Rationale: How we started

Our team, Curious Journalists, began with the prompt “Living the Dream” because we felt we could create a meaningful story with it. We then started our search for someone who we could interview for the multimedia project. One of group members, Chuning Zhang, came up with a person who she was able to contact for an interview. His name was Levi Bagge, a musician and contemporary poster at First Baptist Church of Eugene. We also found out that he previously played in band, called Calling Simon, and this made him an interesting person to interview. Also, his welcoming attitude helped us to make our decision final. We started to visit his church service to see his performances and gather visual content for the project. Zhang captured video and Jaejin Lee took photos, while Whitney Davis looked for other people to interview. Taking photos and video were more difficult than we thought because inside the church, we did not have very much lighting. However, the people were helpful to us and let us take photos during the service which made working easier.  We worked individually at church as we had different roles for the project. Also, being independent gave us different perspectives for our products that we used to brainstorm ideas for the project. We then started to arrange interviews individually as well. We conducted video interview for Levi and his co-worker, Jimmy Kellar, after their Wednesday worship practice. The following Sunday, we interviewed Levi’s father, Levi’s wife, and his co-worker. We thought it might be difficult to get interviews with his family, but they welcomed the interviews warmly. We also prepared the Q&A portion separately. We really wanted to have a variety of perspectives about the music ministry that weren’t able to be incorporated in the video or text story.