Right after our department got a slew of new equipment, we got word that a group within ASU's University College wanted to overhaul their Academic Success Programs web pages. This, of course, comes at a perfect time because we are deeply engaged in migrating our entire college's website (and this college's website) over to the new Webspark platform.

 

So we emailed back and forth a few times and set up a time for a meeting. The meeting was with Gina. And Gina is the best. 

 

In under a half hour of extremely energetic and just utterly genuine pitching, Gina had all of us wanting to take the UNI 110 Critical Reading and Thinking and UNI 220 Academic Refresher courses. I got the next best thing: a sizable project involving three new videos and a website makeover. 

This is the UNI 110 video which was decided on after a few drafts of work. These programs haven't gotten the best reputation over the years they've existed because they appear "fluffy" or "remedial," which is precisely the image we wanted to confront when we spoke with the students featured in the video.

 

Gina had a list of recent students eager to praise the class, and we got to work straight away sending them all a questionnaire about their experiences with the course. The questions helped us identify unique perspectives and stories from individuals which we would later try to flesh out during the interviews. 

 

To my amazement, of the 12 students slated for interviews, we managed to pin down eight of them for actual filming, which, towards the end of the academic year and all that entails, is a pretty darn impressive percentage. To my added excitement, all the students were, to varying degrees, sincere and well spoken, even in the cases where English was not their first language. After getting everyone relaxed and conversational, we were thrilled with the quality of emotion they gave us as they expounded upon their experiences. It's a real shame we were trying to cap it off at the 4:00 minute mark, because we could easily have gone on with the materials we gathered. 

 

The pre-editing process of transcribing eight 20+ minute interviews was absolutely harrowing, but completeted swiftly. In the end, it made what could have been days worth of sifting through clips in Premiere into mere hours worth of picking specific bytes indicated by our various versions of script-drafts, and compiling those. The creative formulation of "what-goes-where" was done via the transcripts and eliminated a lot of extra storyboarding work. 

 

All in all we went with the third draft, which, for that much raw footage, is a quick turnaround. Indeed, the entire process from initial meeting to finished products clocked in at just over a month--a very fast project compared to the normal slow-going pace of things here. 

 

Getting the chance to speak with the students about how these classes helped students find their motivations for pursuing their education was downright inspiring and easily one of the greatest things I've had the opportunity to do here at ASU in the year I've worked here.