The History of Tea

In my Design Methodology class, we are doing a project on tea makers. To get the project rolling we had to research the history of tea, what tea makers are available on the market, how they work, and pick a target group and a brand to design for. Since it is a larger class, we split up into group of 5 or 6. My stellar group consisted of Sussie, Christine, Anna, Chris, and I. I really liked working with this group of people because they weren't afraid to do more non-traditional methods of presenting. We knew that almost every group would have the same material and so we tried to set ourselves apart by making a short movie of the history of tea.

Challenge #1: Finding a camcorder - luckily Sussie's boyfriend's dad owns one and let her borrow it.
Challenge #2: When to shoot the movie - the only day everyone was available was the day before the presentation
Challenge #3: The camcorder didn't come with a firewire cable and no one knew where any tape decks were located on campus - I looked up the Student TV club and they let me use their equipment.
Challenge #4: Editing with a Chinese feel - I recorded Keaw speaking in Thai some selected text and placed subtitles in the movie. I also looked up Chinese characters to use as the title screen. Funny side note - the characters I looked up actually say "Tea Set" and not "The History of Tea."
Challenge #5: Waking up in time - I edited into the wee hours of the morning (4 AM) and woke up at 7. God I love sleep!

Anyway, it turned out to be pretty good; especially with my time constraints. And, we got a lot of laughs, so I was quite happy. I have uploaded it to youtube mayhaps you want to watch it.

Another good thing that came out of this is that I am probably going to get more involved with the TV station so I can work on my editing skills. This summer there is the possibility of me working in Spain teaching video editing so I want to have something to show them. And they have a lot of really great equipment here that is free to use!

So I really like all of my classmates and had to get a picture of everyone. Unfortunately I think some of them had to leave but it is still a great picture. Time is flying!