Growing up I always wanted to solve problems and help others going through difficulties. Because of this, I decided I would use my Engineering Skills and design a solution that could help the homeless. At first, I had quite a few ideas about what I could create and I was pretty indecisive about what I wanted to make for my Capstone early on. However thanks to Mr.Kamal the Engineering teacher at SLA and Mrs.Hersch the director of homeless services I was able to narrow my ideas down and ultimately chose to Design a Building for the Homeless. I 3d modeled a ¨Safe House¨ that would work as a place for homeless people to stay if they missed curfew which is 8 pm for most homeless shelters. With the ¨Safe House¨, they will be able to get essential supplies and things they would need and be able to rest at a safe place for the night. I learned while going through this that we can help homeless people every day but that’s not going to end homelessness. The only true way to end homelessness is affordable housing. Housed people are not homeless.

Below is the 3d Model of the ¨Safe House¨ with each object being its own individual model

We all consume digital media everyday, whether that be movies, shows, or simply social media posts about such content. Representation of different kinds is becoming more normalized as time passes, however it’s still important to recognize and analyze the possible subtext of representation. While many people are aware of LGBTQ+ and autism representation in media, I find that they are less aware of the often more abundant queer and autistic-coding in media, or do not know of it at all. For my Capstone, I wanted to create a duo-logy of video essays, with one focused on queer-coding and one focused on autistic-coding. Prior to this, I didn’t know exactly what went into making a video essay, and so researching the basics and what made an engaging and thoughtful video essay was my first step. I then wrote each essay and had it peer-edited, story-boarded each video with its respective writing, gathered my clips, and then edited it all together. I learned more about not only about my style of editing and creating a digital project, but I, myself, was also exposed to more films and TV shows that included queer and autistic-coding. My ultimate goal was to educate more people on these concepts and expose them to looking at media through a lens that they might have not considered before.

Each video essay had approximately four pages of storyboarding to plan out the visuals with the accompanying voiceover. A page from each one is pictured above. Not every aspect of the story boards came to fruition as I altered and changed some parts, but creating the storyboarding made assembling and sequencing all my video clips much easier.

To make my capstone accessible to anyone, it’s uploaded on Youtube and you can view them here:

Annotated Bibliography