I had an amazing two weeks while studying France with the Irish and French students during my first week in Lens. The staff of Iut De Lens were very accommodating to all the international students and provided lunch for us for that one week and were very supportive towards us when we needed help with anything whether it was school related or just getting to know the city of Lens. The French students were also very kind to all of us and made us feel welcomed by inviting us out to hang outside of class time to make us feel more integrated during these two weeks. I got to experience a lot of new ways to challenge myself as a student by working with people I've never met before, use new equipment and plan shooting time for videos. I am very gateful to have experienced this two week long exchange and would defiently go back to study in Lens.
During the two weeks I got to develop two projects one being promotional material for an event and the other was a livestream. For the promotional event my team was made up of three French students, one Irish student and I. Our event was a Bridgerton themed stay at the Chateau in Fresnoy with activities associated with the series. For our promotional material we made multiple short TikTok styled videos and a longer trailer showcases the castle. My group and I had some challenges with time because we were originally going to go to a different castle but hadn't heard a response from the owners so we had to find somewhere else to shoot our videos and the owner of Fresnoy Castle kindly let us do our project at her castle. The castle was beautiful and had a sleek modern look that fit perfectly with our project's aesthetic. We had a lot of fun filming together and creating our project. We had some language barriers to get over but it wasn't too difficult because one of my French teammates spook English pretty well and could translate for me and my Irish teammate.
For my second week I got to work on a web tv and it was my first time ever doing somehting like this so I wasn't familar with the proccess of making one. I was in a group with 10 French students and 2 of my classmates from the program. My friends and I got to do more of the branding and graphic design elements. Our theme that we chose for our web tv was an airport with a blue and yellow colour theme. We decided to make a parody talk show with one of the French teammates pretending to be a well known movie star with a lot of awards on his way to Montreal to film a movie. We decided to do that because we wanted to make something unique and unexpected for a culture exchange project. Our French teammates mostly worked on the motion graphic transitions for the show and the fake advertisments that plsyed during the live stream. My friends and I got to experience using a control pannel for the first time for the live stream which was really fun. I was not expecting to use something like that during my two weeks so it was fun being able to experience it. We also got to be in the segments as hosts playing games and asking questions to the "celeberty", it was a little nerve racking but in the end we had a lot of fun and were actually laughing during the live stream behind the controls. We did face some challenges with our transitions not working at first and not having time to practice the controls but in the end we succeeeded and a lot of people really enjoyed our live stream and we heard that some of the other French students who watched it found ours really funny.