BARON PRIDE - 2017
Client: Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Camilo Montoya, Jay Zimmer
Project Type: School
Position: Editor
Timeline: October 2017
Programs Used: Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro
Baron Pride is a slogan adopted by Bethesda-Chevy Chase (BCC) High School in 2014 to encourage school spirit. It launched with a massive publicity campaign, leading up to the release of a video that is now very iconic in the BCC community titled: What does #Baron Pride Mean to You?
Since the release of that video in my freshman year of high school, the phrase took on another meaning. The 2014 video had made it a cool slogan, but by my senior year "Baron Pride" actually had real meaning for students.
Starting in 2015, the school underwent a massive renovation that took all the way until the 2019/2020 school year to totally complete. The students lost about half our campus to the renovation, including the fields (meaning no home games). This combined with a new, very unpopular principal and many administrative changes that seemed to be designed to constrain students' freedom even more caused school spirit to decline immensely. To try and combat this a few students set out to remake the Baron Pride video from freshman year in our senior year. I was brought on as the editor because of my work with B-CC TV.
Unfortunately, the Spirit Committee from 2014 had long since dissolved, so this project had no funding and no ad campaign leading up to it because despite supporting it, Administration didn't give us any aid whatsoever. All we were able to do was make the video. Also, instead of being set in motion at the beginning of the school year, we had to make everything in just a few weeks and just barely met the deadline.
CREATIVE PROCESS
There was a creative team behind the concept of this video that I wasn't originally involved with, but I was brought on as soon as they started getting ready to actually record footage. The team when I went in was made up of Camilo Montoya, Jay Zimmer and Caitlyn Clendenin. Camilo and Jay were co-directors while Caitlyn was the producer. They brought me in to edit and they brought Keith Laird in to get a lot of the shots, particularly the interior hallway shots (which were done by him rolling through the hallways on his skateboard holding a camera). I think the image you get in your head when you visualize that probably describes the whole process of this video coming together. We had no budget, no support from administration and barely any time but we were determined to make it happen.
The video was obviously a partial recreation of the original Baron Pride video that we'd all watched freshman year in 2014, but there were differences. The main difference was the people that we decided to interview. The 2014 video was solely focused on sports, and the interviews were really only with people on the sports teams. What we decided was that we would get interviews with more than just athletes. We got people from SGA, Music, Theater, and people who were just generally influential in the senior class as well as the athletes. Also, since we didn't have as much time to record sick footage of every team, our video had a lot more interviews than the 2014 video.
The other thing we wanted to show in the video was that we were trying to move on from the effects of the addition, this meant a lot of shots of construction equipment and mud in the rain. We absolutely scrambled for about a week to get footage of as many teams as possible and we were able to start editing on the Thursday before homecoming. The video was due to be released on Monday.
Unfortunately, we had to edit the video at school meaning that a lot of it was actually done in Final Cut Pro. This also means we had to come in to finish it on a Saturday. Fortunately, we were able to persuade administration to let us do it, but of course almost immediately on the Saturday the whole computer decided it was going to crash and delete our project file. Now of course, we were about halfway through by that point, way too far to start over. I spent the next few hours first trying to resuscitate the computer, and then eventually find the Final Cut backup files that were hidden deep in the bowels of the machine. This was combined with the fact that editing on Final Cut feels terrible to begin with. We were able to finish the edit itself in Final Cut, export what we had as a lossless .mov file and then throw it on a flash drive right before lunch. Then we went to lunch but didn't prop a door open, so when we got back after lunch we found we were locked out of the school. Fortunately, nobody lost any equipment and I was able to finish the video at home and add in all the After Effects stuff we needed.
RECEPTION
The video was released on schedule on Monday morning and was a success from every metric we could measure. The seniors in particular really connected with it. While it wasn't quite as polished or planned as the original video, we made the best of a bad situation which is pretty emblematic of why the video was made to begin with.
It has also since spawned more sequels (the most recent of which I actually helped with on a visit):
