On Saturday, February 12th, we went to go film the SLO Dragonboat Club live in action during their morning practice. The dragon boat team has recently become a club on Cal Poly’s campus. It’s comprised of students that are either starting this hobby, or have long been competing. At 7:30 am we made our way to Morro Bay to attend their club practice. They didn’t start until 9 am, but we wanted to get their earlier to make sure we could interview some of the members before we began filming their practice. Zach from Mustang News also joined us to take pictures of the practice so we could use them for our story.
We got to the bay, and were immediately met with hundreds of gnats floating about around our heads, swarming. They were pestering us and the other members that had arrived earlier. We eventually got used to them, but we were worried they would get in the way of filming and shooting. We ended up getting great footage though, thankfully. Since Riley’s doing video, she had some great ideas for getting different content for this project. She brought her friend Hudson who has a drone, and is more experienced in using it. Riley said, “I was so happy that he was able to come to help me, because I was really nervous that I was going to crash the drone.” They got some really cool footage going over the water of the members in action, paddling. They also were able to get angles that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Riley also joined the members on their boat as they were paddling so she could get 360 video footage of their practice. Allison stood on shore taking b-roll footage and working with Zach to take pictures of the practice. Allison said, “I was pretty happy to stay on shore and get the shots, I was afraid of dropping the gear. The gnats got annoying, though.” Ali was multimedia, so she has been working to get at some other angles of this project. She’s been targeting a more informational approach, since many people don’t know what dragon boat racing really is. She was going to feature the different aspects of their boat that traditionally represents different features of a dragon. Unfortunately, the team has a regular boat- that they borrow from another dragon boat paddling team, SurviveOars- without it being designed to look like a dragon. So, Ali shifted her focus to make a listicle, to tell readers 10 things they didn’t know about dragon boat racing. This should effectively serve to teach readers about the cultural aspects of this Chinese tradition, and also mention some fun facts as well. She’s also focusing on the different positions of the paddlers with a cool hotspot idea. She’s going to use one of Zach’s pictures to tag different audio clips of the paddlers that explains what their doing and what their position is. It mixes in an informational audio element with a cool visual element. Ali said, “I’m excited to work on multimedia for this project, because I feel like there was so much I could do to focus on different angles.”
Though we realized that they were a club and not a team, we were excited to feature a unique Cal Poly group that is so new to campus. We hope to do this club justice, and hopefully more people will know what dragon boat racing is after this. We’re excited about this project.