​For my senior capstone, I created My Philly Love Letter, which is a news blog that focuses on promoting small businesses in Philadelphia. I created a website on wix that operates as the heart of where things are ran. From the wix website, anyone would be able to access my interviews with small business owners from the YouTube channel, the Instagram and twitter accounts, as well as any blog posts on the site. For the social media portion of the capstone, I used pixlr to make my YouTube banner and account logos. I edited my video in Resolve and I used the wix blog post feature to make blog posts. I wanted to interview people who were involved in their community in some way shape or form as well as people who grew up in the Philadelphia area. I felt it best to interview people I was close to, to avoid any awkward moments between me and my interviewees, since I’m still an amateur interviewer. I interviewed two people at once who’re running a small business together who are very focused on community outreach. Through my capstone process I learned that I should schedule as many people as possible. Before this, I never thought about how my plans with some interviewees could fall through. Some minor takeaways that I learned were to allow my capstone to change as I went along the capstone process and to use a different video editor because I wouldn't know when Resolve would randomly crash on me. Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MV1XyVneaJs5Rr7XYHz0r8nEybw2Kty31J1l1DZPFys/edit?usp=sharing Wixsite: https://editor.wix.com/html/editor/web/renderer/external_preview/document/f00dafaa-3a26-4605-a854-833fce1a311a?metaSiteId=6269736d-6ae6-46b5-9210-fe0f377e751c

For my senior capstone, I took my time to get to know some of the refugee youths from my church and I decided to share their stories. On Wednesdays, we have a weekly youth meet up aside Sundays at church so on certain Wednesdays, I kept one or two people behind after our meetings to interview them about their lives as a child/teen growing up as a refugee in Philadelphia. In the final documentary, I only included certain people to get a variety of ages and years that they’ve been in America. Doing this allowed me to get personally closer to the youth group as a whole and understanding where they come from when they are struggling with certain things. Having the opportunity to share the stories of people from my community that didn’t grow up to have the same opportunities that I did, being born and raised in Philadelphia, made me feel confident and proud to be able to share their lives with the public through my documentary. It also creates a personal accomplishment for me to be able to do something like this for the people of my culture, the Burmese people. The main struggle of this process was only the fact that since it is portrayed in a documentary format, some shots I took of certain people’s stories were not the best, but it had to do because scheduling just one interview was already complicated enough from the process of filming and making sure the lighting and the filming area was the same. Bibliography: Bowles, Edith. “From Village to Camp: refugee camp life in transition on the Thailand-Burma Border.” Accessed on January 23, 2019. https://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdownloads/en/camps/bowles.pdf Dave, Matt, Michael Slowe, and Matt. "How to Make a Documentary: 7 Steps For Making a Breathtaking Documentary • Filmmaking Lifestyle." Filmmaking Lifestyle. November 02, 2018. Accessed January 22, 2019. https://filmlifestyle.com/how-to-make-a-documentary/. Dwe, Eh Taw, and Cook, Tonya. “Karen Refugees from Burma in the US: An overview for torture treatment Programs.” HealTorture Presentation. Accessed January 23, 2019. https://healtorture.org/sites/healtorture.org/files/PowerPoint%20Karen%20Refugees%20From%20Burma%20webinar.pdf Fazel, and Stein. "The Mental Health of Refugee Children." Archives of Disease in Childhood. November 01, 2002. Accessed January 23, 2019. https://adc.bmj.com/content/87/5/366?FROMPPV=true. "Refugees from Burma." Cultural Orientation Resource (COR) Center. Accessed January 22, 2019. http://www.culturalorientation.net/learning/populations/burmese. United Nations. "Forced Displacement Worldwide at Its Highest in Decades." UNHCR. Accessed January 23, 2019. https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2017/6/5941561f4/forced-displacement-worldwide-its-highest-decades.html. United Nations. "Refugees and Migrants – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)." UNHCR. Accessed January 23, 2019. https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/latest/2016/3/56e95c676/refugees-migrants-frequently-asked-questions-faqs.html. Paw, Largay. “My American Dream.” February 13, 2019. Accessed on January 25, 2019. Christ, Hser Nay. “My Childhood.” February 13, 2019. Accessed on January 25, 2019. Soe, Christ. “I was a Baby.” February 13, 2019. Accessed on January 25, 2019.

This year, I created a video essay for my Capstone. It's about 8 minutes in length, and is about one of my favorite pastimes - Magic The Gathering. In the video itself, I explore my relationship with the game, the creation of the game itself, and the seemingly infinite amount of entertainment it provides to me and millions of others. My goal for this project was to create something for YouTube specifically. I grew up watching a lot of YouTube, and I still do. For a while, being famous on YouTube was something I aspired to, in the way that lots of kids want to be celebrities or famous athletes. Recently, I've re-thought about being on YouTube - not as a YouTube star, but just as a content creator. I looked through my list of subscribed channels - among them many channels creating video essays or something similar. Inspired by many of their styles, I took a stab at the same genre. Some of my biggest inspirations for this included Rhystic Studies, who does MTG card and artist studies; and Jon Corpora, who hosts a video series called "Pretty Deece" about MTG. There are lots of other inspirations - I consider my intro - where I start with a hook about a tangentially related subject - to be very inspired by Michael Stevens of VSauce. My other goal with this capstone, besides creating the video itself, was to set myself up to continue creating content for YouTube. I hope to get some feedback on this video and make more video essays throughout college - be they on Magic or not. Here's my bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ySxj-BXNheZnRtcDHVQvIL5YtcZN0S9yqbARyNGwel4/edit?usp=sharing

For my Capstone, I collaborated with a fellow peer, Bronwyn Goldschneider. She approached me two years ago with the idea and we have worked on it ever since. the final product was the Celestial Gala. Bronwyn plans to study fashion in college, while I will be studying marketing. When designing the event, we wanted to make sure that everyone who came felt included, as this is something that often lacks in mainstream fashion houses and media companies. We didn't want to use token diversity, as we recognized that it doesn't fix the issue, it only capitalizes on it. Instead, we had students, teachers, and parents from all over Philadelphia join to naturally represent the diversity we see in our city every day. Models in the show represneted nearly different spectrums in race, size, hieght, age, and backgrounds. I took pictures, made posters, and helped organize the final event. I also began my own production company named RoVe Productions. We took a lot of time networking with Braskem and figuring out logistics like how to fund the event. We participated in a shark tank in order to receive some of this funding. We were able to secure $1,000 to help supply catering, decorations, live entertainment, and other additions. The venue and seating, however, we were able to secure for free. I learned many things about scheduling, budgeting, collaboration, and the work process. To see each resource we used for the project, a viewable link to the google drive is below: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13gxB9aRZ_DWPm1p-QsaJaJbYQyvMGZ08?usp=sharing

For my project, I did a podcast that delves into people’s capstone. We talk about what made there capstone and what was the general inspiration for it. Going through it I thought that all of it would go swimmingly but the technology did not favor me a lot of the time. In total there were supposed to be 10 episodes but my program crashed and got my stuff washed so I had to find my best way to recover them and such. Podcasting requires a lot of listening and cutting down a lot for my stuff. For my podcast, I had to make sure that everyone was talking at a generally loud tone and also had to make sure that. Finding willing people was also hard for the reason that people who said they were done to help didn’t show up or bailed last minute. I changed my capstone up a lot it was going to be a bike race, then a film, then a comedic podcast and then so on and so forth. While recording my podcast I also got a lot of insight on what a lot of the people at my school wanted to do in the future. There was a lot of good words exchanged and many of the people I interviewed were very honored. I was straining a lot to write custom questions for each of my guests on my show. I tried my best to make my transitions as soon as I cut certain parts but still sounded weird but in the end, I think I still did a pretty good job.