Even though the pandemic put a pause on the Waller Creek project we were still able to bring some of our plans to fruition a year later. This involved a much different process than we had in store last year including online communication, less in-person meetings, and more work on your own. However, despite these challenges our project has been a huge success.
A year ago I described our project and how the pandemic had put an indefinite pause on it. Little did I know that we would get another chance to engage the city of Austin with our cause. Many changes were made this time around to adapt to pandemic life. One such change was that we cancelled our plans for yoga sessions and a mental wellness space; we also cancelled our plans for our Earth Day march. These would have been hard to do since people would be so close to each other and safety and health was our number one priority. We as a group decided to also focus on sustainability more so than mental wellness this time because we wanted to show people how they can be sustainable on their own.
Another change we made were less in-person meetings and more online communication. This was a bit of a hurdle because we had to find new times and dates to meet with our teams. There would also be times when there would be problems and it would be hard to communicate what was going on virtually. However, despite this we still were able to plan out our project and achieve our goal.With in-person meetings we would make sure everyone took a Covid-19 PCT test before coming to class. We wanted to make sure to protect our fellow students and professors by staying safe and healthy.
For my part in the project this time I worked mostly on editing audio from the past versions of the project. I edited the creek monster sounds and songs we composed in the past to be used in social media posts and for the nest itself. For the creek monster sounds this was done by making short arrangements of the sounds to be played. The music and sound effects were then made into various clips of five, fifteen, thirty second and minute long clips. These were then sent to the social media team to add to videos and gifs. I also came in to help build some eyes for our nest, and it was very nice to have some hands on experience and meet face to face with members of our team!
This may not have been what we originally planned for our project, but we still did the best we could to make it amazing given the circumstances. We still had a lot of fun planning and building our nest, and I gained so much knowledge on how to edit audio. We all worked well as a virtual team and all of our hard work paid off. I cannot wait to see the impact our project has had on Austin!