The goal of this project was to make a commercial for a partner organization of the United Way of St. Charles. We needed two commercials, a short commercial that only focused on the partner organization, and a long commercial about both the partner organization and United Way. I started by finding a partner organization to do a commercial on. After finding one I liked, I emailed them asking if I could do a commercial on them. Once they said yes, I asked if I could interview their director and one of their volunteers. They kindly agreed and I got in contact with the organizations regional director to set up the interview. After that, I scheduled the interview and went to their office to film it. While I was there, I filmed some B-roll. After I got all the video I needed, I started getting it all organized and put together. I asked the director to email me some event photos to use in the video. Once I got them I got some music, finished up the video and sent it in.

I personally had a hard time with the project because I had Senior Project at the same time, so I’m biased toward being negative about it. I personally liked how the full-screens and lower thirds were done for me. I didn’t like how we weren’t able to work in groups for this one. However, I learned a little more about the United Way.

Working with an outside client was rather uneventful, it just felt like I was doing any other assignment but with more emailing. I got lucky and had a mellow client that wasn’t picky at all. The only real challenge I faced was trying to balance this and Senior Project at the same time.

My video fully met up to my expectations almost exactly. I really don’t want to call my video superior or inferior to anyone else’s, I feel that everyone did equally good work.

If I were to do this project over again, I wouldn’t change anything. A few improvements for this project I would recommend are to change up the timing a bit so that it wouldn’t mess with any schedules. If I talked to next years class, I would tell them to just treat it like any other project but to keep your contact at your partner agency.