Evaluation

The first task for analysing the different kinds of briefs that can be obtained, went very well. I discovered a lot of important and useful information about all these kinds of briefs, such as contractual briefs, negotiated briefs and formal briefs. I wrote a detailed essay-like blog post explaining what all these kinds of briefs mean and how they should be approached. The difficult part of this task was finding real-life examples, because there weren’t very many; if not at all.

My tutor Faye mentioned in one or two of my blog posts about the Sumac Centre and social action required some alterations in order to complete them fully. This was very helpful and taught where to not go wrong in further blog posts. “Great work George” is what Faye commented on my #iwill blog post. #iwill was one of the trending social action projects that I had to research to begin with.

The second task began the social action and community media research which played a very critical part for expanding my knowledge on the topic of social action within my community, and the world. Social action plays a key part in our lives whether it be helping the homeless, free catering for vegans or setting up a homework club for children who don’t get enough educative attention at home.

Ashley Carter came and visited us, he does work for the leftlion which is a community driven magazine, in which all the workers there work for free. The main reason he came in was to talk to us about what it’s like to be a writer. It was very informative and helped me understand furthermore what it’s like to work for a magazine. He told us a lot of information about leftlion too. The Leftlion played a part in my assignment, because I had to research how it is social action. The main reason it being social is of course because the workers work there for free. And because it is community driven of course.

I analysed my community’s social action, mostly by evaluating the actions that took place on the University of Nottingham’s website. Here I gathered many examples of social action within my area. Seeing this vast array of organisations trying to make a difference in Nottingham made me re-evaluate how much needs to actually be done within Nottingham. There are particular aspects around Nottingham that require more of our attention and action. E.g. the free catering on Thursday’s organisation, organised by the University of Nottingham. They require more volunteers to help feed more people in need of food.

After conducting all of my secondary research it was time to research into the organisation that I was going to be helping. This was the Sumac Centre. There website provided much information that I required in order to know what I was going to be getting myself into. As well as make it clear to me as to what it is specifically they might need my help for. I learnt that they are a social action organisation, in partnership with veggies, a free vegan catering organisation. These two together help each other b organising events, especially for children, such as youth clubs and homework clubs. I attended both the youth club and homework club to record footage.

After my research was completely gathered, Dominic paid a visit to our college in which we negotiated a brief with him which was very helpful. He discussed with us, what it was he was looking for from us. He didn’t make it quite clear at first, however in the end we came to terms that we would produce a promotional video for the Sumac Centre. I blogged the visit that Dominic did for us. I also blogged about the visit of Patrick and Libby, they visited before Dominic to tell us a little bit of history on veggies and the Sumac Centre.

After the brief was sorted, we organised when we would visit the Sumac Centre, and the people we would go with. I went to the Sumac Centre with Ben Homer and we recorded plenty of footage for the promo video.  The volunteers there were incredibly helpful and aided us whenever we needed their help with something, or were confused, or nervous about of the children. The recording went extremely well, aside from some of the lighting at the Sumac Centre due to it being quite dull or too yellow there. I ended up going to the Sumac Centre twice, once to the homework club on the 7^th March and second to the youth club on the 3^rd May.

I managed to get an interview with one of the volunteer’s whilst he was doing the washing up. I would have preferred to interview him when he wasn’t doing the washing up, however he was too busy. We also got some footage of the children having fun, we played around with some camera angles whilst this was all happening. We got some cutaways, zoom-ins, zoom-outs, camera pan fades ETC. All relevant footage in order to produce our final product.

After we gathered all of the footage together, I put it all onto my hard drive. Sersha Rose who was part of a different group that went to the Sumac Centre, gave us her footage and we gave her ours. We used some of her footage in our final piece to give it more character and depth.

Editing the Video went terrifically smooth. I ran into zero problems whilst editing the footage together, found some great royalty free music and put it altogether, with one voice-over of myself. I mostly used hard-cuts with one cross-dissolve for the final scene transition to give it a good fade-away effect. Ben Homer helped me by selecting some of the clips I should use and what order some of the footage should go in, however I mostly did all of the editing.

This project has taught me a lot about social action within local communities, and Nottingham. I now see what social action truly is and how it can be used to bring communities closer together and help form a better society for our future generations. Taking an in-depth look at social action in person too helped me reflect further upon the effects too, like visiting the Sumac Centre’s homework club. I look forward to seeing how much further this could go in Nottingham. I hope the best for the Sumac Centre, and that this video helps them along with their social action within Nottingham.