My story centers around the fact that registration at the University of Washington has become a very frustrating and painful experience for many students, especially the freshman who are relatively new to the college experience. The story begins by introducing the plain frustration regarding registration at the UW. The subject of the story, Matt, is then introduced as a student who has found a way to almost “beat the system of registration” at the UW by hearing from some friends about the Visual Schedule Finder- a user friendly registration program that was designed by one of UW’s very own students, Rylan Hawkins. The rest of the story is focused on some of the aspects of the visual schedule finder, including some clips from an interview I had with Matt. Closeups of the VS Finder are used to help explain the process, and the story concludes with Matt talking about how good of an experience he had using it. The question is then asked at the end of the story about whether or not the University will buy Hawkins’ program, or if other Universities will invest in it.
I would say my biggest challenge in filming was simply getting good close-up shots of the computer as Matt was using the Visual Schedule Finder. I only wish that the camera I had could shoot with better resolution so that it could pick up some of the smaller details on the computer screen, but the shot was important for the story so I had to go with whatever I could get. Another big challenge in completing the story was getting an interview with Rylan Hawkins himself. He is one of my friends, but between our schedules we weren’t able to set up a time and have an interview about the Visual Schedule Finder. It isn’t the end of the world that I didn’t interview him, and in my mind the story will still be very strong without his part, but I think it would have added a lot to get pieces of an interview from him to make the story as strong as possible. If I was to do the story over again, this is the main thing that I would make sure to do. I would also have preferred a higher quality video camera, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t necessarily the most important thing for this particular story.
