My multimedia piece that I presented was about the ongoing fight in the Eugene community to restore Civic Stadium, which is one of Eugene’s older landmarks. I was desired to report about Civic Stadium because of my passion for sports and my love for baseball. My initial goal was to create this great multimedia piece chronicling the past, present, and potential future of Civic Stadium. However, that goal quickly deteriorated as I realized I might be biting off more than I could chew.
The first obstacle I faced was getting accessed into the stadium. In the past, I was able to gain access inside of the stadium with ease. However, Civic Stadium has dealt with recent break-ins inside of the stadium. People have been entering the stadium and stealing bleachers and copper wire. When I went to Civic Stadium to begin to shoot for my multimedia piece, I was attacked by a guard dog and didn’t realize until then that people need permission from Friends of Civic Stadium to gain access to the ballpark.
The second obstacle I faced were the days I was granted inside of the park. I was only able to gain access for two days and the first day, my interviewee only granted me 30 minutes to shoot because he had a meeting with the city about Civic Stadium. I was able to complete the interview portion of my piece but I was hoping I would be able to take pictures on that day. Unfortunately, I had to wait until the following week to capture my B-roll but of course, it began to rain. I couldn’t use any A-roll from the interview because the bright, sunny background from the interview wouldn’t correlate with my rainy photos. If I was granted more time, I would’ve gone back to Civic Stadium on a nicer day but I was only able to gain limited amount of time inside of the stadium’s walls.
Finally, the third obstacle I faced was realizing the narrative I wanted to capture was unrealistic. I tried to make my piece like a sports documentary seen on ESPN. I wanted to capture the past, present, and future of Civic Stadium not realizing that I was limited with sources. Capturing the beauty of Civic Stadium past with photos wasn’t going to be enough to move the audience emotionally and everyone I talked from Friends of Civic Stadium had little to no video footage of past Civic Stadium games. The present Civic Stadium is basically a junkyard and it is impossible to capture Civic Stadium’s future because it hasn’t happened yet. If I realized that sooner, I would had an easier time transitioning to a more achievable piece, like capturing photos and video of the huge impact Civic Stadium had on Brandon’s life. Shifting the piece to capture the story in Brandon’s eyes would’ve been more powerful rather than trying to make a piece all about Civic Stadium.
Overall, I’m still satisfied with my work. Was it as amazing as I initially thought it was going to be? No. But I gave it everything I had to make it a presentable multimedia piece. I went into all, if not most of the available office hours to give updates on my current status of my project, work tirelessly on fixing the footage, and was happy I was able to present a piece on sports. I’m almost happy that this project didn’t go according to plan because so far at the University of Oregon, I was able to work on journalistic projects where everything did fall exactly into place. Unfortunately, that isn’t how life works and you will deal with obstacles even worse than the ones I felt. The only difference is the deadline isn’t going to be 11 weeks, its going to be 11 hours. This project taught me important life lessons about preparation that I would learn the hard way in a working environment. This project wasn’t the walk in the park I originally intended it to be, but nevertheless, I accomplished it and the sun still rose the next day.
Thank you for a great term Alaina and have a terrific summer!!!
