Oct 2024 – Mar 2025

Wellington New Zealand

For this project, I worked with a team of five engineers in New Zealand to create a documentary on the restoration of Wairarapa Moana, a culturally significant lake and wetland system. This project was honored with the 2025 WPI Presidential IQP Award, a distinction given to projects that demonstrate outstanding academic excellence and significant social impact at the intersection of technology and society.

While the project began with an environmental focus on the local flora, it quickly evolved into a deep dive into qualitative research and science communication. We moved beyond simply documenting plants to exploring the complex relationship between the land and its people. The film was designed to help a local Māori elder raise awareness about restoration efforts, requiring us to translate technical ecological data into a narrative that resonated emotionally and culturally with the community.

The Challenge of Narrative Discovery

One major challenge was crafting a story without a pre-planned storyboard. This forced us to adopt a rigorous qualitative approach, adapting our narrative based on the nuanced interviews and footage we gathered on-site. Due to time and footage limitations, we strategically shifted our target audience to local viewers who could make the greatest immediate impact. Additionally, working within a different culture required careful, ethical representation of Māori perspectives and a commitment to authentic storytelling.

My Role & Skill Development

While the whole team contributed to research, planning, writing, and storyboarding, I was primarily responsible for reviewing and organizing our interview footage. This consisted of watching back 6 hours of interview footage, and breaking it up into ~250 usable clips, tagged and categorized by topic and theme. These topics and themes were synthesized through a qualitative lens to create a cohesive final narrative that balanced ecological science with personal testimony.

This project fulfilled my Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) requirement, which encourages engineers to tackle problems outside their technical major. It significantly strengthened my professional toolkit:

• Soft Skills: Teamwork, project management, cross-cultural communication, and adaptability.
• Hard Skills: Qualitative research, science communication, proposal writing, and professional filmmaking.

Without formal film training, I learned these tools independently, proving my ability to master new disciplines and communicate complex scientific stories to a broad audience.