Diving into a large project can be extremely overwhelming. Your head is filled with dozens of ideas you hope to see to fruition and your heart is all in. As is the case with most things, however, your next question is now, “Where do I start?”
Last week I reinforced the importance of a project management system as it conceptualizes all your ideas in a visual format. This means that this week, it was time to start taking action. Doing so can entail something different for everyone as it pertains to their respective passion project. For me, this meant the start of the pre-production process. My project is a bike safety awareness campaign by way of a video series, podcast and a social media campaign, which means there are several tasks I need to tackle these next two weeks in order to complete the entire project by week seven. My goal this week was to work on one element from each of the three categories so my project remained on course.
After reviewing the Trello board I worked on last week, I reaffirmed that the questions I am hoping my project helps answer are:
- Why are roads so dangerous for cyclists?
- How can cities help ameliorate the issue?
Before diving into the video and podcast process, I wanted a way to visually see the overall problem. I found that the best way to do that was through an infographic. I set forth on researching and reading several articles so I could then work on consolidating the information. It was on this step that I discovered how truly concerning this issue was.
According to the National Safety Council, for instance, the number of preventable deaths from bicycle transportation incidents increased 16 percent in 2020 and have increased 44 percent in the last 10 years, from 873 in 2011 to 1,260 in 2020. The number of preventable nonfatal injuries also increased five percent in 2020 from 2019. Another interesting piece of data I discovered on the National Safety Council website was that bicycle-related deaths peak in the warmer months, starting in May and remain high through October. While this is all crucial information the public should know, they’re also just numbers, which meant I needed to create a visual diagram to represent this data.
The following is the first artifact I created in the pre-production process.
Because I know the video element will be the most time consuming part of this project, I knew I had to dedicate a lot of my time this week to prepare for these next two weeks. I began by reaching out to a cyclist group in the Rio Grande Valley with the hopes of setting up a day and time I can stop by this week to record broll and my interview(s).
After setting that up and informing them of my goals, I drafted the questions I would be asking my interviewees to better-prepare for the on-site shoot. I then created a three-page storyboard so I could go into the shoot prepared with a shot list and have a purpose behind each one. This also helped me plan out the equipment I will require this week.
While I am by no means an artist— don’t judge my stick people too hard!— this step really helped me establish what I wanted to get across to the audience, a point author Victoria Skiba explores in her article “What is a storyboard and why storyboarding is important for creators.”
In the article, she emphasizes the importance of storyboards and how well they can organize any type of information that requires a systematic approach.
“The more detailed your storyboard is, the easier the production of your motion picture,” Skiba says. “This is why TV shows and movies usually have very long storyboards, where they explain what actors are wearing, what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and what’s going on in the background.”
I worked on several pieces for my overall project this week, which could not have been possible with my Trello board and my first production journal. I created my production journal with the intent of seeing how much time I put in this week and determining where I could make changes if I needed to.
What I learned from creating this production journal was that every artifact does take a significant amount of time. I wasn’t anticipating taking three hours to complete my infographic, which took time away from finalizing my podcast episode. I learned a lot by tracking each bullet point down to the minute, which will definitely be a learning experience in the subsequent weeks.