Date: Jan. 2020
Client: Longo Mai
My Role: Lead Photographer
Tools: Nikon 7D, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, and Pages
Along with seven other graduate students, I created a website for a small village in Costa Rica called Longo Mai. The website was created to gain tourism as well as educate the world about Longo Mai.
Problem
The client was located in the remote mountains of Costa Rica. They had limited access to the internet, which made communication difficult. However, the client gave my team complete creative control over their new website. They also wanted us to translate the website into English and German.
Solution
A month before we flew to Costa Rica, my team created interview questions and content ideas to present to the client. Preplanning was vital to ensure that we obtained the necessary information we would need to create an outstanding website for the client.
Capturing Photos
Using a Nikon 7D, I captured photos of everything I thought encompassed Longo Mai, Costa Rica. We had a limited amount of camera equipment in the village, so we had to be resourceful.
Organization
At the end of each day, I would sort through the photos I had captured and put them in the correct folders on an external drive.
Editing
At the end of our week in Costa Rica, I went through the 300+ pictures we captured to select 18 images that highlight the culture, community, and lifestyle of the people in Longo Mai, Costa Rica. I edited each photo in Adobe Photoshop.
Captions and Subtitles
I added short captions to each photo to briefly explain what was depicted.
Due to the interviews originally being in Spanish, I worked with translators to add English and German captions to the videos.
Layout
After the web developer coded the majority of the website, we sat together and selected photos for each page.
Final Product
In one month, my team was able to create a responsive website for the community of Longo Mai, Costa Rica. We presented our site to our fellow classmates at the end of January in a showcase. The client received the final product a week later.
Outcome
Our team placed first in the 2020 Best of the AEJMC Web/Best of Digital Competition.
The client was pleased with the outcome and sent several e-mails expressing their sentiments. Our site has allowed them to attract a diverse crowd of people who are interested in experiencing their culture.
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