For our group project we decided to do it on struggles. This was a good opportunity to get an insight of students and staff’s encounters they have faced or facing which can be personal or uni related. Something that surprised me was how students and staff are very open when it comes to personal information which can be hard, but it goes to show the amount of courage it takes to tell their story.
Challenges
Challenges that we faced were getting people to interview and audio.
Some students didn’t want to be in front of the camera probably because they felt uncomfortable or busy with attending classes and studying. Audio was a big issue where the person we interviewed wouldn’t speak as loud as the others or background noises interfering with important information for example, airplanes and people talking.
Ways we overcame some of the challenges, was by getting help or feedback by peetie with the audio. For example, The music was louder than the person speaking or the person’s voice would be louder than others.
For interviews I think asking more people gave us the confidence to approach someone.
Our original idea was putting ourselves in their shoes for a whole week and reflect on how hard it was. In the end our group discussed on changing the idea to interviewing each others struggles due to lack of documentation.
Roles & Contributions
My contributions was editing and collecting footage for our documentary. I thought our group worked well and was a great learning experience. For roles Casey filmed our interviews, collected music and planed what needed to be done. Holly was in charge of audio and animations for the intro and credits. Sarah also filmed our interviews and collected footage.
The process for our documentary
So for the first 2 weeks we filmed our interviews.
Then from all the interviews, our group only selected the ones we needed and found interesting.
From those selections our group listed what footage we needed to overlap the interviews.
Once that was sorted we filmed scenery and AUT students for our intro.
After Holy finished the animation for our intro and credits we put it all together to see what it looks like.
The last step was color grading and making sure all the audio is leveled evenly.
Learnings
What I’ve learnt is the basics of Premier pro, camera shots + movements, color grading and how it can set the feel, team work and how to approach different people. This project taught me a lot about having the confidence to approach people for interviews which will be useful for part 2.
Here are some photos of the people we interviewed
OTARA 