Home Business: Vegan Baker Chloe Lee

This was one of my first projects I did in NYP, featuring a home-based vegan baker, Chloe Lee. One of the main aims of this project was to also raise awareness for home-based business in Singapore, as it touches on her journey and challenges managing a home-based business single-handedly. In this project, everyone had to take on many roles throughout the pre-production, production, and post-production.

During the pre-production, the biggest problem we faced was choosing an appropriate interviewee. We initially came up with 3 candidates for our interviewee- a home-based vegan baker, a soccer player, and a director. But after accessing the pros and cons of each person based on factors such as the filming location and covid-19 restrictions, we eventually went with the home-based vegan baker as we felt it was the most unique and convenient feature story. We also chose the soccer player as our back-up plan should there be any situation that we face on the production day itself that we could not film the baker anymore. After which, we had to prepare a pitch, which made us plan out the proposals, shooting plan and possible issues that we might face and how we could solve it if it happens. We also planned out the schedule for the production day itself so that we could stick as close to the plan as possible and try to complete things without overrunning. Besides those, we also came up with a list of possible questions to ask the interviewee on the day and sent those questions to her in advance so that she would be prepared to answer those questions. We did all of these pre-production planning for both the vegan baker and our back up plan which was the soccer player. Following, we had to come up with a script and a storyboard. Our team met up at Clarice’s house to plan the script and I did the storyboard afterwards.

During the production day, I would say it went rather smoothly and we did not really face a lot of problems, which I think was because we planned well beforehand and thought of the possible problems that we might encounter. Zikry’s father offered to give us a ride to the interviewee’s place and we then took a grab back. Throughout the filming process, everyone was focused and did their part well. I was the videographer, Clarice was the director, Lydia was the producer, Jammerohd was the soundman and Zikry was both the safety ambassador and the lighting man. We followed the storyboard and script closely to make sure that we got all the shots needed.

Finally, post-production. During post-production, our team met up on different occasions, both online and in-person to edit the video. Our initial plan was for everyone to edit the brolls individually. We then met up online to see whose brolls we wanted to use. We eventually decided to use my brolls for the introduction part of the video and Sin’s and Lydia’s interview shots. We then decided to edit the rest of the video at Zikry and Jammerohd’s house on two different occasions. One problem we faced when editing was the time limit of three minutes so our team then decided to cut down to four questions.Another problem that our team faced was not knowing how to use certain things in the software, so we just watched some Youtube tutorials.

In general, I found this project a very meaningful one as we got to learn how to put what we learnt during lesson time in a real life context, to make a feature story. It was definitely not as easy as we thought and it made me appreciate the beauty of film making even more now. Throughout the whole project, I realised that every part of the project needs us to be very meticulous. I have learnt the importance of planning and critical thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyqQMS6jzm0