Alina, Aibar and I shoot a promotional video and designed a website as part of our final project for Nazarbayev University iGEM club. Actually, we did a great job! My experience from the project are described in the post.
NU iGEM is academic club established in 2013 at Nazarbayev University. The major goal as a club is to create projects for iGEM competition. They showcase their projects to judges and other 300 iGEM team around the world. Since the website and promotional video will be seen by not only NU students but also iGEM teams from other countries and sponsors, we wanted to make our best possible efforts to create a quality product.
Our team met with Daulet, our client and the president of NU iGEM, and discussed the website and video shooting arrangements. After that we created our chat and shared folder to keep in touch with client and so that client kept track with the progress of our project.
The process of creation was very collaborative. At all stages of the project our team worked physically together so that we were able to discuss any design choices. Even though we all were involved in idea generation part, we still had some separate responsibilities: Alina was responsible for video editing; Aibar was in charge of providing equipment and website design; I was mostly involved in website design due to my background in biology and iGEM.
In terms of my contribution, I was able to shoot insider’s scenes from birthdays of one of the ex-iGEM team member. I was very involved into catching good shoots during the birthday. I mean TOO involved..
The fact that I was part of the club also allowed me to take the role of client sometimes and interviewee for the video. Since I know our client personally and we worked together on iGEM 2017 project, I felt the client trusted me and us as a team.
Additionally, I offered NU iGEM as our clients for the project. I felt responsibility in front of my group for offering NU iGEM, since if something would not work out, I was the one who initially recommended. Happily, everything turned out to be as smooth as possible.
I was sincerely glad to work with my team. It was fun working with Alina, Aibar and Daulet. We had really a well-matched team.
Alina is well-trained and meticulous at the video editing.
Aibar arranged everything with equipment and took permission and help with the website.
Daulet, as a client, he was very responsible and understanding.
We were able to do all the shootings and collect most of the contents for the website way ahead of the deadline. It seemed more of collaborative work rather than ordinary client-provider relationship. We considered his opinion and he considered ours because all we wanted the same thing to make quality video and the website.
I liked the process of actually building the design for website and editing video, since we started to see if what we planned could be implemented. However, It was a little bit distressing when some ideas, that we were so proud of, turned out to be not as planned. I realized that sometimes things just do not happen as planned, so one should move on to the next step.
Some of the things that happened to be not as planned are:
The website sizing looked different at different devices. For example, the website looked smaller at 100% zoom on my lapop (produced by Acer) than on macbook of Alina and Aibar's Lenovo laptop. We did not what to rely on, so we decieded to leave it as it was best fit at macbook.
When we shoot the coming to the lab from window, the video shaked. We had ust about 30 minutes to shoot the video with the dron, since it was borrowed. So at all the attempts that we made, the video turned out to be shaking. During the editing part we wanted to somehow crop the shaky parts, but it did not seem aesthetically pleasing. Daulet, our client, was very understanding at this point and he told us to let the shaky dron video stay as it is.
When we recorded the interviews with club members it seemed that the voice quality was good, however when compared to another video recording it was very quiet. We did not want to disturb our client, but when the video/audio editing tool could not make the voices loud enough, we asked Daulet and other iGEMers to do the voice over. They were really fast and cooperative with that, even though it was pre-finals week. Even tough we made voice over, it was still hard to match it to the video.
One last scene was not implemented as we planned since It was hard to gather the whole team (which is 15+ people). So client decided to omit the scene.
I learned that it is not hard to do services of video shooting and website creating, when you believe into what you are doing can really help someone. However, I also realize that not all the clients and projects are like that, too. All of us knew about the club and their achievements and it was our goal to help and promote the club. So that the club could become even better and more people would know about it. Additionally, sometimes things do not go as planned and it is our reponsibility to be flexible and create alternative options. Despite some of the things that did not work out, I believe that we met the client's needs.
Comments