In Week 9, our group made headway on several tasks, including: working on a comprehensive spatial analysis, finalizing interview questions, teasing out our goals for the article and documentary, and, most importantly, shooting B-Roll footage! After designating tasks last week, our group members came together in class to showcase and discuss what we had accomplished.
First, Mishika showcased her meticulously crafted network analysis that demonstrates pedestrian-friendly radiuses around outdoor rinks in Downtown Toronto. According to literature on pedestrian-friendly cities (World Health Organization, 2017; Crowley, D. F., Shalaby, A. S., & Zarei, H., 2009), we have determined that a 15-minute walk is what is considered a “pedestrian-friendly” distance. This work helps to substantiate that our rink serves the entire community of Regent Park, while other rinks, such as Riverdale, do not serve the community or only does partially. Access to Riverdale is also constrained by the Don Valley Parkway (DVP) which acts as a de facto border between Regent Park and Riverdale. Lastly, although Moss Park is within a 15-minute walk of South Regent, it: a). Does not serve most of the community, b). Is an indoor rink, and c). Only has 4 hours of open free skate a week, whereas Regent has around 5 hours a day!
Next, we finalized our interview questions. Charlotte and Sumayyah collaborated on these questions, ensuring that they were straight forward, while being broad enough so that the interviewee feels comfortable to give us a thoughtful response. We settled on around a dozen questions, many accompanied by sub-questions, to carry out successful semi-structured interviews. We do not expect to get through all these questions in each of our interviews, as we want the interviewee to be able to somewhat guide the interview depending on the stories and experiences they wish to share. From here, we designated several interviewees we wanted to reach out to, and Sumayyah and Mishika edited their email template to send out in preparation to schedule interviews (hopefully) before next week's class!
Last was our favourite part of the week, shooting B-Roll footage. Charlotte, Maddy, and Sumayyah met at The Rink at around 12 to take part in their afternoon free skate. It was only us and one other woman. As we told her we were filming and asked her if she would be comfortable potentially being in the background, she thought we were professional skaters. Unfortunately, none of us were, although Charlotte (the subject of many of our clips) did skate in her childhood. So, when the woman had questions about how tight her skates should be, she could offer some semi-professional advice. Then, Charlotte skated around the rink, and we got some solid shots. Another person eventually joined free skate, but this Thursday afternoon during school/working hours was not incredibly busy.
We then made the trek over to Moss Park to see how it was being utilized and collect more B-Roll footage to include in our doc. We made it just in time for free skate to begin, and watched a much larger number of skaters enter the rink. We took some interior/exterior shots, observed some of the skaters, and then parted ways. Later that day, we brought out footage to class and organized it into a Google Drive folder. We aim to organize some of the shots by next week to home in on key footage (but do not want to omit too much B-Roll depending on the content of our interviews!).
Underlying all this work, we outlined our goals for the article and documentary. This documentary and accompanying article will illuminate an often-overlooked public space and its essential role in serving the community in which it’s located. We hope to bring forward voices of community members that have grown up with The Rink, to provide varying perspectives on its position in their lives, and what it represents in an ever-changing Regent Park. We also want to use these pieces to highlight residents' experiences in an accessible and tasteful manner, so we hope to spend significant time on our editing process.
This week, we hope to have scheduled and completed at least half of our interviews and start to become more familiar with the filming and editing tools in preparation for putting our final project together. For this blog post, I have included a screenshot of Mishika’s spatial analysis work, as well as attached some of our favourite B-Roll clips!
Works Cited:
Crowley, D. F., Shalaby, A. S., & Zarei, H. (2009). Access walking distance, transit use, and transit-oriented development in North York City Center, Toronto, Canada. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2110(1), 96–105. https://doi.org/10.3141/2110-12
World Health Organization. (2017). Urban green space interventions and health: A review of impacts and effectiveness. Full report. World Health Organization. https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/librariesprovider2/euro-health-topics/environment/urban-green-space-intervention.pdf
The team members of Frozen in Time are Mishika Khurana, Maddie Wintermute, Sumayyah Shahajan, and Charlotte Pink.