Team Reflections
For our multi-media project, we decided to do ours on something that can be only found in Eugene: Sweet Life Patisserie. The first thing that we learned from this assignment is that, things take time to complete. We had to contact the owners of Sweet Life multiple times for interviews, follow up interviews, and to ask for permission to shoot at the café and bakery locations. We went to the bakery three times. We got a lot of footage each time, realized that we had a lot of stuff, just not a lot that we could use for our multi-media piece; every time we went back to get more footage, we found new things that we hadn’t seen the before. Secondly, we learned that many people don’t like to be filmed if they don’t have to be in the video that is being shot. We asked many people if they minded to be in the background of our video, even if their faces weren’t going to be shown, and almost everyone we asked told us that they would prefer not to be in it. If they didn’t want to talk or be filmed, many people avoided us or tried to get out of the café quickly when our backs were turned; it was very aggravating. Thirdly, we learned that Gabi is better at taking pictures and writing the written pieces, Alex is better at filming and editing video.
Rationale
For our multi-media project, Alex and I ran into a few bumps at the beginning. We thought that we wanted to do a story about Sweet Life Patisserie and food carts, but we realized, with Dan Morrison’s help, that it just didn’t fit. So, we decided to do our project on Sweet Life. Getting the okay to interview the owners wasn’t the hard part; Cheryl and Catherine were very nice, friendly, pretty much up for anything we wanted to do. The hardest parts were getting footage, audio, and pictures. For the audio, the hardest part was getting clear audio and interviews, without any background noise. We had to interview Cheryl twice because, the first interview contained too much background noise of the bakery, and the second time there were birds chirping and cars going by. Despite some background noise, we decided to keep the second interview because it was the clearest and we a-roll to go with it. We also interviewed the manger of the café, Aaron Sullivan, with audio and a-roll to match. We interviewed the dishwasher, Jacob, with a-roll but no audio to o with it because it didn’t record for some reason. Lastly, Alex interviewed a student in one of his classes, Alison Milligan, with phone audio but no video. For the footage and pictures, we had to go back to the bakery three times. We got a lot of footage each time and realized that we had a lot of stuff, just not a lot that we could use for our multi-media piece. Secondly, we learned that many people don’t like to be filmed if they don’t have to be in the video that is being shot. We asked many people if they minded to be in the background of our video, even if their faces weren’t going to be shown, and almost everyone we asked told us that they would prefer not to be in it. If they didn’t want to talk or be filmed, many people avoided us or tried to get out of the café quickly when our backs were turned; it was very aggravating. Also, we had trouble with the editing of our multi-media piece. We realized that we had a lot of thing to use, but not a lot of concrete stuff. After we finished editing our video, we realized that it was too short. We cut out a lot of stuff because we felt like it was unneeded for the type of story we wanted to tell. Lastly, we decided to decorate our website around one of our favorite pictures taken at the bakery. The layout is simple enough to draw attention to our work. We were planning to add a photo album, but most of good pictures are already in the video.