Her Campus: What exactly is your organization?
Dope- Hank: “The real name of the organization is ‘Diverse Organization of Photo and Video Enthusiasts.’ We help create a platform for people who want to express themselves using photography or videos, in addition we cover/help promote events on campus.”
Dope- Bruce: “So yeah, Hank takes care of the video part and I am in charge of photography. So I take the pictures and he’ll shoot the videos, which helped us with taking projects around campus. Mostly event covering, and some photography projects like Humans of Behrend.”
Dope- Hank: “So today we are working with the international student office making diversity videos for them, and a couple of other projects in the comm. department, and also we are working with people like Jon Otto (RA) who wants to make videos of all the RAs and their staff teams, as well as an overall week at Behrend.”
Dope- Bruce: “And we also support people, any idea that is brought to us we try to do our best and bring to life.”
Dope- Hank: “We make sure everyone gets credit for their work as well, if you go to our page and it shows that an event was covered it does say DOPE but you can also see their name first before ours.”
Dope- Bruce: “Its really hard to present yourself even if you have talent, so we’ve decided to become the middle-man between them and organizations.”
Her Campus: Who is the president of DOPE?
Dope- Hank/Bruce: “We are both president.”
Dope- Hank: “First it was just a video club under a different name then he (pointing at Bruce) wanted to start a photography club and we thought ‘why not just combine them into one big club?’ It’s kind of the same genre, but then it’s easier if you offer services to people on campus when you have both photography and videography under one roof.”
Dope- Bruce: “It makes it feel broader, which makes more work, but at the same time it’s more interesting to the members.”
Her Campus: What events has DOPE taken photos/videos for so far?
Dope- Bruce: “Wow.”
Dope- Hank: ” (Laughs) Our first official event was Harambee by MCC, the Mid-Autumn Festival by ASO, ABC’s Date Auction, MSA’s EID Dinner, ISO’s Halloween Night and Saturday Madness.”
Dope- Bruce: “And we covered Reslife’s Halloween Extravaganza.”
Her Campus: What exactly is “Humans of Behrend”?
Dope- Bruce: “Its a project between DOPE and the SGA PR Committee, so we help each other out with this project. We actually were inspired by Humans of New York, it’s a really nice idea to go around and talk to people because the stuff that we interview them about usually goes much deeper than we expected. People have more depth in them. Usually you see surface-value, not what is inside, so this projects allows you to get personal. We hope that when readers see them around campus they will go up and be like ‘hey, I liked your article!’ or ‘I think your life is awesome.’ We hope to reduce the gap between each other and to have people realize that everyone is actually human.”
Dope- Hank: “We try to do it random, but if someone knows something interesting about someone we want to share that too.”
Dope- Bruce: “Sometimes we’ll spot someone through Instagram or Facebook too. Like last time I met this girl Taylor and I knew her from Instagram and I just really wanted to interview her. Sometimes the planned stories are just as good as the spontaneous ones.”
Her Campus: What other new projects has DOPE been up to?
Dope- Hank: “So what’s happening right now is that the comm. department is having a lot of projects that people want to do, but film majors are too busy to take on these projects. So next semester we will be working with the comm. department and a professional company to bring out these projects, and have them mainly focused on Behrend, the community here, and also the diversity.”
Her Campus: How could someone intersted in this join DOPE?
Dope- Hank: “Start with Orgsync, if you’re a member on Orgsync you are then an official member of DOPE. After that we have two separate meetings for each division which are biweekly for the most part.”
Dope- Bruce: “Right now it is still the trial run because DOPE is a new club and it keeps growing, so we are still trying to figure everything out one day at a time. You can also direct message us through Facebook on the DOPE page, which is where we post all our projects. Also, we do mainly focus on photography/videography but we also work with some screenplay and screenwriting.”
Dope- Hank: “We try to incorporate all aspects even with editing, scripts, and even softwares.”
Dope- Bruce: “We are looking forward to new equipment as well, we just got approved to get a GoPro. Also, Ronin, which is something we are trying to get approval for as well.”
Dope- Hank: “It will take time but as our club grows we get a larger budget and more equipment to keep up with it.”
Dope- Bruce: “Equipment is really important when it comes to photos/videos because it can effect the overall quality of what you are trying to shoot.”
Her Campus: What if someone doesn’t think they know enough to join?
Dope- Bruce: “If you want to do something, honestly you can do anything here.”
Dope- Hank: “We all teach each other new things.”
Dope- Bruce: “It’s more like we are learning new stuff while we are doing it. I don’t mind teaching people, but a lot of the time they are too shy to ask so we try to encourage everyone to participate more and ask. Behrend is a really, really nice campus to be involved. You’d be amazed at the amount of things you could do.”
Her Campus: Is there anything else you would like to put out there?
Dope- Hank: “We want to start doing movie critiques on how a movie is filmed to get some new perspective and help us in the future more.”
Dope- Bruce: “We are a club but we want it to be fun too, still professional but this is something we want our member to enjoy being apart of.”
Dope- Hank: “We also are looking for more people to help cover events in the future.”
Dope- Bruce: “This is the first semester so, like I said, it is a trial run, you get one right and you get one wrong but we can only go up from here.”
Dope- Hank: “A summary of all this would be; we never expected it to get this big.”
Dope- Bruce: “We hope that next year we can work with more clubs and even do a field trip for all of us. Also, some info sessions so people can realize that we do a lot more than just take pictures for organizations. Please like us on Facebook and we hope to see more people who are interested!”
Thank you for the interview DOPE!