Creating the Class of 2020 Senior Video, but what happens when everything changes?

By: Kadin Joyce

For my quarantine project, I decided to put together a video journal documenting the process of a production and the new ideas I had while working on the Class of 2020 Senior Video. Over the summer when I was thinking of projects for my independent study, I came up with the idea to make a video dedicated to our senior year. I wanted to create something digital that the Class of 2020 can relate to, connect to, and look back on in the future.

I chose to vlog the process because for future projects I want to be able to see the way I work and as I learn more about production, improve my creative process.

Since quarantine, I’ve had a hard time staying motivated to work on this project because the biggest parts of senior year have been taken away from us, it felt like there was no purpose to my senior video anymore. 

I created a daily routine a few weeks ago to get myself back in the right mindset and I noticed I’m a lot more motivated and focused on my work. I've been a lot more creative and definitely excited to continue this project with my new ideas for the video. 

Believe it or not, the most difficult part of this project has been documenting the process through vlogging. Talking to a camera feels so uncomfortable to me and I always cringe when I edit the footage. 

Fear of judgment is definitely holding me back from feeling completely comfortable in front of the camera but the more I do it, the less I seem to think about others opinions. 

The plan for my video was to make montages of every major senior event and have interviews with seniors about post high school plans and their high school experience. 

With school closing due to COVID-19 and the likelihood of us not going back to school, I had to come up with new ideas and find a new way to put together the Class of 2020 Senior Video. 

Now the new idea is to follow through with the plan, play the montages and interviews then interrupt the video with COVID-19 news coverage on school closings and the world completely changing. I want the interruption to symbolize how everything changed so fast with no thought that the rest of our senior year would be taken away from us. 

The next step is to put it all into Adobe Premiere Pro and start editing together the video journals and finishing other parts of the senior video. By the end of this quarantine project my goal is to have the video journals put together along with some type of trailer for the senior video. 

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