Cuesta Canyon

With all of the rain the past few weeks, our group wanted to do a story about the outdoors to encourage people to get outside. Maddy discussed with us about how she worked on a story last quarter about the city of San Luis Obispo buying land in Cuesta Canyon, creating new hiking and biking trails.

We knew this would be a very visual story and we looked for creative ways to show the new land. Laura Cassin came up with the idea of using a drone to show the scope of the land. She contacted Brady Teufel to get training on the drone. She really enjoyed trying something new.

“It was fun going out of my comfort zone and using drones to get footage of Cuesta Canyon. I learned a lot through making this video and I think that it turned out well,” Cassin said.

Tina Raeisi also helped with the video portion of the story. In a Public Relations track, she said she’s never really used Adobe Premiere before.

“I didn’t have much experience with premiere prior to this project so I learned a lot through making the video for this project,” Raeisi said.

Our group also saw an opportunity to use video footage to make an interesting parallax component. Nicole Thorpe was in charge of the interactive portion this cycle and she enjoyed creating elements to make the story pop. She hadn’t created any multimedia elements for a story before and she said she was grateful for our group members for helping her

“Being able to go to Cuesta ridge and see the land was a good opportunity for our group and very helpful when getting content for interactive and video,” Thorpe said.

Maddy Copley wrote the article and was behind this cycles story idea.

“I’m so glad we were able to pursue this story because I feel like a lot of Cal Poly students will really like to know about this new adventure to go on,” Copley said.

The whole process to get the visual elements were challenging due in part to the weather. It rained for the majority of this cycle and it was hard to find clear a clear day and coordinate with the group to meet at that time. Eventually, we got a window to use the drone and go out to the land Wednesday.

At the interview, we asked through provoking questions and tried to find answers from professionals that would get our audience’s attention. Since Copley already worked on this story last quarter it was easy to re-contact her sources and have follow-up interviews with the answers they gave her a  few weeks ago.

Overall this was a fun story to do. There was a lot of outside adventuring. A lot of us were exposed to new technologies that allowed us to tell this story better. The group was nervous about trying new roles, but I think we created a story that is multi-dimensional and will reach audiences across all platforms.

Notes: Here

Competition: Tribune

Social Media: Post