Freestyle Academy proudly presents
2016 Innovator Project by DasomC

The purpose of the Senior Innovator Project is use your own passion to innovate, create, and develop your own project.

Project Proposal

I am helping my teacher hold a benefit concert with her students to raise money for a girl’s school in Niger, which is one of the poorest countries in the world. The project consists of me creating videos to play in between each performance, to introduce the pianist, talk about their piece, and the significance of participating in the project. I will be filming the interviews, editing them, and running the tech booth day of the concert. I will also be creating jpgs of poems that will be displayed along with each piece as the pieces are being performed.

I’m really committed to this project not only because it holds a close tie to my passion for music while improving my video, audio, and film making skills, but in that my contribution is the only way this concert can be held this year, and allows me to be a part of something that can really make a difference in the world, and save young girls from getting married off so early.

I am working alone, so getting everything to work smoothly is still definitely a challenging task. Completing such a large project with such an important piece riding on my back gives me pressure to do well and really pull through for the concert, and I’m creating a lot of content that is being shared with a live audience, so that’s pretty nerve wracking as well.

Project Productions

Read my research paper

Project Reflection

The idea for the project began from discussions with my piano teacher about music. She mentioned a benefit concert she was holding with her students and expressed concern for finding someone to create videos to play before each piece was performed. I decided contributing to such a meaningful concert would be worth spending my time and effort into, and I definitely feel that was the case with the outcome of the project.

The research paper and project link themselves through music as their common ground. Since I researched how different factors of media and publicity can influence how the actual music is perceived, it was useful for me to apply to my videos knowing that the audio-visual matchmaking is very important in conveying the right message to the audience. Making sure it’s relevant to the audience by touching their emotions was the key to carrying out the concert successfully.

I collaborated with others by recruiting Freestyle and community members to help with my project while helping out with other Freestyle Innovator projects. To help others, I inputted my opinions and constructive criticism where requested and also where it seemed helpful to my peers. I also helped others create content, help filming, help with brainstorming and editing on their content for the Innovator as well. I also enlisted the help of my fellow Film students (just Felix, mostly) to help me film for the videos. I worked on most of the actual constructing of the content myself, but I asked for opinions on how it looked and also got help with the technicalities of working in Premiere.

If I had another go at this project, I would definitely get more b roll and to cover up jump cuts because there just wasn’t enough to make the video go smoothly with all the content that was in it and the limited amount of extra footage to go over the interviews. I would also make sure to consider the venue of the concert and make everything fit to size because the screens turned out to be really small, and it was hard to read the texts, so we had to improvise last minute to move them to different slides and split up the texts so it could be read.

I think filmmaking in general was a whole new process to me because it was in more of a foreign setting, with many people I didn’t know, and having to do most of the planning and postproduction by myself. Luckily I had Felix helping out with the production bit, running the camera and audio recorder while I conducted the interview, but I think I could have maybe used some more help with making the video editing go smoother. My audio editing skills seem to be the one that was least developed while working on this project because I didn’t do a whole lot to the audio other than making it sound good and flowy during the videos, and I worked on my skills on design elements through the poems and other small videos.

I can definitely see myself using my design skills here and there in the near future, and maybe my editing skills for college assignments, but what I really take away from this project is communication and collaboration, and the importance of both for every aspect of working on a big project as this one. I got practice managing my time efficiently, which is definitely an important quality I need for literally everything in life.

I really liked the immense amount of innovation that took place during this project with my work and while helping others work on theirs as well. I definitely branched out on the skillsets in digital media, and putting together such a big project that was presented to a real audience is something huge that I feel was only possible because of the freedom I had with the Freestyle curriculum.

I feel that there were many valuable things that I learned and can take away from doing the Innovator, and I really feel like it added to my Freestyle experience. It’s definitely something that would make me happy to know that Freestyle would continue to allow the future seniors to take part in the Innovator project because of how much value it puts on work ethic and creating something that the individual really wants to do.