It’s Monday, spring break is over, and today I felt the urgency of both academic and professional responsibilities.
I worked on a bunch of things today:
- I created/updated a long excel list of media contacts (e.g. online local newspapers) and uploaded them into Constant Contact over break, so today I spent a good chunk of time adding the appropriate geographical information to each contact (Worcester, Sherborn, Shrewsbury, Dover, etc.). This will make it easier to select addresses when we have news particular to one geographic area.
- I drafted interview questions for an upcoming article on one of our corporate partners.
- I drafted interview questions for an upcoming video for National Women’s History Month.
- I tried to plan site visits for footage for the video for National Women’s History Month.
- I embellished and established our YouTube and Google+ pages.
The most exciting part of my work today was probably making preparations for the video. This video is going to be more creative than I’ve ever done, and so I was watching some videos by Mass Mentoring to get brainstorming. These are some of the cool things I noticed they did (and it’s important to note that they obviously have expensive video cameras, perhaps lighting, and definitely mics):
- extreme closeups
- photos
- half of face crop
- two different shots side-by-side (not sure if can in iMovie)
- slow mo
- black and white
- walking b-roll
- filming from behind walking
- urban / POV footage
- quick jump zoom on photos
- logo full screen at end and beginning
- look up straight into cam, smile
I definitely plan on incorporating the extreme closeups, quick jumps and crops, and I also liked some of the POV / walking footage they had, and their utilization of slow mo. One little idea I had, since this video is for National Women’s History Month, was to give my camcorder (a scary decision for me) temporarily to a Little and Big, and let them film each other, film “selfie”-style, film whatever they want, even fumble around with the camera while it’s rolling, as a means of visually showing female agency (and also their laughter and personality). I also liked when the interviewee looked directly into the camera and smiled, I think I may outright take this idea for my own video. This would be a nice way to show power, agency, and strength; direct “eye contact” (or camcorder contact) is always a signifier of such.
I’d also like to share some of the interview questions I’ve planned that correspond to National Women’s History Month. I aimed to formulate questions that focused on female mentoring and role models (for obvious reasons) and tried to come up with questions that could elicit a story, memory, or aspiration:
- why do you think mentoring is important for young females?
- to Bigs: did you have a female mentor or role model growing up?
- what kinds of qualities does a female mentor/role model possess?
- to Bigs: in what ways do you strive to/attempt to be a female role model to others [young females]?
- to Littles: what do you want to be when you grow up?
Lastly, I wrapped up the day with some embellishment of our Google+ and YouTube pages. Both accounts were created in haste just to get last month’s Match Spotlight video up, and were lacking basically all other information. Today I added descriptions, addresses, contact info, social media links, cover photos, cover videos, playlist set-up, circles—the whole nine yards. The Google+ page desperately needs followers, so if you’re reading this, maybe you could create a circle in your Google+ account called “Best Nonprofits in the World” and add us. 🙂
I'M A MKTG INTERN! 