finding a better way

Time is not on our side this term! Thanks to the up-coming world cup (very exciting!) our second academic term has been cut rather short as a result there is a bit of a mad rush to get things done! What Sipho and I have decided to do in order to (hopefully) maximise output, is split certain tasks between us. Otherwise there would be some serious 7 day working weeks happening!



Last week was the first week putting this plan into practice. Once recording of episode 1 was finally done, my job was to sit down and edit it into a complete 7 minute episode. Once I was happy with it, I handed it over to Sipho who played it back in a focus group consisting of a number of teenage girls. We decided this would be necessary so that when we scripted episode two, it would be well informed and not just dialogue we randomly came up with. Otherwise there is the risk of our material not ‘speaking’ to our audience. The feedback I got from Sipho was great and it helped us hugely in terms of scripting episode two (which we did together). Apparently the girls felt that their needed to be considerably more isiXhosa included in our dialogue if we want to capture audiences. So, when we scripted episode 2, we made sure to do so as much as we could. The girls were also confused by the role of the narrator (which we included in order for the drama to flow better and be easier to follow). This I found rather disconcerting as the role of the narrator was rather simple. However, we decided to narrow down the narration to a more direct bridging role between certain scenes.

I am happy with the way Sipho and I have decided to work this term. While what we are doing is still considered group work, we each have specific tasks to complete which, I think, evens out the workload nicely.