寻根 Reflection

For my group, we have planned to shoot a documentary film based on food from different Chinese dialect group. I felt that we have chosen an interesting topic to work on as food is an element that connects to each of us deeply as many traditional dialect foods are mainly brought over by the early Chinese pioneers. Behind all these food lays very interesting stories.

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Some of the challenges I have faced while planning this event is that our team consists of students from different courses from all over Temasak Polytechnic. Thus, one of the problems I face as a leader is planning the time and schedule for all the members to meet up. The second challenge I faced was to help decide on what is to be filmed by the crew for the film. It was a stressful task as I must decide quickly on what needs to be filmed, as the editor only have the holidays to do the necessary editing. The last challenge faced personally is also to up my own game in terms of time management. It is not an easy task for me as I am from School of Design and there are a lot of projects ongoing simultaneously for me. To ensure the planning of 寻根is being carried out smoothly, I must reschedule my time to ensure that it suits and fit my teammates' timings.

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Firstly, I’ve learnt during the planning of this event is that during the execution of the event, there tend to have a lot of hiccups. It is important that as a team, we step up to these hiccups and challenges and ensure the event runs smoothly. For example, even before the main event started our team decided that to change the food we plan to serve to our audience. This change required the team to make a lot of last minute amendments, John and I must make sure the food arrives to the venue on the dot. As the food we have prepared previously does not need any preparations, the team must be ready to cut the food to different servings for guests.

 

Secondly, during the event I learnt of people’s weaknesses, but it is important as a team leader that I encourage them and try to help them out to ensure the success of the event.

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Lastly, the researching section for this event was probably the most tedious part of this entire project and event. I must ensure all the facts are delivered accurately to the audiences. I've learnt that if the researching part of this film is not done accurately, the event planning would not be smooth, and the event itself would turn out to be a laughing stock. For example, there was one day where John, Yufei and I went to recce for the film shooting but when we visited the sites half of it was not open for the day. Then we realised it was a Monday which we went on and there are a lot of stores not operating on Mondays. So, the recce pretty much turned out to be a disaster and was not very successful.

 

With all that is being said, I am still glad that we faced so much disasters as through that I am truly being educated.