Four people, two scripts, no director
Four students - Ana, Bez, Chen and Dev - have six weeks to research a focus area and produce a three-minute collaborative film plus an individual research presentation. At the start of week three: three planning meetings have been held, Dev has missed four of six scheduled meetings and has not posted in the shared drive for nine days, two versions of the script sit in the drive with neither marked as current, and Bez has quietly taken on camera, editing and scheduling. Ana and Chen each believe they are directing. Nothing has been shot; the film is due in 18 days. At the last meeting Bez said, "Fine, I'll just do it all," and the meeting ended. No minutes exist for any meeting. Documentation of process is assessed individually.
1. Diagnose what is actually wrong and propose an intervention that can be executed in the next meeting.
Read the worked answer
The visible symptoms - an absent member, an overburdened member - are consequences of two structural faults: no assigned decision rights and no single source of truth for the work.
Evidence: two unmarked script versions means nobody owns the script. Two people believing they are directing means the director role was never assigned, only assumed. Bez's "I'll just do it all" is a withdrawal, not a solution: it concentrates every decision in one person and guarantees that the remaining three disengage further. Dev's absence may be a cause or a consequence; the group currently cannot tell, because nothing was ever explicitly assigned with a deadline.
Intervention - one 45-minute meeting, three outputs written down before anyone leaves:
- A one-page role chart: named owner for script, camera, edit and production management, plus, for each phase, a named decision owner who breaks ties. Ana and Chen's situation is resolved by naming one director and giving the other a defined role with real authority, such as cinematography or performance.
- A version rule: exactly one file per deliverable, marked current with a date and an owner; older versions move to an archive folder.
- A rhythm: a fixed 20-minute check-in twice a week, with a two-line written note after each, and an agreed escalation step if a deadline is missed.
Then contact Dev directly, outside the group channel, with a specific task and deadline - the test is whether the absence was structural or personal, and the group should find out before writing anyone off.
2. How should each student document collaboration so that the individual assessment reflects their contribution rather than the group's chaos?
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Because documentation is assessed individually, a group diary is the wrong artefact. Each student needs to show their own decisions and their own handling of the collaboration.
What to keep from this point on: dated notes of the intervention meeting, the role chart with names, the version history of the drive, message threads where decisions were made, and a short personal log recording what they decided, why, and what happened next. Evidence created now is worth more than reconstructed memory later.
On writing about Dev: state facts, not character. "Dev missed four of six meetings between 3 and 17 March and did not contribute to the shooting script; on 18 March I sent a direct message assigning the location list with a 48-hour deadline, and it was delivered on time" demonstrates collaboration skill - monitoring, escalating, reallocating. "Dev was lazy and did nothing" is unverifiable, reads as a complaint, and tells an assessor nothing about the writer's competence.
The same discipline applies to Bez. The over-concentration of work is a group design failure, and the strongest reflection names it as such: what the group did, what each person did about it, and what they would set up differently in the first week. Honest documentation of a badly run project, with evidence of corrective action, scores better than a tidy account of a project that evidently was not tidy.
3. With 18 days left and nothing shot, what should the group's plan prioritise, and how does the research requirement fit?
Read the worked answer
Plan backwards from the deadline and cut scope first, because scope is the only variable fully under their control.
- Days 1–2: lock a single script version, name the decision owner, confirm one location and at most two performers, and complete a shot list. No new ideas after day 2.
- Day 3: read-through and technical test - check the camera, sound and light in the actual location, with the actual performers if possible.
- Days 4–6: shoot. Two short sessions beat one long one, because the group gets a chance to correct what the first session reveals.
- Days 7–12: edit, with a fixed picture lock date that is not negotiable.
- Days 13–16: sound, and the research presentation assembled; Days 17–18: buffer.
Scope discipline: three minutes, one location, two performers, no effects that require a specialist. A finished three-minute film with a clear idea beats an ambitious five-minute film that is never completed.
The research should not be a parallel assignment. The focus area should be the question the film is testing - if the research is about how suspense is built through off-screen sound, the film's sound design is the practice that answers it, and the presentation can show the footage as evidence. A group that can state that link in one sentence has a coherent project; a group that cannot is running two projects with one deadline.