Creative Collaboration: Week 1: Semester 1: 28/9/18: S.W.O.T and pipeline.

For our first Creative Collaboration session, we conducted an exercise in analysing our talents and skills set for our potential teams that we would select by next week. This method was called S.W.O.T analysis. Annabeth our tutor, explained that it was an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunity and Threats. The purpose of this exercise was to essentially promote ourselves to our perspective teams, and to begin we first went into pairs or teams to list our many strengths and weaknesses and decide how they could prove as an opportunity or how it may threaten us or hold us back in our development.


I personally felt this to be rather hard and confusing as it was hard to determine my weaknesses in my character. I thought asking for others opinions might help but my class mate Declan couldn't think of any weaknesses. However after a little time and consideration I soon determined some weaknesses such as working on more than one project at a time be it some of my stories (fan fiction or my own creation) or how the approaching deadlines and work on 2D animation can at times be rather stressful.

Some opportunities were plucked from this and Annabeth suggested that my skills in writing could be used in fan fiction given she saw the story I did over the summer, which I agreed it would. The next step was to connect some of our notes of us together. For example how our strengths can minimise our threats or increase opportunities and how our weaknesses could present opportunity for learning. I felt this area was rather difficult for me as I didn't understand some aspects of the exercise or couldn't see how it would work.


In hindsight I should've asked Annabeth for further details on this aspect of the exercise so that I could better understand it more.

Our second task was mapping out a production pipeline that we may wish to consider looking at for doing our group projects. This task seemed simple at first given we had covered this in year 1 of the course, however our time during the summer break did make us forget some elements of the pipeline in the pre production, production and post production phases of a project. However this at the same time served as a refresher course in the production pipeline and I felt it helped gain more perspective into how we may work.


Our task for the weekend would be to create a creative C.V using what we learned in our exercise in anyway we choose, be it a motion comic or a show reel this would be shown next Friday and enable us to recruit or choose our teams for the collaboration project.


I would think I learned a lot from today and how this SWOT analysis could be of use in the project theme or even help in the development of a CV for future work placements or team projects. Looking back on today I possibly would've researched more about this method in the second stage of the exercise.


I could see the sense in using this method for the groups chosen theme as it would help identify the negative, positive and opportunities that it presents for us to experiment with in terms of methods and styles of animation.


To improve my understanding of the exercise I would've possibly talked with my tutor about this in further depth to get a concept idea of how it could be used. I will make sure to look into this further should I decide to approach this method of analysis in themes or practice it on some of my own stories or character design work.