Your Face Your Story 2015
‘Your Face Your Story’ is a yearly program by ABCN, in partnership with Chester Hill High School and students of their Intensive English Centre.
The program brings volunteer mentors and students representing many nationalities together to share their experiences and journey into making Australia their home.
Working one-one with their mentors, the students are encouraged to explore their cultural origins and tell their life stories or significant life events through a written and creative piece of work.
In 2015, the program also partnered with the Cumberland High School Intensive English Centre, which made the turnout for both students and volunteers dramatically increase.
Learning from our experiences on the project last year, we elected to show the students three selected videos of students telling their stories from ‘Your Face Your Story’ 2014. No Pool’s Ben Hasic addressed an audience of 30 students about public speaking techniques, as well as on-camera interview performance. Like last year, all students were offered the opportunity to speak on-camera to tell their story through the day.
This year, to our complete surprise, all 30 of the students wanted to share their stories on-camera after seeing last year’s examples of what their videos could turn out like. This unexpected turnout definitely brought the crew to a scramble, as the media turnover for 30 interviews was not initially expected. We did manage the day fine and conducted all 30 interviews with the help of the ABCN volunteers and organisers who helped to schedule groups of students throughout the day.
In interviews led by Ben Hasic, the students were encouraged to talk about their cultural background and their story, as well as share their feelings about their mentors and their overall development through the program. They also had the opportunity to talk through the artworks they had produced with the help of their mentors. With twice the amount of interviews as last year, we heard stories from all parts of the globe that would touch all walks of life.
As it was last year, the production of the event was split into two teams. Team A worked on interviews with the students, and Team B captured high-frame-rate B-Roll of the event, as well as each of the student’s end of day presentations & speeches.
All interviews were shot on an Epic-X Red Dragon with modified Zeiss Contax prime lenses, and the B-Roll was shot on a Sony PMW-F55 with a Fujinon 19-90mm T2.9 Cabrio Premier PL lens which offered great versatility in the fast moving classroom style environment. Working off the example set by Jaime Hamil in 2014’s series, this year Andrew McClymont was able to capture some great moments between the mentors and students which really helped bring this piece to life.
In the end, 30 individual student videos were produced using content from their interviews and their presentations to best tell their story. Additionally, a longer case study piece about the students’ overall thoughts of the ‘Your Face Your Story’ program was also produced including several student interviews.
Due to the very personal nature of the videos, they cannot be shared publicly, but they will be screened for the students at their end of year ‘Your Face Your Story’ event in December. They have also been housed on a private website developed by Sean Hambridge, which includes profiles for each student, placing their face on a world map at their country of birth. This website is shared between the mentors, students, and their families, and is a great memento of their time in the program.
Overall, this has been a very rewarding experience for the team.
To find out more about volunteering with the Australian Business & Community Network, visit their website here.
Cheers,
Ben & The No Pool Team