Final Reflection

These past four weeks have been extremely eye opening to me to what Atlanta has to offer and what I can accomplish on my own. Murphy and I’s original goal of this project was to create a documentary on restaurants and businesses that are outside of the “Buckhead Bubble” that we live in. It took a lot of thought and consideration to come up with our final project idea of doing five webisodes on five different restaurants. We had hopes of making a sixty minute documentary, but after a lot of planning and thought with our advisory Mr. Silverman we realized that this simply isn’t realistic. Mr. Newman recommended to me that we do webisodes on each visit that we did instead of an entire documentary because that would be a lot more user friendly to people that would visit our blogs. We took that idea and rant with it. We narrowed our project down to five restaurants that we would do an episode on each of them. This was a major turning point in our project because it gave us a realistic goal for our final product, and was definitely the best decision we made during our four weeks of doing a senior project.

            Murphy and I never had a dull moment during our project. We have worked around a lot of obstacles such as footage being lost, restaurants bailing on us, and iMovie crashing while in the midst of editing. For example, one of our biggest turning points during our project was our ability to improvise when a restaurant denied us to film inside of their restaurant, so we scrambled to find another restaurant to interview, and luckily found an ice cream shop that was delighted to serve us, here is an excerpt from the blog of that day, “Today was quite the interesting day. We had planned to do a interview with a Vietnamese restaurant named, Little Bangkok, but there seemed to be a little miscommunication with their manager on what kind of interview we would be doing. They didn’t understand that we would be video taping and when we should up with a video camera they were not willing to let us video tape inside the restaurant. So Murphy and I had to scramble to find a new place to go for the day. We thought that maybe a donut shop or an ice cream shop would be a nice change, it would offer a dessert choice for all  of the restaurants we have been interviewing. We chose an ice cream shop named Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream.” As you can see after we left Little Bangkok, we were kind of lost on what to do, but this day actually strengthened our communication skills and ended up being a nice addition to our project. Were excited to have Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream as a part of our webisodes because it offers a dessert aspect for people to visit after the eat at one of the restaurants that we present. Day’s like these are what made the senior project stressful but also show how we weren’t slacking or going to give up. We knew we had to fill that time for that day, and we didn’t want to just go home and do nothing, so we improvised well and I think that’s a great example of how dedicated Murphy and I were to our daily grind of the senior project.

            The idea of doing a senior project throughout high school has been sort of a foreign object to me. I never thought I could do it, watching the presentations of the grades above me I always thought that it would be to daunting of a task for me to accomplish. Well look at me now! This senior project has been such an amazing experience for me. I have always been interested in the behind the scenes aspect of videography, basically the editing side. While Murphy has always been the on camera type of guy, since he has taken drama for the past four years. So together we make quite the team for a project like this. The experience of the senior project has expanded my business communication skills, personal skills, and time management. My business communication skills have been broadened because it takes time and effort to organize interviews, and having good personal skills helps because talking to the managers, it was more of a convincing job to get them to allow us to interview and video their restaurants. And time management is obviously one of the hardest tasks of a senior project. I have always been a procrastinator in school, but doing a senior project that I thoroughly enjoy has lead me to become more productive hour by hour. I am so thankful for the senior project program because it has made me an overall better and more productive person. I have strengthened skills that I would never be able to strengthen while sitting in a class room, and I believe that this what the senior project is all about.