I worked on Hnefa during my last year of university, acting as the producer on the project. The project was exceptionally challenging for me and forced me to learn a lot about producing in a short amount of time – truly a trial by fire if there ever was one. Looking back on my experience now, I am able to reflect on truly just how much I learned from the entire process. I may have felt like I was struggling in the moment, but at the end of the day, I held my team together and got us through to the other side.

My efforts on this project were rewarded with the Creative Media Production award for Rising Star – given to the student the staff felt had truly risen to the challenges of the year and showed great potential for future endeavours.

For some more insights on my experience working on this project, check out my final reflection submitted alongside the project at the end of the year:

As the producer, I was responsible for planning our timeline, delegating tasks, organising and running meetings, and most importantly, looking after our wonderful team. It was a role that often felt was made up of a million slightly unrelated things and often felt quite undefined and all over the place. But, as I have learned, this is often the life of a producer. I created a shared workspace for our team on Notion where everyone would be able to see the upcoming meetings, access all of our documentation, provide work for feedback, and stay up to date on our latest sprints. I continually maintained this space and ensured that whenever anyone couldn’t find information, I could direct them to the appropriate section of the workspace. Similarly, if anyone was confused or unsure of what they were doing, I was the first line of contact for both third and second-year team members. 

I worked with my teammates to create our incredible asset list that formed the backbone of our production timeline. This asset list was continually refined as our scope changed, and later on, had a new priority assignment system added to keep us on track for our deadline. I introduced daily check-ins for our team as a digital form of stand-up meetings to ensure that I was staying up to date on everyone’s work and that everyone was staying on track. I used a Discord bot to automate a reminder each day, which ended up being a very useful feature. I also worked closely with our BTS filmmaker to help her organise her necessary meetings and interviews. 

 

During pre-production, I also created an availability spreadsheet that was sent out to every team member. This became one of our most useful tools throughout production, as every member of our team had an increasingly busy and ever-changing schedule. Using this spreadsheet, I was able to quickly organise meetings with little to no scheduling mishaps. When we got our second-years on board, I arranged, set up and organised food for our onboarding meeting. It was a great few hours of introductions, slideshows, and of course, pizza!  Additionally, I was largely in charge of any communication between the team and outside staff members – whether that be for setting up supervisor meetings or simply relaying information about the course to my team.

One of the most important aspects of my role was taking the time to keep my team members on track and chasing them up when they weren’t hitting the projected milestones. This became more and more integral to our workflow as time went on, as we had to readjust our scope in order to meet our deadline. Ensuring that I was staying up to date on everyone’s progress was really important for ensuring that we could appropriately adjust our timeline and relevant goals. 

Overall, the role of the producer was one that I was excited to step into but ended up challenging me far more than I expected. I came from a background of writing and (badly) programming – both roles in which you are given a task and a timeline, and are then expected to get stuck into the work. Adjusting to the workflow of being the one assigning the tasks and watching over my incredible team was something that I found, at times, to be incredibly frustrating and completely adverse to how I normally function in a working environment. However, in the end, I absolutely adored the role and have found a true passion for producing. The entire experience of taking on a somewhat more invisible role has challenged me endlessly but has also expanded my interpersonal skills and general passion for organising an incredible amount.

Still hungry for more? Check out this video essay I posted discussing my experience and what it taught me about myself as both a creative and a producer: