In the final stage of CMWP course I am supposed to review our digital storytelling work. Here, I have to say that it is a very impressive and positive teamwork experience for me and my partners and they all did really great job in this project.
Firstly, I want to briefly introduce our story. This series of video is about a strong accent foreigner, who made some funny pronunciation mistakes in different occasions since his interesting accent (there is no offense and irony here), and resulted to misunderstanding.
Regarding the content, our initial idea is to create a hilarious short video that ask audience who is learning English language and who do not use English as the mother language to pay attention to this awkward situation. Thus, we set a character whose name is Mr. Badinglish that is the representative of this kind of awkward situation. From the character’s name it is obviously that our story is about a foreigner. Since all of us in this group are international student here, and sometimes due to our wrong pronunciation and slight accent may lead to others misunderstanding and that limits the options for a foreigner. Furthermore, since English is the world’s most used and widespread language, and there are over 700 million people who use English as the first foreign language (English Language Guide 2014), so we should pay more attention to English learning, and what we want to promote is better English for better communication.
The whole project production process lasted around 3 months from the pre-production to the post-production, and I was really satisfied with the result of our collaboration. The working process that we followed is the basic media production workflow. In the early stage of pre-production, our team started working on some ideas about our storyline and style of the video, and then we finished screenplay. In following step, we drew the storyboard and made a logo for our digital story as well as outlined our project proposal. Once we finished all the pre-production work, we get started to shoot our story. Specifically, we found out several locations around RMIT campus, and filmed our story according to the script. In order to have a better visual effect, we used two cameras shot from different angles, and separately recorded our audio by recorder. Moreover, since most of our videos were shot in inside places, so as to have a natural lighting, we had used a portable warm light and white paper as the reflect board. For post-production, my partner Yuri did a really wonderful job. He edited all the video episodes and made several effects on it by utilizing the Adobe Premiere and After Effects software to make the videos looks funnier. The music we used in video was free for non-commercial use, which is derived from the AUDIONAUTIX.com, and we posted our video on Youtube, which is under the standard Youtube license.
When it comes to the social media strategy, we set up a Twitter account and Instagram account for Mr. Badinglish, and wrote and shared many tweets that related to English pronunciation mistake and English translation failure by using some trendy hashtags such as #englishfail, #badenglish and #beunderstood. Meanwhile, we shared those tweets through our personal account to make more subscribers. We also published our video trailer and behind scene photos on Mr. Badinglish’s Instagram, and also shared on our personal account. By now, we have already gained several ‘likes’, re-tweets and shares.
Talking back to the collaboration with my peers, I really appreciate them, since they are all hardworking, responsible and understanding partners. Maybe this is not the perfect work, but I believe that we will do much better in the future. Small progress will make success.
Video By: Yuri Ardana, Angela Chohee Kim, Janet Chao Ji and Jessie Xi Tan
Learn more about Mr. Badinglish by looking the links below:
Weebly: http://mrbadinglish.weebly.com
Titter: https://twitter.com/mrbadinglish
Instagram: http://instagram.com/mrbadinglish
It's Jessie 