http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~jh5231/VideoProject/
This project was definitely one of the most fun and exciting projects that I got to work on ever. I already had experience with photography which is something that I’m very passionate about but I never had experience around filming and video making before so finally being able to implement my own video skills in the project was definitely really exciting for me.
In the beginning, we had many ideas but we weren’t too sure on which to pick. Initially, we thought that we were going to make an ice cream making machine for our project and film each steps of it so it would kind of be like a build-a-bear workshop but for ice cream instead which would be video based and interactive. After digging into this idea for too long, we felt that it wasn’t a project that we were passionate enough to plan out. After scrapping the ice cream idea, we considered doing a day to day life comparison of the Chinese national students compared to the international students at NYU Shanghai. However, we also felt like this idea was already played out a lot in comm lab and it also wasn’t very originally. When brainstorming new ideas, I thought of the “expectation vs reality” scene in the film “500 Days of Summer” and proposed we make an “expectation vs reality” that students had of NYU Shanghai. Jon and Allie liked the idea a lot so we went along with this.
When planning the clips for what we would do, we first thought of our own expectations and experience of living in China. For me personally, I was on a gap year in Wuhan (China) prior to coming to NYU Shanghai where I was in a very traditional Chinese environment unlike NYU Shanghai so I had a different experience with China and Jon used his own experience as being a Junior and NYU Shanghai and Allie who was living in China for the first time ever.
During the filming parts, I decided to use my own DSLR camera instead of the one that the school provided because although the school cameras were better than mine, I was a lot more familiar with my own camera and I’ve always believed that technique and skill were more important that the quality of your gear and equipment. I also borrowed my friends tripod and we were able to film around the school.
For one instance of our project, we wanted to do a traveling scene that shows an expectation people have when coming to NYU Shanghai. So for this, I decided to book a ticket to Tokyo on 4/19-22 because I truly believed that taking the extra step to travel somewhere would of helped our project greatly.
Jon and I were directors and actors for the project and Jon was in-charge of the coding while Allie was in charge of video editing since she had prior experience with video editing while I didn’t. I felt like our group dynamic worked very well together since each of our own strengths fit perfectly with each other for this assignment.
This project was definitely my favorite project and one of my favorite assignments that I’ve ever done for school and I would love to film again if the opportunity arrived to me again.