Provo CAPS Elin’s Video Project Highlights CAPS Program Capabilities for Growth

You can expect to tackle unwieldy video projects when you belong to a district Communications Department. These projects require a fleshed-out script, a plan for direction and video capture, the participation of schools, teachers, and students, video and editing know-how, and a vision to propel you through the long hauls and scheduling setbacks.

It’s the sort of task that might prove tricky to pull off successfully for an industry professional– which is what makes the district video created by Elin, a Provo CAPS student, all the more impressive.

Provo CAPS students work with local businesses to provide business solutions, making real contributions in the professional field. 

For the past semester, high school students in the program made authentic digital designs, software, marketing plans, and engineering projects for local businesses. Student projects fall into one of the four CAPS strands: Digital Design & Software Development, Business, Marketing & Entrepreneurship, Engineering & Industrial Design, and Medicine & Health Science. 

From the inaugural event to the Business Pitch Day leading to the end-of-term Project Showcase, CAPS students journey from mile marker to mile marker until they finish their project.

To give you some insight into the journey, we can use Provo City School District’s Promotional District Video as an example. The video and script highlighted unique, exceptional features of our district (like our DLI Program, CAPS program, graduation rates, cultural values, etc.) by asking students and staff from all district schools to read brief testimonials and facts about district features. By collecting video testimonials, the video would celebrate our most significant achievements, and the cultural unity spread across each school.

It’s a significant project that asks the creator to employ hard creative skills, patience, perseverance, and a maven’s eye for content creation. But overcoming obstacles is what Provo CAPS students do.

So, Communications Employees from Provo District pitched the video project on Project Pitch Day. 

The Project Pitch day, however, marked a leaping-off point, a threshold crossing. Students learned business tools and strategies to manage tasks and projects until that date. They’ve learned insider jargon and language and worked through team building exercises. On Project Pitch Day, representatives from local businesses present a project requiring slick time management and adept usage of industry tools to complete. Students took notes on projects, developing strategies for achieving a given project’s goals using their learned skills. Then, CAPS mentors divide projects up to students according to their strands and interests. It’s the first step on the journey toward their business project.

After the Project Pitch, the Communications Team met personally with the student taking over the project– this was Elin, a student on track for early graduation with an eye on digital design. 

The team reviewed the details of the pitch, discussed project layout and,

and offered insider stats on district demographics, noting that she had total control to effectively alter the script and produce shots as she saw fit. After handing over the script, Elin shared her vision for the video; she intended to primarily utilize J-cuts to overlap audio over the preceding scene’s video from scene to scene to convey a cohesive, harmonious message.

It’s a directorial and editorial decision that speaks to control over one’s craft– and it was a compelling choice to convey the video’s thematic message effectively. 

After the meeting, Elin had the monumental undertaking of outreach to every school, organizing dates, locations, and talent to collect video using authentic audio collection tools and camera rigs. Then, after collecting the clips, she edited each video’s volume, lighting, and framing, slowly stitching each shot together using her J-cut technique.

She worked hard to finish her product, completing the video in the nick of time before the Project Showcase.

As her client, we can’t overstate how impressed we were with Elin’s technical prowess, task management, and editing capabilities. We can’t thank Elin enough for all of her hard work. 

It’s mind-boggling to realize that all of the students in the Provo CAPS program are this capable, and undergo this degree of on-the-job learning. Watching this next generation of students develop the skills and tools required for inevitable leadership is beyond exciting and should give Provo residents hope for the future, too. 

We’re so proud of our Provo CAPS students and instructors, and we can’t wait to see what they do next.

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