In Good Hands

In the spring semester of my sophomore year, I enrolled in seasoned documentary producer, podcaster, journalist, and professor Katherine Winkler Dawson's class, Reporting Images. In this class, we were assigned a final project of creating a 3-4 minute documentary video about a single subject of our choosing. 

Before this, I had never dipped my toes seriously in the non-writing mediums of journalism. My video production experience had been limited to iMovie before this class. Still, I am very thankful I was given the opportunity to work on this project because it taught me valuable skills in how to source interesting feature subjects, record A- and B-roll footage, how to storyboard and write scripts after parsing through all your footage, and how to piece everything together seamlessly along with natural sounds and music in Adobe Premiere Pro to create an engaging video. 

In my video project, I followed the story of Paige Hawkins, a UT student who runs a successful nail business from her West Campus apartment. I learned about her through Instagram and was inspired by her work ethic and ability to balance her rigorous studies as a health studies major with her time dedicated to maintaining a clientele base and honing her artistic skills.