Everybody who knows anything about baseball or the civil rights movement has heard of Jackie Robinson. He was one of the most influential athletes of all time as he was one of the first to break the colour barrier in major league sports. One athlete didn’t quite get the same recognition as Jackie Robinson. He didn’t play baseball but he played with the same level of drive and motivation as Robinson. His name was Willie O’Ree. He was a Canadian hockey player, and was the first black player in the NHL.
This was a partner project that I worked on with my classmate Sofia, we first started by working on learning about everything we could about O’Ree. I mainly focused on taking the information I found and condensing it down to the most important things. It started getting more complicated quickly, as there is not that much information about him as he isn’t the most well known athlete. Eventually I finished condensing the information so that it was ready to be put into a script. Our first draft was too much of an informational video and less of a video that answers a question. It was boring and bland and wasn’t good enough. The first thing we changed was how we explained everything. We added other information that was harder to find about his impact on the sports and civil rights world. It was also hard to find visuals for the video.
Our second draft was a huge improvement, but it was still missing something, so Sofia and I decided that we should try and get an interview. This was Sofias idea and it was a great one to, I was a little bit worried that it was to ambitions to complete within the time frame. It was a major turning point in out project as it added a lot more depth to it. Getting an interview with the one and only Willie O’Ree. Instead we got in contact with the Hockey Hall of Fame, as Willie O’Ree was inducted not too long ago. The person we got in contact was Kelly Masse the director of corporate and media relations at the hall of fame. We told them what the project was about and asked if it was possible for us to ask her some questions. This is the email that Sofia sent:
We got a response a couple days later. We are very excited to get a response as this would really amp up our video. It made our video a lot more professional and less like it was done by a couple of teenagers. Sofia found a time where she could execute the interview. We developed several questions and got this interview done. It was very helpful to have some input from somebody who had first hand information about the topic. It made our final draft much better, there was an immense difference between are first and last draft. It was awesome to be able to do a project on a hockey player as it is something I am very interested in. I hope I get to do something like this again in the future.