeveloped and uncensored, another was critically trying to assess their feasibility.  Both ended up frustrated.  So we all worked out that we needed to be clear about where we were in the process, and articulate either that we were feeling anxious about feasibility, or we needed to just run with an idea—rather than shutting each other down.

2) For all our critical thinking skills, we’ve not yet established a system that lets us start our interviews on time.  There are batteries to be charged, tapes to be labeled.  When we arrive on site, we need to find a space with low ambient sound and an evocative, but not distracting background.

At college, books will wait.  Libraries will wait.  It’s been a shock to have to deal with real, things, and real people; with heavy, delicate, expensive, gear, and with people who are not being paid to share their time with us.

Welcome to the real world.