Salt Lake community college

“Graduates of excellence”

writer |director | producer

Every year for graduation, Salt Lake Community College honors one student from each college with the award “Graduate of Excellence.” These short documentaries were produced to honor each student and tell their story at Salt Lake Community College.

The biggest challenge with these projects every year is that the students are chosen every year one month before graduation. That created an incredibly tight deadline to interview, film, and edit seven different stories of students, whose schedules were already incredibly busy due to it being the last month of the semester before they graduated. The other challenge was that because this was produced primarily for the graduation ceremony it couldn’t be longer than the allotted time in the program.

The solution to these challenges were to record the interviews as audio only. This saved time by not having to setup seven different interviews but also allowed me to conduct the interview whenever and wherever the subject was. This forced me to rely on the visuals to tell their story and shoot it verite, showing what a snapshot of their life is like.

The first year I felt that the tone of the stories lead to a more serious reflective tone while the second year I felt like the stories required a more up-beat driving tone.