I began following the European Green Crab story last year when I began to ask departments what they were working on so I could make content for our new Shoalwater Bay website. I spent my time with them on the field and taking photos, not knowing what I’d do with them later. I for sure knew I had a story, however, there wasn’t much new solid info on it until the beginning of this year.
With my time in the Next Generation Radio program, I really wanted to push myself to write a hard story. Science-heavy stories can be a challenge. I love oceanography, so I enjoyed learning about Willapa Bay.
I had incredibly basic audio skills coming into this, and that’s what I wanted to learn more about this week. I also had never done non-narrated storytelling before. In college, I mostly remember doing narrated radio pieces.
I used photos I took mostly last summer while out with the Green Crab Crew. I used my Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra and I was shocked by how good the quality was for a cell phone.
My stand-up video was recorded on my iPhone XS when I realized I didn’t save my video camera recording properly. I wish I could’ve used the shots I recorded on the camera for the quality but my iPhone sufficed.
For my graphic, I love the imagery of the European Green Crab eating the Dungie Crab as it is lovingly called here. It shows the literal eating of the crab but also that the native Dungeness crab is being crowded by a predator.
Pauly Denetclaw has been such a great mentor for me to work with. She helped me not get lost in the hustle of everything and worked with my capabilities, which she says are just amazing. There were times when I needed pushing and she didn’t hesitate to give me a nice affirmation and then a direction of where I needed to be in terms of progress.
One thing I’ll start doing next Monday is relearning my video camera because not being able to use that footage sucked.
