LULING, LA – For our Arc project, my group completed two videos, one minute long PSA and one 30 second commercial. Both were for the Arc of St. Charles enterprise Throw Me Something Mister, a store which collects and sells Mardi Gras trinkets and beads and offers the Arc’s individuals job opportunities in the workforce. To complete this project, we first did a lot of research for the project launch, asked our contact from the Arc, Kelsey Pollock the Communications Director, any questions that we had, and visited our filming locations. Then, in planning, we figured out shots that we thought would work well, then we went to the store to film those shots. After that we wrote the scripts, recorded the voiceovers, and began putting everything together while we waited for Kelsey to edit and approve our scripts. When she did edit our scripts, we re-recorded the voiceovers accordingly, and after editing that in we completed our agreed upon lower thirds and fullscreen. After that, the project was mostly just fixing anything our classmates or facilitator noticed was wrong.

The commercials turned out great, and I feel that we did a great job on this project. The shots and voiceover go very well together, and the music my teammate Korbin found tied the videos together very nicely. I liked how we made the shots work with the voiceover, especially with the listing part. The only thing I really didn’t like was how we had to essentially squeeze the fullscreen in, as it both forced us to cut out things I liked and still resulted in a fullscreen which is arguably too short. Originally, our timing was planned decently well, however, this project did teach me that leaving extra room is easier to fix than having too much and having to cut things out, as we didn’t plan the room for the fullscreen which made adding it in very hard on us.

Working with an outside client felt very strange, but it went pretty well, and our group had good communication with Kelsey. We also had good communication with one another. I felt that my group worked very well together and any disagreements we had  were very minor. I am proud to say that I was very involved in this project, as I wrote the script, assisted in filming, and co-edited with Korbin. My involvement was major in making sure everything came together cohesively, but I still couldn’t have done it without my teammates.

Our video came out better than I would’ve expected at the beginning of this project. It’s high quality and puts across the exact message that I wanted. Of course I’m a bit biased, but I would say our video was generally better than the other group’s videos. No one in our class truly had a “bad” video, but ours had very attention keeping shots while still succeeding in being very informative and using every second we had. It came out this way due to our work but also due to those criticisms and that feedback we got from the other groups. We followed through fixing every criticism that we could, but I sometimes felt that the feedback I gave was not implemented by other groups. A lot of things I said to fix a week or two ago are just being fixed or were just fixed. My classmates’ videos still came out very well, however, and I’m proud of the final projects that our class created.

If I were doing this project all over again, I would plan more on my timing in the video; that is, I would write the script with some room for the fullscreen and anything else I might have to add in later, like the stuff Kelsey added to the voiceover. For next year, Mr. Robinson should just make it more clear what the project is before we start; I understand he was trying to make us research and ask our contact for things rather than him, but there was no real reason why he couldn’t just clarify things like the fact that we were making two videos each enterprise. This was never a big problem or anything, as it was only as issue for the first week or two, but it’s something that could’ve been easily fixed. That and establishing the lower-thirds and fullscreen competition early, but I know this was a first time for this project in this class so I’m sure that will be better planned out. To future students, I would tell them that they should make their voiceover focused on including facts and their shots focused on being visually interesting and more of the attention-getting aspect. Other than that, just try to have fun with the project and be collaborative with their teammates.