I created a 5 part miniseries centering around the 5 core values that have been so ingrained into us students since the first day of high school at SLA: Inquiry, Research, Collaboration, Presentation, and Reflection. As a CTE Digvid student, I put my focus in utilizing the skills I learned in Adobe Premiere Pro and personal art and creative skills to answer the question, “how is growth and development demonstrated in different ways within these core values?” As students, we are always growing. Though we may not know it, we enter high school as vastly different individuals than we leave as. I created this film not only to document my experience but to show other students the ways in which we can learn more about ourselves as we progress.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MNnyW9hlyzz_vL63c3yO1ysthycwvNx5

For my senior capstone, I co-led RocketFest, which is a legacy capstone at SLA. It’s a student-run, city-wide film, photography, and (newly this year) graphic design festival celebrating the creative work of Philadelphia high school students. Working alongside my teammates Henry Blakelock and Desmond Maggione, our advisors, Ms. Ro and Mr. Rivera, and our mentor from WHYY, our guiding question was: how could we expand RocketFest’s annual tradition to uplift and recognize district students’ voices through media as much as possible? Our process began in September, when we started building our social media presence, researching venues, and coordinating community outreach. As head of Communications on our team, I managed all external relationships from reaching out to schools and participants, to partnering with a nonprofit for printed programs, to presenting to Braskem, and speaking at a CTE fair at Temple University! Our biggest obstacle was securing a venue within our limited budget, which kept us without a confirmed location for months. Ultimately, hosting at SLA’s auditorium turned out to be the right call, and on May 15th, we welcomed over 200 people to celebrate student artistry! The most important thing I learned is that a closed mouth truly never gets fed. Every connection, venue, and opportunity that made RocketFest successful came from someone being willing to ask. I grew enormously as a communicator and advocate, and I’m proud to have carried on a legacy that gives young artists, especially those in an underfunded district, a real public platform for their work. 🚀🎥

RocketFest 2026 Photobook

An Old Marriage: For my capstone I decided that I would write a book. To be more specific I decided to write a book that covers different aspects of how people receive and show love. The process of making this book has been nothing short of hours and hours of reading and interviews, with various people, on the personal experiences they have had in their lives; while also simultaneously reading dissertations written by human behaviorist and how they studied the brain, observing how interactions drive our minds especially in areas of connecting with people. While I have digged in the nooks and crannies trying to figure out the true definition of human relationships and how we experience love: I’ve come to find myself in my writing. Not only has writing this book helped me understand the people around me it has taught me a major lesson, “no one is looking at you but yourself, and it takes surrounding yourself with people who love you, no matter the circumstance; for you to realize that you are enough.”

Best, Mila Rosario

Sports and Media have been the essence of my four-year journey here at SLA. Having been raised in an environment where sports have consistently been the thread that brings us together, I’ve always been captivated by the impact sports can have in forming a community. As a Digital Video student, it was important to me to make my Senior Capstone reflective of this, thus I set out to plan, organize, and host Media Days for our athletes here at SLA. There were certainly some unforeseen challenges that arose, such as real-life situations where we had scheduling conflicts, miscommunication, and even personal struggles with managing time. Despite not being able to document every sport that I had initially set out to, I would never give up. Overall, the goal of this project was to ensure that my peers felt recognized and honored for their efforts. This Capstone allowed me to gain invaluable experience in accountability and professionalism when it comes to planning and executing projects. This project has taught me the critical nature of holding yourself accountable, even if there will be some bumps along the way.

Annotated Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-mcaThLrYz84OcKzSaO6ItaEEuFUKl0EBfc1-Id9nI/edit?usp=sharing

Hi, My name is Quincy Sullivan and my capstone was being a director of a live sports broadcast. As a student athlete, I can understand that not all family or friends are able to attend every sporting event. So, as my last capstone idea didn’t work, Me and Ms Roe worked to figure out a new idea and she has been saying she wanted to bring live sport broadcast to SLA. We worked more and more and chose that idea to be my capstone. After a long year, we were able to do live streams for Boys and Girls Basketball, Boy’s Ultimate Frisbee, and Boys Volleyball.

Nearly every baseball player who plays the catcher position experiences some sort of knee pain before they even step foot on a high school diamond. Many are unable to even get to high school while playing the position full-time. Catchers are lucky to get through all four years without some sort of physical therapy, extensive time off, or, oftentimes, complete knee surgeries. I am a catcher who, like many others, has faced severe knee pain in both legs before the age of 18. The common short-term solution is to invest in a knee brace. However, knee braces are expensive and rarely work comfortably in an active setting. This is why I chose to take on the challenge of creating a personal brace that fits all of my needs in a cost-effective manner. This project took months of research to understand a multitude of extremely complex anatomical and mechanical systems. Because of this knowledge, the design phase of this project went fairly quickly, from initial sketches to digital drawings and finally to fabric stencils. However, the production element was less smooth. Things kept breaking, which meant I had to use alternative, less time-efficient methods. For instance, I was forced to sew the entire brace by hand. Through the setbacks, I am extremely happy with my final product. I achieved everything I wanted to achieve with the brace. I also filmed my entire process and produced it into a YouTube-style video for public enjoyment or anyone who feels hopeless, facing similar circumstances.

https://youtu.be/8qWvV7-Ew24

CTE Community Engagement: For my capstone, I provided digital media services to my community through photography and videography. I was the club photographer for SOCA (Student of Color Association), ran my own workshop for the April art show, filmed and edited staff interviews for incoming SLA students, and even helped my teacher on a music video gig for an upcoming rapper and much, much more. Considering I switched my capstone twice, I am proud of my work and all the activities I participated in this year, as it gave me the networking skills I need in order to thrive in whatever career path I take in the future.

I aided the following students’ capstones,

-Yun (Art show exhibition)

-Matthew Zematitis (Filmed and edited staff Interviews)

-Magda (Weekly SOCA photographer)

-Destiny Harris (Senior Signature film)

-Quincy (Filmed sports games)

-Reese (Documented & assisted classes)

-Abby (Assistant photographer for media day)

-Angel (Consulted Digvid equipment room additions)

Link to my Portfolio:

https://tinyurl.com/ys3pvh4h

As the year ends and my Capstone must come to a conclusion, I present a work that represents the ability that has been given to me by going to the SLA CTE Film Program. In Freshman year, everyone heard that as their final graduation requirement they would need to submit a major project, one that was built by your creativity and based on everything you learned from the school and honored your beliefs and the school’s well being. Immediately after hearing this, I immediately saw an opportunity to seize the moment and crystallize my idea of making one of my dreams start to come true. To make this project a horror film, and one true to me. This is not my Magnum Opus, but a beginning to the rest of my life and my carrier, I will seek more and more improvement as this was a great learning experience, please enjoy my spooky film!!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17fVQolaxbeEQ5sO-XVTnpcKB9hJyiD1I?usp=sharing

This Capstone showcases an independently written, filmed, edited, and published crash course comprising three lessons about digital video relevant subjects. The process of deciding what I wanted to do for my senior year capstone involved me having to look back on my first days and experiences in the Digital Video program, and asking, what would have made my time in DigVid a little easier?

While thinking back to those days about two years from when I began working on my capstone, it occurred to me that a lot of the curriculum of the program had to be shown through youtube videos, or screenshots from films, or examples of professional photography. And obviously, this is only because that is the best way to teach a visual medium: show examples of things that already exist on the internet. It’s difficult, (next to impossible, actually), to teach a subject like film and video production without presenting a visual to back you up. Because of this, DigVid was often taught through things like Youtube videos to help explain these visual subjects. Then I thought, now that I know these things that we’ve been learning and applying for three years, I would be equipped to be the one explaining them now, and I could be the one making the Youtube videos. And that’s how I ended up deciding on what I’d accomplish for my capstone.

Annotated Bibliography

Studio VYV. “APERTURE, SHUTTER SPEED and ISO/ the EXPOSURE TRIANGLE MADE EASY!” YouTube, 31 Jan. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2HSoOq-rfo. Accessed 30 Jan. 2025. In order to create videos that are successful in ensuring that the skills and information that I will be passing along and explaining in my videos are honed and prepared properly to be shared, it is important that I study the videos that already exist in the topic areas that I intend to center my capstone project on. This is a video about the exposure triangle, one of the six video topics that I plan on reproducing for my project. I have taken notes on this video as well, highlighting specific things that I think makes the video a successful explanation to viewers who may be inexperienced in this particular area.

Aputure. “Lighting 101: Intro to Light Placement.” YouTube, 27 Jan. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqMQZG68Wkc. This is another example of the kind of information that I intend to share in my capstone. Another aspect of my note-taking and research process has been writing down the things in these example videos that I think are not exactly helpful or something that I believe I can improve upon in my own videos. However, for this video, I have very little to criticize because I believe that it exceeds all of my own personal standards and expectations for what I’m trying to accomplish with the resources that I have available to me. This video is quick paced, simple, and heavily visual-reliant which works great to convey its message extremely effectively to its beginner audience.

RocketJump Film School. “Intro to Storyboarding.” YouTube, 24 Mar. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQsvhq28sOI. This is a video that I have watched and known about for many years at this point. I believe that this is the most effective explanation of what storyboarding is, and the things that you are able to accomplish with it. There are two elements to this video; pictures of the storyboards, and the final product of the shot that was created from it. And on top of these visuals is just a casual narration that provides context, explains the process, and goes over the technical aspects. But for the most part, this is a visual explanation. I will take lots of inspiration from this video, mainly the intent to be as simple with the explanation as possible.

Interview with mentor My mentor works professionally as a pastor. He is very familiar with the process of creating a draft of his message, his sermon, and then delivering that message in a way that engages the audience and allows others to connect with his words. I thought that he’d be a great help in aiding me with the script-writing process of my videos, as well as the actual recording and public speaking aspect of talking to a camera. This will be a very major part of my videos that I don’t intend to ignore, the person that is explaining something to you has to be interesting to listen to, which my mentor is very good at in my opinion.

Interview with professional I’ve talked to a professional in the writing/producing industry about my capstone project and what I intend to accomplish with my videos. What I gained from this conversation was that explaining the topics in my videos, since the target audience is intended to be towards beginners, will force me to put myself into the shoes of the people who will be watching my videos, ie; the tenth grade class of DigVid students. Oftentimes people who are more experienced in an area might gloss over seemingly obvious things to them that are not inherently obvious to newcomers, or they might let slip some jargon that only a select few people will catch and recognize its meaning. So I’ve become more aware that I should focus on making my videos friendly to beginners.

Tarantino, Quentin, and Roger Avary. PULP FICTION. https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/pulp-fiction-1994.pdf?v=1729114975 One of my videos will be about how to write a screenplay. One of the most genius screenplays of all time in my opinion is of course Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. I enjoy the movie just fine, but oftentimes I come to the screenplay for my favorite scenes and just read the words on this script and I’m able to experience the movie in a whole different way that somehow enhances the experience of digesting this story. I think this is a great example of a screenplay because it’s not so by the books, or straight like it was written by a robot. The words are free and loose, there is slang in the scene directions; it is a very creative piece of writing that I will cite heavily when making this particular video.

Aaron Sorkin. THE SOCIAL NETWORK. https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/the-social-network-2010.pdf?v=1729115039 As opposed to the screenplay for Pulp Fiction, I find this screenplay to be a little more clean to look at in terms of its formatting. But that just goes to show the contrast between how writers choose to create their screenplays, and how much liberty they have in the way the screenplay turns out and eventually serves the production of turning these words into something visual that then becomes a feature film. There is no one way to write a screenplay, and I intend to show a wide variety of screenplays when I’m explaining in my video the process of creating one.

BrainBuffet – Self Serve Education. brainbuffet.com/. In the DigVid curriculum, we are given an account to Brain Buffet dot com, which has a bunch of different courses in basically all the types of Adobe sites. I’ve used it so far for Adobe Photoshop as well as Adobe Premiere. This is an incredibly rich and useful source for me as well because I intend to learn how to use another application called Adobe After Effects in order to edit my videos and provide helpful visuals to pair along my explanations. And I will also use these courses as secondary examples to study how professionals in this field might explain these concepts and topics to someone who is unfamiliar, like how I took notes on the three videos in my first sources.

“The Closer Look - YouTube.” Www.youtube.com, www.youtube.com/channel/UCI9DUIgtRGHNH_HmSTcfUbA. Instead of just one video to look at, this is an entire youtube channel that I have been following and been subscribed to for a while now. This source is intended to be used for the video that I will make about writing tips and coming up with ideas for stories that you will tell in your films. I believe that behind every great film, is a strong script, so in my opinion being able to think like a creative is super important for creating engaging and meaningful pieces of art/content. The Closer Look youtube channel is perfect for those who struggle with the writing process, and I have learned a lot from this channel and grown much as a writer from it.

Detisch, AJ. “5 Cinematic Lighting Techniques Every Filmmaker Should Know.” StudioBinder, 28 Feb. 2019, www.studiobinder.com/blog/film-lighting-techniques/. And finally, through the process of my research for the sources that I’ve included in my capstone production, I felt as though my knowledge was lacking a bit in areas, or was being stretched a little thin as far as how much I actually knew and would be able to explain simply. This led to me finding StudioBinder, a website for pretty much everything about filmmaking. This is a specific article about lighting, something that I believe I should sharpen up my knowledge on; this way, I’ll be more confident in sharing this info with others. And you know what they say, if you can’t explain it simply, then you aren’t an expert on it.

Digital Video students at SLA work tirelessly to produce documentaries, narrative films, and experimental projects, yet once those films are turned in and presented, they largely disappear. They get buried in the cloud, forgotten, and never seen again. Digflix was created to change that.

Digflix is a student-built website designed to archive and celebrate the work of Dig Vid students by giving their films a permanent, accessible home. The site was built with a bright, intentional design to reflect the creativity of the students it showcases. Each film is accompanied by a written reflection from the filmmaker covering their creative process, the tools they used, what they are proud of, and what they want viewers to take away.

The project began with a Google Form sent to current and former Dig Vid students, collecting both their films and their reflections. From there, films were uploaded to YouTube as unlisted videos and embedded on the site, with reflections shaped into cohesive paragraphs. Building the site from scratch with no prior web development experience required significant independent research and problem solving at every stage.

Digflix matters because it fills a gap that is easy to overlook but hard to ignore once you see it. It extends the life of student work, provides future filmmakers with a reference for what is possible, and turns a pattern of loss into a lasting celebration of creativity and growth.