In our first System and Strategies bridge assignment, my group member and I created a five minutes documentary about the Upper East Side in studio class and we also did research based on the history and culture of the neighborhood in seminar class. The entire project was based on the research and interview we did. By using various methods such as primary research, secondary research and observation research etc,. we observed the different vibes of the neighborhood and intended to present it to our audience through the studio class.
Firstly, We started to investigate our neighborhood by doing secondary research in our seminar class. We typed up the key words that are related to our topic into the library sites such as The New School Library database, NYPL database. By searching the article from the sites, we received different types of document from a hundred years ago tile last month. It is such an advantage for us since we were capable of absorbing the large amount of information by using the database as our research table. However, the amount of documents that database contains somehow confused us during the research process since we could not decide which category we should focus on. We had to spend a lot of time to cut down our range from the general upper east side toward a certain period and then toward the human and culture at that certain period of time. We observed that many authors and writers had the similar aspects on an assertive topic which helped us to summarize and make up our assumption and conclusion.
After the background research we did on seminar class, we then had more specialized topic for our studio documentary project. We decided to focus on tourism of the Upper East Side — since we found out that tourist has always been an indispensable part of Upper East Side. We wanted to perceive the perspective and understanding of those people who come to visit Upper East Side as tourists. During the filming, we interviewed tourists at Metropolitan Museum and Central Park (between 60th Street and 78th Street) and asked them several questions such as the adjectives they would love using to describe the neighborhood?why they were here?and If the tourism contributed to the area etc. We did our interviews two times and there was a huge difference between the two. We found out that people would willing to talk and even talk more then we expected to hear in a more pleasing day then a freezing day. In this case, collecting the primary resources from the street(interview) has been affected by the weather, hours and other unpredictable limitations a lot. In a short working period, doing the interviews would always be intense. Moreover, the timing issue would also limit the number of interviews we did. We could only get to talk to several tourist and use the information from them to present a whole tourist group which has a certain inaccuracy in the project. Even though there are a lot of shortage on the street interview, but it still provided us the efficient, interesting and fresh answer that we need for our film.