I was approached with the question, “how do we launch this summit in a way that will inspire high school and college counselors to work together to help students get into college.”
At the time, I was working with the Oregon’s Education Department and the Higher Education Coordinating Commission on their annual “Reach Higher Summit”. The summit purpose is to support staff in both k-12 and higher education, collaborate on ways to help students transition into higher education.
The conversation continued:
“Our beginning keynote speaker should remind the attendees that we are doing it for the kids. We have to bring it back to why were are doing this.”
“We will have speakers throughout the conference. It should be more engaging with visuals.”
I then suggested that it would be more inspiring if students were part of the conference kick-off. Everyone liked this idea. However, it quickly became unrealistic with our timeline and logistics to have the students be our keynote speakers. Instead, I recommended that we create a video capturing students discussing the difficulties of accessing college and have a call to action from the attendees.
The project wasn’t all straight forward. I had to incorporate several wishes of the stakeholders into the script. One of the department heads insisted on following the themes that they had used in a previous commission and scripted the initial draft of the video. Click HERE for their storyboard draft. Additionally, they really wanted to incorporate themes of “bridges”, found in their commission presentation, HERE.
I took those themes and storyboarded the final draft, found HERE.
With limited timeline and no budget, I grabbed a iphone (edited using Adobe Premiere). I asked a couple of my friend’s younger siblings to hike a mountain with me and I recorded them reading the script. The completed final video is found HERE.
I scripted the movie in a way that I could repurpose this video for other projects, knowing that this movie would only be shown once at the conference. ASPIRE is a volunteer mentoring program part of the State and I was also working with their recruitment efforts. This is the same video but adapted for ASPIRE volunteer program, seen HERE. It is also the video displayed on the right.