Interviewing 1st Gen Immigrants of the 80s

The 1st Generation Filipino American Experience: Laying Down Roots in the United States

An Interview with Manuel and Marina Matel

This is a proof of concept video created in 2013 for a documentary I want to create about 1st Generation Filipino Americans and their immigration experience. To create this video I did the following:

  • Coordinated Interviews

    • Wrote questions and created slides with questions

    • Recorded interviews

    • Reviewed and culled footage

    • Recorded hand-written title slides

  • Scanned and Trimmed Source Material

  • Layered Audio

    • Dahil ‘Sa Yo spoken word recording

    • Music by the composer Chopin

    • Interview Audio

  • Animated Graphics

    • Created lower-thirds

    • Motion graphics

If I'm able to find the original source videos I would like to redo this video and perhaps remove the spoken word recording and focus more on the interviews.

Source Material

This was an indirect interview with my parents Manuel and Marina Matel. Meaning, I was not in front of them asking them questions, but rather I displayed the questions on my laptop and left them alone in a room with my laptop in hopes of giving them the space to be open and honest about their experience. This was indeed a success as I was hearing many of the stories for the first time when I reviewed the videos.

The photographs are image from my family archive and the additional images were sourced from a book called In Our Aunties' Words: The Filipino Spirit of Hampton Roads. The inserted audio recording is called “Dahil ‘So Yo” and was performed and written by members of a Youth Organization from Salem High School called Filipino American Culture Society (FACS).