Hi! My name is Hannah Kelley and I am a reporter from WACS News. I am a Senior this year. My plan for next year is to take a year off to visit my college choices and find a place to live down in Florida. I enrolled in Multimedia Production because I believed it would be an amazing experience and for the most part it was. I learned a variety of new things that I couldn’t have learned without this class.

Throughout the course of this class I have completed a variety of stories, all involving activities in the high school. For example, I have completed stories on the Homecoming Football game, Alden’s new athletic director, the musical, Alden’s 2017 Seniors, a teacher’s retirement, and many more. I believe some of my best stories were about the UNYTS Blood Drive, Mrs. Nelson’s retirement and the Musical Start-up. These stories were successful because they had all the components that you need to have for a good story. These things include b-roll, an interview, an intro and a closing. However I also had some awful stories. I believe these stories were the Seniors’ 100th Day of School, and the follow up on the Senior trip. These stories weren’t that successful because one of them didn’t even include a video and the other didn’t include any of the components needed for a great story. I have learned a variety of different skills in this class such as video editing. For example I have learned how to cut video. I have also learned how to add background music, titles, and transitions to a video. Before taking this class i had very little knowledge of how to use iMovie. However, throughout this class I have learned how to import, edit and publish video through iMovie. Furthermore, I have learned that writing your article is basis for a voice over for your video. This class has also taught me the right way to film a video to make it look right. Finally this class has given me a chance to see how a real news show is set up and put together.  

For future students planning on taking this class you definitely want to aim for success. In order to do so you need to stay on task and make sure your stories include an article, video and a featured image before submitting them to the WACS News site. I believe everyone has faced challenges throughout this class. Especially me. Some of those challenges include finding a story for a couple news cycles. Sometimes there are weeks where not a lot is going on around the community so your best option is to do your best to make a story out of basically nothing. Another challenge I faced was completing my stories in the period of time I had. A variety of people will think the time period we have to complete a story is way too short but staying on task in every class will get the story done faster. I also had to find time to film interviews, students, b-roll and myself to add into my stories. I also needed enough time to edit my video and put it all together to create the final product. There are multiple things I could have done better such as obtaining b-roll for all of my videos. I included it in some of them but it is required for all of the stories. Also I could have completed everything earlier than I did.

The skills that I obtained in this class definitely got better throughout the course of the year. I have sharpened my video editing skills. By having a story to work on every week it gave me a chance to work on those skills. WACS News does a variety of things for the Alden Central School District. WACS News is responsible for covering all the activities that around going on in all the Alden school. WACS News has covered the activities in the school from Homecoming week all the way to up to Graduation. WACS News also does a lot for the community. WACS News has covered events like Winter Fest and the National Night Out community event. In this class overall I had a great time. I became close with the classmates/news cast that I had. We all ended up working really well together. However, this class has definitely taught me multiple things about myself. I have learned that I really need to focus on the work that I have in front of me. Also, this class has shown me that i need to prioritize all of my work from most important to things that can wait till later.