For my Visual Literacy course, the class was split into two teams to work on two different client projects, one with Fotosynthesis and one with the Smithsonian Institution.  I chose to apply for the Smithsonian project for a couple of reasons.  One being that I love American History, and we would be working specifically with the National Museum of American History.  Another reason I wanted to work with the Smithsonian is that Fotosynthesis is a relatively new organization.  I wanted to work with a more established organization because I thought the tasks would be more clear and have some structure to them.

 

The National Museum of American History hosts a National Youth Summit each year connecting middle and high school students with scholars, teachers, policy experts and activists in a national conversation about important topics, including abolition, the Dust Bowl, and the Freedom Riders.  The focus for the 2014 Summit is the Freedom Summer, a civil rights movement in the South in 1964 to increase voter registration among African American citizens.

 

The representative from the Smithsonian wanted our team to create a 1-2 minute promotional video for the upcoming Summit.  It was difficult trying to think of an idea for the video because the team was not given much direction, but after the government shutdown was over and we had some concrete feedback, we were able to put together a great presentation.

 

The video idea we decided to go with was originally going to have an African-American actor "walking through time" with images of civil rights events or moments and clips of powerful speeches being played in the background until the actor is in modern times, then cut to information about the Summit and logo.  Unfortunately, this idea was not what the Smithsonian was looking for.  We also had an idea to have some of the team's high school teachers record their students answering questions about what the Freedom Summer was and civil rights in general because the teachers were from all over the country, just like how the Summit will be presented.  This idea did not work out because of timing issues and not enough teachers responded positively.

 

The video idea we ended up working with was asking high school/college students at the Lincoln Memorial questions about Freedom Summer and making changes in general.  Then we had a narrative in the middle of the video explaining historical information about the Freedom Summer with images related to civil rights shown.  For the final presentation, we also created posters, social media examples, an original logo, promotional buttons, and t-shirts.

 

This was an extremely difficult project to finish on-time.  Our team did not get much direction until two weeks before it was due (one of those weeks being Thanksgiving break, so we could not work on the project).  We split into two groups to film one day, put together a rough cut of all the footage, and then the three days before the project had to be finished, we figured out what we needed to get done.  The team divided up all the work and completed their tasks wonderfully, and we all came together in the end to go through it all.

 

My contribution to this project was filming part of the footage, button design, and editing the videos.  Editing took a lot of time because we were not only making the full 2-minute video, but also shorter versions that can be displayed on social media sites to create buzz about the Summit.  Editing was also difficult because we had to find images, find someone to do a voiceover for the narrative, match up all of the audio of the footage, and make sure everything looked completely professional.

 

What worked for my team and this project was that we could come up with great ideas and create outstanding work, but only if we had direction.  There was a long period of time where it was unclear what everyone's roles were in the project, but once the tasks were specifically divided, we were able to get work done.  It was also beneficial that everyone in our group was very creative and had the same sort of ideas of how the end product should look.  We all worked really well together, and we are all proud of our end product.

 

What didn't work was when group members weren't pulling their weight.  On the day we were supposed to film, there was another group that stayed back to work on social media, but nothing really got done on that end.  It wasn't until our tasks were specifically outlined a week before the project was due that everyone got into gear.  What also didn't work was the feedback we were getting from the representative from the Smithsonian.  It was very vague, but that could have been because they didn't really know what they wanted for the video.  It was difficult to work on a project where we didn't know what the end result should look like.

 

I learned from this project that while working with a client, they might not know exactly what they want in the end.  It is then important to create a product that can be manipulated to fit their needs.  It is also important to produce a product even if the client may not like it in the end.  The most important thing, though, is to take pride in your work.  It is a good product and a lot of effort was put into it, so it deserves some love.