Every year, the University of Richmond and VCU organize the largest French film festival in the United States. As a film student at Richmond, I worked with a handful of other students from UR, VCU, and schools in France to put the event together. One of my major contributions was this trailer, which contains clips from each of the wide variety of films within the festival. Creating a cohesive piece from a diverse pool of films was challenging given the variation in tone, cinematography, and content, but I was proud of the way the end result unifies them all.
While at Brandthropology, I tested the limits of my job description by pushing to work with more media. The first project I was assigned was building out a video campaign for Central Vermont Home Health & Hospice (CVHHH). This task meant combing through existing footage, identifying narratives, and using them to create meaningful questions to ask when on site shooting later interviews. The end result was a combination of new and old testimonials that communicated exactly what the clients and their customers felt was special about CVHHH.
I worked with the Virginia Distillers Association throughout the summer of 2018 to create a video campaign for Virginia Spirits Month. As the editor, I was given dozens of hours of footage to wade through in order to create about 30 short videos displaying cocktail recipes made with local spirits. Working remotely proved to be an exercise in building communication skills and autonomy. Time management was also key, as the videos all needed to be done by a certain date, but in no particular order. The biggest challenge was the sheer amount of content, and staying creative with a rather formulaic task. As a whole, the shorts were a valuable addition to the Spirits Month campaign, and stayed true to the VDA brand.
This clip is the introductory video for the campaign of 32 “cocktail shorts” I created for the Virginia Distillery Association. The campaign focused on showcasing local craft distilleries’ favorite cocktails, in a short how-to recipe format. Working with the VDA presented a challenge not in the complexity of the work, but in scale of the task, which provided experience in raw footage organization, timely feedback and correspondence and a large final deliverable.
One of many examples of a Cocktail Short. This one for Catoctin Creek Distillery. Capped at about 30 seconds, the goal for these videos was to create a simple yet visually pleasing and format would look good on a desktop, yet easily be converted to square format for mobile viewing on social media. Using branded fonts from the VDA and logos from each distillery, the challenge with these videos was to create a formula that was easily and efficiently replicated across many videos.
I include this piece not because it is recent, but because it is one of the first I created outside of my own hobbies. Fresh Tracks was a program at Sugarbush Resort that paired potential film students with professors from Champlain College and Sugarbush’s own ski instructors. It was also a unique opportunity to work with U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame inductee, and Warren Miller film star John Egan.
The opening scene to the film.
