Today is my second-to-last day as a college freshman. So far, I’ve spent the entirety of my college experience online – and as a student with ADD, it hasn’t been easy to manage my workload while sitting at the same desk all day. I wanted to create a video to try to capture this experience, so I used my contacts to find an education specialist who I could speak to. I interviewed Dr. Nanda Shaheen on Zoom, and recorded the interview for the purposes of my video. Given that she completed her PhD on the subject of students with learning disabilities (mainly focused on ADD and ADHD) and hypermedia, she was incredibly adept at responding to the subject of how ADHD students react to remote learning. I interviewed three other college-aged students who have ADHD in order to get their first hand perspectives of the subjects Dr. Shaheen was discussing. I was sure that I wanted the entire video to be composed of Zoom recordings and internet-based footage in order to represent what the Zoom classroom was like and to give it a digital-age feel. For example, in my intro, instead of recording myself speaking I screen-recorded google searches that reveal what the video is about.
After I had completed my interviews, I cut them down on FinalCut Pro until I was left with short, snappy clips that could retain a viewer’s attention. Cutting the interviews down was the longest part of the process because I also tried my best to get rid of filler words such as “um”, “like”, etc. After I organized the content on FinalCut, I searched for visual aids such as images of Zoom classrooms and headlines about remote learning, and layered these over certain sound clips. I used a dystopian-sounding ambient music track from a free music collective for podcast creators, and played around with the volume settings for it to fade naturally in and out of the intro and conclusion of the clip. I hope you enjoy watching this as much as I enjoyed creating it!
Camilia Fateh 