Halloween Threat Down

First, I must say that this video project was a blast and kind of last minute for me due to some family and personal issues. I was kind of thrown off guard when I came back to class to find out that we had to make our own video but I was a bit relieved once I was assigned a partner. My partner was Frank and he was a pleasure to work with.

Having no topic for our video made the assignment a bit difficult and too vague. I sat down with Frank in the Mac lab and we began to brainstorm on some ides for a video. I thought about creating a documentary and recording the football team or the basketball team. The idea of recording either the football or basketball team was to get an idea of their personalities and how they are off the football field or basketball court. This idea was not the one we selected because it was not unique enough for the assignment and plus we have classes with some of them. We continued to think of potential topics for the video project while browsing on the web for some inspirations.

Finally, we were able to conduct a topic. We thought about creating a video based on the holiday, Halloween, but we thought that it was too generic and afraid that other students in the class would choose the same topic. So we added in a twist to make it unique and scary. Frank and I decided to make a video based on the threat that was made to the students of University of Illinois along with all of the faculty, staff, and people of this community. We thought to make a video based on the interviews of the students that we found on green or “near” green and their view on the threat and how it affected them and their holiday, if so. We went out to record people and Green Street it self on Friday October 30th and Saturday October 31st.

On that Friday, Green Street was ghost town. There were a handful of people walking on Green Street. We were able to get a few interviews from people who were on Green. Many of the people that we interviewed on that day were not affected by the threat and were just ready to celebrate their Halloween. On the other side, there were quite a few people who were afraid of the threat and were celebrating their Halloween a day in advance. They were not planning on coming out on Green to celebrate at all and they stated at least two friends who were not as well. After shooting this footage on that Friday, Frank and I were kind of afraid for Saturday. Not just because of it was Halloween but because we did not think anyone would show up on Green at all. Little did we know that we would have the show ups that we did. At first when we began to record on Saturday around 9:30-10:00 pm, there were not many people walking down on Green but there were numerous police officers, fire fighters, helicopters, undercover police teams, and swat teams. They held their position on every corner. I even witnessed a girl receiving a jay walking citation; I would hate to have been her.
We were able to gather many interviews and even some extra footage of people in their costumes. Not only were their just people on Green Street, their were people celebrating Halloween on Green with costumes and all. People were waiting in long lines trying to get in the hottest costume parties on Green. The excitement of being someone else just for a day was spread throughout Green Street.

I was very happy with the outcome of the project. It took us a long time to actually edit the 20 minutes of footage but we succeeded; at least that’s what we think. When we first imported our footage there was no sound, which cost us to re-import the footage that took about 20-30 minutes alone. Overall, I am glad that Frank and I chose this topic because it was important to everyone.