Before starting the Arc of St. Charles commercials, I was unaware that they are a non-profit organization that has many enterprises around the parish that help people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Many of these people learn real-world skills by experiencing a customer-service and work ethic environment. The Arc also assists these people in activities throughout the week so that they can live their best life. Some of these enterprises include: the cleaning crew, cajun village thrift store, Mardi Gras store, swamp shredders and lawn care services. My group has the Cajun Village Thrift Store and in order to reach our final project we went to the location and filmed all that it had to offer, as well as interview the members who worked there. After, we went back and edited the footage, added voiceovers, lower thirds and music to make sure it reached their standards.

As a whole, I’m really thankful that we did this project because I gained experience working with clients and also learned how to produce an actual commercial. I really loved getting to know the individuals, specifically ones with special needs, and it just made me really happy to show what they have to offer to the community. However, I did not like the quality at times from other members and it frustrated me that I couldn’t personally fix it myself because it wasn’t my job/role but I think they ended up fixing the issues the best they could which is all that matters. During this project, I realized that sometimes in a group project, there needs to be a leader and someone to monitor or make corrections to things if other people are slacking. I can’t just sit back and rely on other people.

It was very different to work with an outside client because usually our clients are either ourselves or people at the satellite but this time we actually got feedback from another person and had to work according to what they specifically wanted. Typically, we just do what we want with a video. I think my group worked well together, there was just a lack of communication and understanding of what was expected within the videos. Some challenges were that we had to go back and film better quality shots and the editing was not of good quality either when presenting to our clients. I feel like I was very involved. Although I did not edit, I worked mostly with pre-production which was being the director behind the scenes, scriptwriting and being the voice of the voice-overs. I feel like this made our group successful because going in we had a plan of how we wanted the video to go.

Being the scriptwriter, I had high expectations to how the video was going to be and was a little disappointed when the quality of it didn’t meet those expectations. I also don’t think we had the best video compared to the other groups just because our video had a lot of shaky/not swift shots, unclean editing, and missing a lot of the standard information that the client wanted. Their feedback made us go back and change a lot of things that were not correct. I think the other groups mostly listened to the clients feedback and not ours, which was more of a technical view.

If I were to do this project again, I would unfortunately be more attentive to what other people are doing in their roles. Instead of relying on some camera shots, I would’ve stopped myself and looked through them to make sure they were of good quality. I also would’ve made daily checks on the editing progress and gave lots of feedback on areas that needed improvement. I would not change this project next year, I think it was made well. If I could tell next year’s students anything, it would be to have their video planned out, organized and to take every moment/roles seriously.