This week we learnt about the importance of team working and what are the key characteristics that make up a good team player. We also used Belbin’s test to see what type of team worker I am. In the second session we looked more practically at client briefs and how they are repurposed into creative briefs that are used by us, the creatives,
during production. Firstly, we looked at an academic resource to understand the key attributes of a team player. Lencioni boils it down to three personality traits: ‘humility, hunger and people smarts’ (2016) . A humble team member is someone who can stand back and appreciate the work of others. A hungry team member is someone who is hard-working driven and pushes others to achieve their best. Finally a team member with people smarts is someone with high emotional intelligence, so someone who is empathetic and personable.

Next, we did the Belbin test and before I started I predicted I would be a specialist, as I believe I am someone who is quite happy to work individually. My results came out as 14 points for specialist, 13 points for completer finisher and 10 points for coordinator. The strengths of the specialist is that they are self-starting, dedicated and knows a lot about specific things. I also had to be careful to look at the drawbacks of the specialist which is that they only contribute on a narrow front and tends to dwell on technicalities and forget the ‘big picture’.

In the second session we talked about an element of freelancing we hadn’t touched on yet which is the actual client brief we might receive from out clients through Solent creatives. We talked about how the client brief might look in comparison to the creative brief. We were tasked with repurposing the client brief into a creative brief. How this might influence our personal project which is a promotional video for the Zumba class is that we have to ask questions to the client that benefit our own project but also how it can still appease the client.

This week I learned about the enterprise mindset and emotional intelligence. Again like last week it was a good opportunity for self-reflection. I took a few tests to test my entrepreneurship, enterprising and emotional intelligence in order for me assess where I am at with all of these core skills. In the first session we got a briefing on what skills make up the enterprise mindset and emotional intelligence. There is some cross-pollination between the skills with things like confidence and empathy. I learned that your emotional intelligence growth can start from when you’re very young and is effected by your home life and the way you’re raised by your parents and how you’re treated by your relatives. Your enterprise mindset is formed later when you grow into yourself and develop your professional skills.

So the first test was to test my enterprise skills. The results came out that I was occasionally enterprising which is understandable at this early stage of my career that I am occasionally taking risks and looking to better myself but I still want to stay relatively safe because I am still at university and risk taking is limited. the second test I took was to test my emotional intelligence and again the results were quite middle of the road with just slightly above average emotional intelligence. So for both core skills I have room to improve which is something I am going to take on board.

In terms of reading for this week, there was an article written by Paul Beesley that goes into more detail about something discussed in class about being a radiator vs a drain in terms of how you come across when working with others. Simply put, radiators are people who are outgoing and positive and are generally great people to work with whereas drains are people who are constantly negative and have a poor work ethic and are very difficult to work with. Beesley writes ‘It helps if we surround ourselves with like-minded, enthusiastic people that radiate their warmth, generosity of spirit and support.'(Beesley,  2018) this is something I can take moving forward in this unit as working with clients means I will have to radiate positive energy for them to get the best out of me, and for me to get the best out of them.

BEESLEY, P., 2014. Be a radiator, not a drain [viewed Feb 6, 2019]. Available from: https://www.business-times.co.uk/articles/news/be-a-radiator-not-a-drain

This week I learnt about networking, creativity and self-reflection. Firstly, the importance of networking cannot be understated. We looked into the Porter Gale’s book ‘My network is my net worth‘ which explains that meeting people in your personal and professional life has a dramatic effect on your own happiness. Networking can open so many doors for you and will allow you to take opportunities you otherwise may have not got. We also talked about creativity and how to optimise your own creativity and Julia Cameron speaks about the 3-step creative optimisation tool. Firstly, in the morning you should clear your creative memories by writing or scribbling all your thoughts onto a piece of paper. Secondly, you should feed your creativity by doing something you love. Lastly, you should incubate and do this by shutting yourself off by taking a 20 minute walk every day. Lastly, in this session we took part in an exercise where we talked about our aspirations, which for me is radio, and then talked about them in terms of past present and future which were prompted by cards we choose at random which for me were Love (past), Forgiveness (present), Now (future). For me this exercise was very personal and at some points quite cryptic in that I had to find meaning from a word and picture and relate them to radio which was difficult. It did allow me to reflect on some events that have happened to me during my time in radio which maybe will inform my plans for the future.

Coming up with a new and original documentary idea can often be very difficult, especially for young and aspiring filmmakers, because they’re is already so much out there, that to be original you need to put in some work. My main objective initially was that I wanted to find a crazy person and what better place to look than the internet. Now there is limitations to finding stories on the internet because as Rabiger says ‘You’ll need some inventiveness to find situations that are local and accessible’ (2004) so we decided to look local. Steven and I started out by gathering around a table frantically searching local news websites trying to find a story or character that would be the main feature of our film, however after a while we recognised that all the stories were the same and we were just retracing our steps over stories that had no relevance to the ‘climate of hope and fear’.

Eventually we shelved the local news search and decided to just start asking our friends, initially as a joke just because we were desperate, but then we struck gold when speaking to our friend Ronan, who suggested 5G and vaping, two things that have been widely debated over the past 12 months or so. However, I think we realised that vaping has been done before, especially in a short documentary style before on YouTube. So 5G it was.

Now this is actually where the idea should come to life, where we develop the story and ask ourselves “can we sell this idea in a new and interesting way?”. At the moment all we had was ‘5G is bad for your health’ but we needed a stronger story. Rosenthal and Eckhardt explain that ‘The strong story is a vital element of the successful documentary’ (2016) so without the characters and arc to support our documentary it would fall very flat. Obviously as well to do this we needed to not limit ourselves. Again as Rosenthal and Eckhardt say we need to ‘avoid dogmas and strait-jackets and stop yourself from thinking there is only one way to make documentaries’. We needed a perspective that our film would be taken from. Luckily for us there is a whole group of people online that are genuinely scared of 5G radiation and we hit the jackpot when we came across David from Radiation Health Risks, who makes videos about all sorts of radiation damage including 5G. I reached out to him via a YouTube comment and he responded with a list of names of other tin foil hat wearing radiation ‘experts’ that I could interview. So by just doing some research on 5G I found the perfect people for us to interview.

In conclusion I think our methods differed from experts an practitioners in that we didn’t really look through traditional sources such as history books, journals, newspapers and magazines instead we started off with the internet and eventually through word of mouth we stumbled across a viable concept.

RABIGER, M., 2004. Directing the documentary. 4th ed. Burlington, MA: Focal Press

ROSENTHAL, A. and N. ECKHARDT, 2016. Writing, directing, and producing documentary films and videos. 5th ed. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press

I have started off the 2019/20 academic year by attending this year’s Fresher’s Fair, not to get free stuff this time, but instead to help out Radio Sonar at their stall, but more specifically the studio. We were fortunate enough this year to have Radio Sonar be playing out in The Spark, right at the centre of Freshers Fair. For the most part we were the backing track to freshers fair from 10am-4pm but we were also lucky enough to be joined in the studio by the presidents of various societies including Sonar TV, Sonar Cinema, The islamic society, maritime society and the Doctor Who society. This gave me a fantastic insight into all the great people and communities we have buzzing around the university. We interviewed each guest with a few short questions to give them an opportunity to promote their society and have it be broadcasted live in The Spark as freshers fair was taking place.

We had a massive team of us working with Radio Sonar this year, befitting of the biggest society at the university, so for the most part we have about 3 or 4 of us in the studio at all times and about an additional 8 or 10 at the actual stall at the fair. I spent around 4 hours in the studio all told but it was absolute pleasure for me and gave me a chance to dust off my presenting boots ready for the busy radio year ahead. As well as presenting this year I will be taking up the new committee role of Head of Entertainment at Radio Sonar, which means any show on Radio Sonar that concerns entertainment or is entertainment based I will be in charge of and any concerns presenters or producers might have will go through me, which I’m really looking forward to.

So that’s a little update of what’s going on with me for this year, and I’ve added below some screenshots of some of my appearances on Instagram throughout Freshers Fair 2019:

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My expectations for this year are high, I am looking forward to jumping into all my modules and learning a lot of new things. I am excited to get involved with societies such as Sonar radio, as this is something I am really passionate about. I am local to the university, just a thirty minute bus away from hone but am enjoying the halls experience at the moment.

I am really pleased with the title of this post, but I feel like someone might pinch it to write a novel at some point.

Charl.. Sam