The YouTube Group Project

I thought I'd talk a bit about the YouTube Group Project. The last time I had a group project like this, I found myself carrying the bulk of the work and salvaging the pieces during the presentation. So I was definitely nervous going into this assignment.

Due to a stroke of ill fortune turning good, I became partnered with the other Alex in the classroom. While at first we weren't having an easy time deciding on a video to base our project on (our interests weren't quite aligned) we were able to decide on something comedic and went from there. Alex was familiar with the video we chose, he had seen it before, and he showed it to me. After thinking for a little bit, I decided that this was indeed a good video to present on.

For this presentation, I must admit that bulk of the workload at the start was carried by my partner. I ended up missing class due to illness, and during that time Alex began working on a PowerPoint presentation to use alongside our video. This idea hadn't begun to occur to me and yet he had already completed the framework for it by the time we met on our own time to begin collaborating.

This PowerPoint helped us to carefully pick and choose pertinent examples to highlight in the video. As we began breaking apart the video, and assigning ourselves to different sections to cover, I still felt like something was missing. While flipping through the course pack, I revisited Gurney's piece on "Recombinant Comedy" and found how perfectly it fit to our choice of video. I'd argue that this was a pretty smart element to add to our presentation, and one that I didn't notice many (if any) other groups utilize.

Our presentation came together and we managed to give a good show. The group project for this class was remarkably more rewarding than my last.