The Snails

 

Deciding the filming direction of the project had been a challenge to our group, as our group members had different opinions on filing this political topic, and we wanted to film something different since there are already tons of documentaries and videos about the Umbrella Movement. Being the only one that actually join the movement and camped in the protest site since the first day, my initial idea was to film a story regarding the broken relationship of police and citizen. However, due to the time limitation of video and different ideas of other group mates, we agreed and changed the topic to a protester who was politically apathetic and changed after joining the occupy movement in Admiralty, and intended to encourage more people to join the movement.

 

The rapid changes of the movement have also been a challenge to us. As the Admiralty protest site had been cleared, the occupy movement has been come to a pause. Therefore, we changed the theme from a story to documentary recording the Admiralty occupy site, and states ‘we will come back’ to show our courage to the Hong Kong government that we will not just give up achieving universal suffrage even the police clear the roads.

 

Apart from struggling with the topic of the production, we have spent lots of time in creating the background music. At first, we planned to only record a specking voice. But after discussion and brainstorming, we deleted the narrative part and placed it by background music in order to match the mood in the video. We are really proud of the final music piece and so glad that the music has helped so much to bring up the emotion of our video.

 

I believe that we can do better if we can decide the topic earlier so that we can have more time focusing the shooting and editing part. Beside, I wish that we could have better filming equipment. As we do not have professional filming equipment and none of us are good at filming video, the videos that we took in the earlier stage of the production are a bit shaking. Hence we needed to go back and film it again. However, as the Umbrella Movement was ongoing, it was hard for us to shoot the same objects or events on different days.

 

This group project was an inspiring experience for me. On October, I objected the idea of making a documentary, as there are already tons of those; but after the clearance of the Admiralty occupy site, I was so touched by our final work. Also, I was inspired to film more videos recording the ongoing disobedience movements after completing this group project.