Concerned Citizen - Jessica Marquis and Kirstin Anderson
12:12 PM
Artists’ Statement:
We did our Concerned Citizen documentary on Diena Simmons.
She is the station manager of KBYU, Channel 11, at BYU Broadcasting. KBYU is
Utah’s local PBS channel, and is part of the bigger organization, BYU
Broadcasting, which is nationwide, as well as international.
We originally planned to interview and follow BYU
Broadcasting Managing Director, Derek Marquis. When we showed up to do the
interview, he suggested that we interview Diena. He explained that she works
more on the community level than the global level, and that she is really
passionate about her work. We were glad he made this suggestion, because Diena
turned out to be a great interviewee.
Diena is in charge of what goes on the air for Utah’s PBS
station. She is very passionate about providing wholesome content. In the
interview she mentions that no matter what, people are going to use media, so
she wants to provide something that is worthwhile. Toward the end of the documentary, she
mentioned that she has had opportunities to work in the commercial media world.
But when it came down to it, she felt more proud to be doing this work at KBYU.
Other employees at BYUtv have had similar opportunities to work in the
commercial media industry, but choose to work at BYUtv. Even though the salary
is often lower, many of them feel better about the work they are doing there.
We happened to be at BYU Broadcasting to interview Diena on
the day before a big event she was running, and she invited us to come back the
next day and shoot some b-roll. This is one of many events that she is in
charge of. We discovered that they have a lot more going on than people
realize. She said in the interview that not all of the work they do is on the
air. This event, among others, aids the community on a physical level. Diena
feels it is important to provide service wherever she can, in fun and
interesting ways that will get people to want to participate.
We could tell that Diena is a genuinely caring person. While
editing, we talked about how comforting it is to know that there are people
like Diena who care enough to try to improve the community. There must be more
people like her in our community who work hard in different ways to better
their environment, and that is such a great thing. We hope this documentary can
inform people about how dedicated people are to creating better environments,
and how anyone can help out even if it is a small contribution.
On the technical side, we got to our interview and didn’t
have a 9-volt battery to power our lav mic kit, so we just had to use the
camera audio. If we could go back and redo it, we definitely would have gotten
a battery so our audio could have been better. However, in the end, we are
really happy with how the documentary turned out.
1 comments
Love the music from Dan in Real Life, that's one of my favorite movies and partly for the music. Well done on your doc
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