Telling a story about their lives: special persons with special stories

A good beginning is half the battle. Fortunately, I stick to my original idea as the group project with other two excellent members. The tranquil natural setting and tremendous cultural resources of Tai O are so attractive to us. Probing the “Venice of Hong Kong” does have great potential for an interesting on-line story.

Tai O clearly has a niche to visitors and it is also a hotspot for the main-stream media such as SCMP, the Economics and so on. Mass media never tired of debating the pulling and pushing forces between globalization and localization, the contradiction between conservation and development. So what should we report for our audience? Its prosperous eco-tourism? Its commercial potential or the so-called green strategy to rejuvenate Tai O? None.

The local people come and go by boat. The traditional water-related fishing lifestyle is meaningful to catch the eyes. We would like to enter the world of a typical local family (maybe more than one), observing their normal life which still retains the unique characteristic of this traditional fishing village. Seeing is believing. How do the Tai O people retain and preserve their culture and tradition and live harmoniously in this rapidly changing modern society? From the houses on stilts to the heartfelt words of the dwellers we will tell you about them through our visual-audio story from a micro and rational perspective instead of a general picture. By interviewing the protection committee and the family in Tai O, we would like to present the local views of this debate. As a result, the audience will obtain a clear answer to the controversies between conservation and development.

Opening journalistic horizons in a spectacular way: challenges and opportunities

We can borrow professional camera and recorder from our classmates.How to tell a profound and powerful story? How to make our soundslides project a good marriage of words and pictures? How to put the audience at the scene? These are needed to be considered before we arrive at Tai O.

One concern is about the coherence of storytelling. Particularly, we want to focus on the lifestyle of the dwellers in the fishing village. However, we also want to add some more materials (e.g. the opinions from the tourists, the natural scene and other cultural heritages of Tai O) to highlight our story. So we need to consider how to make the various visuals coherently in a logical way with so many wide, medium and lots of tight shots.

The other concern is about communication while interviewing. We need to communicate with the local people, but none of us can speak native Cantonese. I think we should find a native speaker as our translator to the coming interview.  

Never mind, we will try our best to make it better.

Cooperating with my group members: many hands make light work

Our Planning

Han Wei and Nick are very nice and passionate persons in our team. Han owns abundant creative ideas and Nick’s native English is absolutely a highlight of our work. To me, as a student majoring in journalism for four years, I will try to put my four-year journalistic training into practice.  My task is:

1) Preparation Period  

Defining the purpose of the interview  Conducting background research Planning the interview

“Fishing Village” is my original idea, so I have created a folder filled with abundant materials about this heritage. After that, I should  record our pre-planed questions (no prejudge, from different perspectives of the topic) together with Han and Nick. 

2) Contact and Interview in my part

Some of the best stories come through personal contacts. Looking for the Cantonese-speaking person as our guild and contacting my England friend who has been to Tai O in his childhood as other special source to report the story is crucial to me. I will put more effort to ensure I have set up and got the best materials from my interviewees, following up interesting points, and hopefully getting an exclusive.

3) Photographer and final Editor

I will try to master the knowledge of soundslides, by learning its advanced skills through some technical books and websites like Mastering Multimedia to make sure we can tell a story skillfully as qualified on-line journalists.