For my Capstone, I helped lead Rocketfest 2025, a student-run film and photo festival showcasing work from Philadelphia public school students. The festival aims to amplify student voices and allow public school students (who often have fewer resources and opportunities to create films) to have their work appreciated. I worked with Olivia Gavin and Noah Callender, and we each took on specific roles: Olivia led communication, Noah handled presentation, and I directed marketing.

Starting in October, we held weekly meetings with our mentor where we created a timeline and organized the various logistics of running the festival. As the head of marketing, I created Rocketfest’s branding, designed promotional materials, and ran our social media.

The event took place on May 7th at the Parkway Central Free Library and included an intro speech from the three of us, a screening of 15 student films, a slideshow of selected photographs, and an awards ceremony. The awards ceremony was a new aspect that our team added to Rocketfest as a chance to give filmmakers and photographers even more recognition for their wonderful work. We had a great turnout, with SLA DigVid and CAPA students, teachers, judges, and families and friends in attendance.

Rocketfest taught me the importance of organization and teamwork in a major project, and showed me how rewarding it is to create an event that brings people together.

Attached are images of our festival and the bibliography I created to guide my work as head of marketing.

I decided to produce a short film for my capstone because I’m in the Digital Video CTE elective. My film follows a girl who has a gaming addiction as a metaphor for other types of addiction that people go through. I chose to do this because I wanted to create a project combining all of the knowledge I learned throughout the DigVid program, from pre-production in scriptwriting, storyboarding, filming, and editing. My capstone encompasses the core values of SLA: inquiry, from wondering what my film should be about; research, from digging through tons of inspirational experimental and narrative short films; collaboration, from working closely with my mentor and actor to get the best final product; presentation, from editing and posting about it. Throughout this process, I learned that I have to push myself to do what I must do. Nobody else is going to make me to do my requirements. If I did my capstone all over again, I would probably get started earlier and not procrastinate as much, I would have had more time to shoot my scenes, get them as perfect as possible, and reshoot scenes that needed to be done again.