As a student fellow, I have worked on various projects and community initiatives. Most notably, I worked to create the beta version of a tool called VideoJam, which was meant to ease the social video creation process for newsrooms. I proposed the idea in Spring 2017 and was hired to work on it with two other undergraduates during Summer 2017.
We define social videos as the 60-90 second explainers that show up all over social media feeds. They tend to be highly visual, high-level stories with simple text overlays. These videos are hugely popular and proven to be incredibly powerful marketing tools because they are easy to digest and they stand out in a text-based news feed.
At the beginning of the summer, the team spent three weeks talking to a wide variety of newsrooms. We found that top social video producers like Vox and AJ+ had employees who worked full-time to create these videos. Video editors at these companies said they used complex software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects to create the social videos. Most often, they said, the videos took two to four hours to create.
Smaller newsrooms emphasized they didn't have the bandwidth to create such high-caliber custom videos. For that reason, they either had to skip out on great viewership opportunities or use cumbersome and rather expensive video-making apps that created sub-par content.
To address these needs, we spent the summer creating VideoJam -- the beta version of a free open-source desktop application that encourages narrative-driven videos. The following images were created by Jeff Birori, another student who worked on the project in Summer 2017.
App home screen
Text input
Video input
My community work at The Knight Lab has included many initiatives to expand students’ interest in technology, even if they consider themselves non-technical. One of my favorite community initiatives was a program called Month of Making. I worked with three other students to create weekly, themed programming seminars to help students of differing skill levels build a variety of small projects.
For the first week, I created a video breaking down an existing JavaScript tutorial to make it more suitable for beginners. The video explainer allowed all Month of Making participants to use the same tutorial, which meant all participants could work toward the same goal.