My role: Video Editor

The project: To create a short documentary about the homeless crisis in Toronto. Beth, a friend of mine, was invited to present a video at World Merit’s Global Ambassador competition in Portugal. I had to come up with the best possible video that can showcase various opinions on the issue of homelessness in Toronto. Moreover, adhering to the strict time limit of 3 minutes while creating a meaningful and impactful video.

Obstacles: To start off with, I and another editor had only had 3 weeks to go over nearly 24 hours of footage and edit it into something great. This is because Beth spent that amount of time in the streets of Toronto talking to homeless people and other civilians to try and gain their perspective on the situation.

Method to achieve the goal: We needed to keep in mind the SDG goal number 1 of ‘No Poverty’ as this was the topic Beth had chosen. I had to go through all the footage and sort it into the best clips. Furthermore, I then divided them into the ones we would like to use for the main footage and the ones for B-roll in the documentary. After that, I edited the clips to form the sequence while adding music and transitions.

What I learned: Sometimes you might not have a long deadline to work with, but the job still needs to get done. As a group, we were working on this in the evenings as we had different class schedules. This was also in between our midterms and exams, so multitasking played a big role in it. She won 2nd place at the competition, which was a great outcome as it showed us that all our hard work paid off in the end.