Working as a Crew

It had taken me a long time to appreciate the benefits of collaboration. Throughout my entire learning life, "group work" has always been a false promise. The same was true in elementary school as was (mostly) true at Cornell University: group projects always meant extra work for me. Teachers, relying on the assumption that a group of people could produce more and higher quality work than a single individual, would have certain expectations for these projects. And so, not only did I have to do my own work, but often the work of several lazy peers. As an upperclassman at Cornell, I finally had more opportunities to work with people I respected and trusted. Sometimes they had had similar notions about "collaboration," and I found it funny to watch our various control freak impulses manifest and then subside as we realized, in turn, that we could actually rely on each other to get things done.

I vaguely remember thinking about these issues of trust and collaboration a couple of years ago...probably when I was first entertaining the notion of filmmaking. I had been conditioned all my life to believe: if you want something done right, you had better do it yourself. But, at long last, I needed to self-analyze and make an attempt to beat down my inner control freak as necessary. It was finally time to figure out who I trusted (and for what), so that we could get together and make something better than each of us could as individuals. And it has been a continual process. I'm much more likely to let (or encourage) people take an active role than I was in high school, for example. But it's still not always easy to recognize exactly when I need to ask for help.

I've had several great experiences crewing this semester. I really wish I had been able to work on more film shoots. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm very good at making myself available. I have too many hermit impulses, and so I'm just not around all that much. But every time I've worked on a crew, I've learned something new...and that's pretty great! I'll just echo a few sentiments that have been brought up by others: I prefer to meet in advance and get some idea of what's going to happen and what's expected; the sooner I know my particular role (sound, camera, etc) the better; technical problems are awful but fairly inevitable, and you need people around to help you work through them.