Our digital story is called Breaking barriers. It is a short interview based documentary which shows the issues faced by Chinese students when they come to Melbourne, like communication barrier, culture shock or just getting along with the local people. It is a light hearted film with a positive message. It is based on two interviews. One of a local student and the other one of a Chinese student. They both share their views and tell their experiences. In between the interviews, we’ve included some footage and pictures related to the topic.
To start off, we’re only two people in the group, Liang and I. It didn’t really matter because we had similar ideas for the digital story so decided to work together. So we had a couple of meetings before the proposal submission to come up with a proper storyline and structure for the film. At that time our topic was a little different. It was focusing on two Asian people and one local and the duration was around three minutes. Also our social media strategy was not very specific. When we got the feedback for the proposal, Jenny told us to make it simpler, shorter and come up with a better social media strategy. So we changed our topic a little bit (to what it is now) to make it more specific and that way we were able to cut down our duration as well and make our social media strategy better. The next step was to lock down our interviewees. Liang was a big help in this. One of her housemates was a local student and she had a Chinese friend who’s studying at RMIT. Both of them agreed to be interviewed. We wrote a set of questions we were going to ask them and sent it to them beforehand so they could prepare for it. We hired the equipment and were all ready for the shoot. This was our pre production.
We took Liang’s housemate Jess’s interview first. She’s studying bachelor of arts at Latrobe and she was quite confident in answering all the questions and her interactions with Chinese people. We shot it in her backyard. I was on camera. Liang did the audio. One issue we faced was the changing sunlight but we somehow went through it.
We shot Vincent’s interview the next day. He is Liang’s friend and from China. He was a little camera shy and was having a little trouble communicating and expressing himself in front of the camera. We had to take several retakes and the end result was good. He invited us to his apartment. The lighting was good. Liang and I did the same roles as the last interview. We copied the footage in Liang’s laptop and returned the equipment. For the b-roll footage we used our own dslr and mobile cameras and some footage of the city we had shot earlier.
For promotion, we made a Facebook page with some pictures and posts, since FB is a global platform. However, it is banned in China so uploaded the video on a Chinese video site called Tudeo as well since Chinese people are our main target. Apart from that we uploaded it on Youtube too.
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/breakingbarriersfilm/
Tuduo video link: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/l3SsDIaj8Ck/
I edited the digital story. It did not take much time since it was supposed to be short and simple. The only trouble I had was to make sure its not repititive or a drag. It switches between both the subjects frequently and the things they are saying are related to each other. There is b-roll footage and pictures in between the interviews. For the rough cut, I only put in some pictures as b-roll and the interview cuts were not that crisp. I fixed that for the final cut and put a background music to give it a better feel. The name ‘Breaking barriers’ was actually finalized at the very end since we had several names in mind.
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