To round out my final semester of undergraduate school, my web design class required a final multimedia project. The project needed to be journalistic in nature with a story about something that had impact on the community. What resulted was a website collecting stories from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender group on campus.
A link to the site can be found here.
And while this is technically not a freelance project, I did treat it like one. My group and I took this project to a level well above the expected criteria.
Because it’s very easy to get caught up in the political end of a discussion that involves an issue such as this, we decided to take a very humanistic approach. The main focus of this project was up-close interviews with the members of the EIU division of Pride. I handled much of the cinematography and all of the video editing. We used three cameras per interview, collecting different nuances of the participants. Although I’m pleased with the way the videos turned out, there were some audio issues and a short deadline left the videos feeling a little unpolished. In one respect, however, I like how raw they appear. I would have liked, though, to have made a few of the cuts in greyscale.
My goal with the website was to present the content in a serious tone. I intentionally used grey as my base color with only the rainbow sidebar using color. This approach was meant to appeal to the ambiguous nature of the topic (no black or whites, only areas of grey). This seemed appropriate, and I think the result is very up-front and personal. I learned a lot from the experience and I’m proud to present it to a general audience.
