Rightnowish celebrates our fourth anniversary on the air this year – it also marks our first collaboration with the KQED Youth Advisory Board. As part of KQED Youth Takeover, Rightnowish producers served as mentors for four Bay Area high school students who crafted social media content together and brought us behind the scenes of their creative process.
The Rightnowish team strongly believes in the intergenerational sharing of knowledge, so when asked to join this project, we were immediately interested. Through nurturing future mediamakers, we can prepare them for their prospective careers in journalism and follow through on our mission to inform, inspire, and innovate. For the last few months, we’ve worked with YAB members Jeanette, Lyric, Maceo, and Vanessa and met with them to bring their ideas to life.
Our meetings began with getting to know these young journalists and their unique interests and finding ways to translate these into our work. Pulling from their passion and experiences in filmmaking and video production, we focused on creating promotional content for Rightnowish episodes in their own voice with the goal of drawing in a youth audience. YAB members were in control of the pieces they made, choosing their own structure and style and highlighting the episodes’ topics they were most interested in.
Check out KQED Youth Advisory Board members’ videos on the KQED Arts Instagram page throughout Youth Takeover – April 22 to 26, 2024 – and hear about their experience directly from them below.
Quick Q&A with Rightnowish YAB Members:
What was your creative process in drafting these social videos?
Lyric: My creative process is usually watching other videos with the same themes to gain inspiration. I also like to do deep dives on my subject to get a sense of their personalities and aesthetics.
Vanessa: My team partner and I first took time to brainstorm what we wanted to say and what kind of feel we wanted our video to have. After that, we would write up a few versions of a script
Jeanette: An A/V script was always beneficial to have as a roadmap. Here, I was able to outline what I was going to say based on the Rightnowish podcast episode I was focusing on and what visuals were going to be on screen.
Maceo: Overall, what ultimately enabled us to come up with the creative content in our vertical videos was the collaboration of our ideas and the combined effort we put into our video planning.
What did you learn about feedback from this experience?
Maceo: I learned a lot about feedback towards media creation and editing, the processes that content goes through before being posted, and the collaboration of collective feedback in improvising and completing a video project. Receiving comments on our scripts gave me insight of how I can give feedback towards others and how I can take feedback to better my own work.
Vanessa: I learned that there are many different rounds of feedback needed for even a one minute video. These elevated our video to a higher level each time.
Jeanette: I learned to always pay attention to major and minor details, even if that’s just checking the weather. I also learned that adding aspects like captions can elevate your video and make it visually cool. It’s all about managing your time and making a social video that’s entertaining, and to do that, I learned to consider new factors that I never had before.
Lyric: I learned that not all feedback should be taken offensively and that being open to different perspectives can push you towards your better self.
What have you gained from this experience?
Lyric: I have learned to work with a team and to commit not just to myself, but to others. It has also helped me with my editing skills. Being able to experience being a part of Rightnowish, I have felt more confident in myself and my abilities. I no longer doubt myself or my work because I know it is appreciated and respected.
Maceo: I have gained a lot of experience in creating media that appeals to a general social media audience. We crafted every aspect of our videos to grab the viewer’s attention and provide them with informative content that encompasses the subject of the video.
Jeanette: I was able to improve my communication and editing skills as well as my knowledge regarding Bay Area culture because of Rightnowish. Faces that I didn’t know before, I know now. Being able to hear these new stories about people living in the Bay is super cool and interesting.
Vanessa: I have gained valuable experience productively collaborating with others to create content I’m proud of.
How might this apply to your future career interests?
Lyric: I will be able to use my portfolio from Rightnowish on my resume. It will showcase that I have been interested and involved with mediamaking from a young age.
Maceo: This gave me extremely valuable experience and exposure in the career of media creation. I learned how to create media with a team and help each other improve our own work in the process.
Jeanette: This definitely introduced me to the basics of media creation and what is expected of me. I’m thinking about being a movie editor, so this exposed me to what it would be like. I truly appreciate this opportunity for allowing me to understand what it’s like to create content, especially when it comes to the editing process.
Vanessa: This experience gave me an insight into what it would be like to work for a big media company like KQED. I hope to one day be a feature film director and screenwriter, so I will be working in the entertainment industry in the future. I will take the knowledge I learned as a KQED Youth Advisory Board member with me as I look for jobs in media in the future.
Rightnowish is an arts and culture podcast produced at KQED. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or click the play button at the top of this page and subscribe to the show on NPR One, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
