James sent over a link to the finished video and I was excited to click and watch. Overall I thought the video was well edited together. Only one noticable gap stuck out at me at around 1.38 where there was both a black screen and no audio for just a few moments, which sort of felt lacking in comparison to the rest of the video, and another moment with a black screen at 1.47. I also feel like all the different audio clips could have been faded in and out to make their transitions less noticeable, however on the whole these were minor blemishes on what was on the whole a well polished piece of footage.
James and Lewis had however as I expected taken the editing in a very different direction to the initial plan. They had played upon the unsettling element of the genderbread person coupled with human mouth, and also utilized techniques used in online comedy videos and memes. Careful use of jump cuts and pan zooming could highlight areas of humour and also elongate pauses into uncomfortable silences which form part of the awkwardness based amusement of certain aspects. Some of the slow panning zooms to the genderbread persons face and unsettling human mouth were actually quite uncomfortable, but coupled with the lightheartedness of what was ultimately a novelty shaped biscuit it actually became very funny in itself.
Although just as I had hoped, the educational and informativeness of the dialogue prevailed, our montages of different forms of gender expression had been delivered in an entirely mixed up order, as some of the pieces of footage we had collected had featured modern day technology, and due to discrepancies in the brief they decided not to include them just in case. This meant that the remainder of the footage was re-edited together, and no longer bore significance to all of the subtleties of gender Oliver had initially intended it to demonstrate, as they had been indeed too subtle for James and Lewis to properly set apart when editing, especially when certain pieces were removed and the correct weighting of video clips per description of attraction was unknown.
However the video itself was now appealing to an entirely different target group, from the informative and childlike educational styles we had chosen before, what we were now faced with was an unsettling video derived from meme culture which, without explanation or context, would firmly sit amongst some of the most obscure videos on youtube. And the dialogue was still true to Oliver's original idea. So we had created something truly unique, an unexpected mashup of two very different ideals.
This for me truly summarised the nature of a collaboration, as the thing we ended up with was not something anyone could have predicted, due to the joint involvement (and disinvolvement) of the collaborators.
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