Although I am majoring in marketing I haven’t had much experience in content creation specifically digital marketing. Marketing is more complex than just advertising and requires research to segment and target the right consumers, but research is not my interest. Before the fellowship, I had experience using different platforms mainly for photo editing to post to social media. I had also previously used editing software like iMovie for a film class but only made one film at the very end of the class.

Working at City Year Columbus I was introduced to Capcut, Clipchamp, Mailchimp, and dove deeper into Canva. I had heard of Capcut before from the social media app TikTok. I knew it was popular for editing videos but never tried it out myself. Clipchamp was completely new to me as was Mailchimp. Canva I had used for presentations so to the extent of PowerPoint or Google Slides. However, one of the tasks in my role at City Year Columbus is supporting social media and communication efforts. I had been asked to edit videos of our specific site’s alumni asking them about their service as AmeriCorps members, how it has affected the trajectory of their career, what skills they learned, experience gained, etc. in celebration of City Year’s 30^th anniversary as an entity.  

I started off editing the videos in Clipchamp because that was the first one recommended to me by a coworker. Although it was relatively easy to navigate it did take a while to edit each video because the split function could only be so precise. I played around with the audio adding background music and transitions between each clip to try to make it more engaging. A growing trend is people’s short attention span, so I had to cut it to 2 minutes from the 7-9 minutes the original videos were. The problem with getting rid of that much content is I feel you lose some important information or context, but I was able to salvage most of the highlights.

Although Clipchamp worked well for what I used it for it fell short when it came to generating captions. You can choose to go through and manually add every caption, but I see that as extremely inefficient. I then edited the videos again in Capcut to create captions using their AI tool. Even though AI is still relatively new theirs was able to get 90% of the audio from the videos which I thought was impressive. In the end, I was able to learn all the necessary functions for editing videos but still have lots of room for improvement!