Graduate stories are one of the most effective tools in a university’s recruitment toolkit. Prospective students respond to real people telling real stories about their experience, far more reliably than they respond to institutional claims. The challenge is that producing eighteen individual stories at a consistently high standard requires a level of production organisation and people management that goes well beyond standard video production.

Uthakhamkong led the project from end to end. The pre-production phase required sustained coordination with academic staff across multiple departments to identify graduates who would be willing to participate and whose stories were compelling enough to carry a film. This process took considerable time and effort. Not every person who agrees to be filmed produces a good interview, and the selection process required careful judgment about who would be at ease in front of a camera and whose story had the narrative quality the series required.

For each interview, Uthakhamkong developed the interview questions himself, tailoring them to the individual’s background and degree programme while maintaining a consistent structure across the series. Good interview questions for this kind of film are not generic. They need to invite specific, personal responses that reveal something real about the subject’s experience at Otago rather than producing the kind of polished, rehearsed answers that feel promotional rather than genuine.

On set, he directed a team of four: Aasiya, Logan, Jensen, and Philip. Managing a four-person production team across eighteen individual subjects requires consistent creative direction and clear communication about what each film needs to achieve. The team maintained the visual consistency and tonal quality of the series across a large number of individual productions, which is a significant logistical and creative achievement.

Post-production oversight was equally important for a series of this scale. Eighteen videos edited by a team of four editors, without consistent direction, would produce eighteen videos that feel like separate projects. Uthakhamkong reviewed the editing process throughout to ensure that the pacing, colour treatment, and structure were consistent enough for the films to work as a series, while allowing each individual story the space to be its own. The result is a body of graduate content that the University can use across digital platforms, open days, and international recruitment campaigns.