SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND

DESIGN

BACHELOR OF QUANTITY SURVEYING (HONOURS)

Community Service Initiative UCM60102

GROUP ASSIGNMENT

Haji Muhd Syafiq Bin Hj Abd Zariful 0314702

Ti-Ratana Welfare Society

Runs three children homes with over 250 children and is supported by donations from individuals, corporations and substantial from within Malaysia.

Chosen as the place where we will do community service as proposed by our group.

We divided the whole group into different small groups that will handle different things such as designing the t-shirt, making a game, managing the budget and so much more.

I was positioned to be in a group that will need to come up with a game for the event. In the early stages I was assigned as a Game Facilitator and so I get to be involved in the group’s discussion about how or what the game is going to be.

We did a brainstorming session in the early meetings and come up with ideas and propose to the whole group of which one is the best.

The games that we have thought of are such as:

- Doing the bakery act (as a baker, cashier, customer)- Hospital game (as a doctor, nurse, patient)- and Supermarket (as a cashier, customer)

The one that was chosen is the Hospital Game

The 2 other groups who proposed the games have been chosen at the same time as ours:

- Dress-Up Game

- Construction Game

we were told that every one of our members need to prepare one of the materials for the games.

The materials that are needed for our Hospital game are such as:

- Medicine (using sweets)- Nurse clothing (Raincoat)- Medical instruments (toys)- Nurse Hat (hand-made)- Name Stand (for registration, room for doctors, pharmacy)

I volunteered to prepare the name stand for this game because of how easy it is but of course I had to do it in a creative manner to make it look nice or even have some kind of thought process to it.

In which case I found a website that tells you how to make a paper origami stand that holds papers or cards on pinterest.com

And with that I tried to bring up my old color papers that I have never used since Foundation and also print the names (Registration, Room 1, Room 2, Pharmacy)

Photography/Video Team

We had a dry run 4 days before the actual event in which it was the time when I was notified that I will be doing the video editing and so I had to prepare my own small group that will help me with the things needed to make the video such as taking photos and recording videos. I prepared video equipment such as tripod stand and cameras such as GoPro.

Here are some of the photos taken during the dry run:

With the equipment available it led me to have a significant amount of ideas for the videos because of how things like GoPro can give the viewers a different kind of perspective towards watching it. Though I tried to be as minimal as possible and not put too much into it. 4 members of my group volunteered to help me with the recording during the event and we also took some good photos.

Here are some of the photos taken during the events:

Hospital Game

Group Photo

After the event, where all that’s left is the submission of the report and a presentation, Parham and I had to prepare a video of about 10-15 minutes as proposed by the group. In this case it could reach around that range but the only thing that I was interested in is the keep it as short as possible and not make it feel like time wasting so I tried to put more content into it.

We spent some time doing the video from time to time after the semester break and we each divide our parts on editing the video, which takes a long time because of how long the video is going to be. The videos that we recorded in the events has around 200+ video files in total with 5 cameras used on that day and managing it takes a longer time than expected.

The software that I’m using is Final Cut Pro which is the trial version that gives me about 30 days free to use before it expires. Parham and I thought that using this software will make it easier for us to edit the videos because of how easy it is to access all the different kinds of functions such as putting in the text, managing the clips, the speed of the videos and especially the audio editing.

Although that the software gives us a lot of benefits, one major disadvantage is that It takes long for it to process every each of our activities so we had to wait until it finishes rendering or processing our actions which is what makes the video long for us to finish especially with us putting in the videos from our cameras which should have about 500+ MB for each video file. The most difficult part is doing the subtitles of my group members talking. It may be the easiest thing to do but it’s the one that I find least enjoyable when it comes to editing, especially when you had to listen to about 20+ students talking.

We divided our edited videos into 3 parts:

1. Dry run video (practice before the actual event)2. The event itself3. And Reflection

Here are some screenshots of the videos:

Doing the videos is my biggest contribution to the group and I quite enjoyed it in a lot of ways. I like how I get to have the opportunity to improve my editing on videos but the thing that I enjoyed the most is how I get to see all the clips and photos, reliving all the scenes during the event and see how the children enjoyed our efforts in. I also get to see how all the group members worked hard during that day and are having fun interacting with the children.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXo5Z4-vbew

ConclusionOn what could have been a better game setup, if we take it seriously, we look into how we can communicate to the children instead and in what way will they react to these sorts of activities. Will they laugh about it? Or just be naughty or not be interested in playing with us at all? In this case, we put our efforts into making sure that everything will be steady and not chaotic. It made a HUGE impact and it was the right decision. Though the pictures did show that the children is everywhere and not in our supervision, but it is to the point that almost all of them are playing the games by themselves and totally enjoying it!

I was never initially assigned to do the video editing and it was at the time during the meetings that some people told our leader that I was very good at it where he ended up assigning me for doing the video editing. This is somewhat of an opportunity to try and do something better than what I did before, especially with the new group that we’re in. That’s another good thing about being in a group that you’ve never been in before, you have that feeling where you need to work and do something to earn or for the satisfaction of feeling like you deserve to be in the group and that people welcome you. In which case, I hope that I can deliver something that I have contributed so far and learn from my mistakes. Also I want to have a better way to approach the children who doesn’t speak the same language as mine and make them feel like we can have some sort of communication and not feel weirded out. I used to think that community service is what you do to other people by giving out cash but now I know that there’s more to it such as making a change to the people by putting in some effort that will make them feel inspired and educate them in some way.