Community documentary is an exploration of making different products for four different villages in Kampong Speu (Srey Sompong, Chrok Popul, Prey Onse, Trapaing Leap). It starts from the 20th of August until 5th October. The goal is to preserve the culture and to document the villages for the younger generations by making the podcast, gallery (photo book), video and blog. I was one of the two people who was making the podcast. There is a total of 18 students and two facilitators.
We have gone on three trips to the community that we are targeting. Pre-trip was to get to know the potential of the villages and to interview them about the community. When we came back , we organized the information for the second trip. We officially documented the villages by recording sounds, taking photos and videos during this second trip. Back at school, we took the documentaries that we recorded to edit into real final products.
Talking about podcast team, it requires a lot of technical skills and creative thinking in order to create good podcasts with well-told stories. We have gone through a lot of processes until we can finalize our products. First of all, we brainstormed a lot of ideas and ways to make our podcasts and then we chose the one that we think is the most efficient layout for us. Then, we started recording the interviews of villagers and village chiefs during our trips to get as many stories as possible from the community. After that, we sort all of the recordings and find three themes that indicate the potential and interesting parts of the four villages which are Development, Human Life (the blind and disabled grandma) and Agriculture. When we finished writing our script and translate the interviews into English (we also have to do English podcast besides Khmer), we started to make our product in the recording studio. After all of the recording parts, we started to edit those in Audacity, an efficient application for editing podcasts. That is the technical parts where we cut out the bad noises and mistakes of recordings. Adding background, intro and outro music helps to add more attraction to our podcasts. After all of the hard work, we finally have our final products.
In my experiences, I have never involved in making podcasts before but I wanted to try in this exploration. As in the first time, I made a few mistakes with recording at first but I learned from the mistake and apply it to the future experience and continued recording until the end of the trip. I was satisfied with learning a completely new skill because it provides me with unique experiences.
These are the links to our podcasts :
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCgjx7qwkAYkQ6wKhxC5ATQ?view_as=subscriber
Farming Leeks
