What Have We Struggled With?
As amazing as this project has been, we’ve run into some problems --very annoying problems.
1.) Having participants show up late. I think that because we are students and we know the participants to some extent, punctuality was one of our biggest problems. For our first interview, for example, our interviewee woke up late and came almost 2 hours after her scheduled meeting. One person even forgot we had a meeting and needed to reschedule. It was especially annoying having to reschedule these people; we had everyone sign up by February 11 so that we knew which weekends we had free. We also asked them to respond at least 24 hours in advance if there were any problems. Because we had to reschedule some people, it got in the way of the time we had to complete other assignments.
2.) The weather. Maryland is a mess. Just a mess. When it comes to the weather, Maryland never knows what it’s doing. We adjusted by doing most of the interviews inside, which was fine. But towards March, we had the belief that it would be warmer outside. That’s when we scheduled interviews and photoshoots at Centennial Park in Ellicott City. Maryland lied to us; it was so cold!
3.) The wind. There were some moments where you could hear wind in our audio. Thankfully, I learned how to edit some of it out, so that isn’t much of a problem. HOWEVER during one of our photoshoots, it was extremely windy outside. For literally half a second, I let go of my tripod to grab my bottle of water. That’s when the wind made my tripod topple over. My camera fell on its lens, ultimately breaking it.
4.) The McKeldin cameras. I’m glad McKeldin had extra cameras we could rent out. It was annoying having to go back every two days just to return it and re-rent it. But that wasn’t the worst part! Towards the last few photoshoots, the camera would suddenly stop working and say “batteries exhausted”. We had to stop and get NEW batteries at one point, which was an extreme waste of our time.
