La Jerne Terry Cornish - Finding Ithaca
Short Biopic on Ithaca College’s 10th President | Fall 2022
In 2022, Ithaca College inaugurated Dr. La Jerne Terry Cornish as its 10th president. I was in a live event production class at the time, which was tasked with planning, creating content for, and producing her inauguration ceremony.
One of the planned segments was a mini-doc about Cornish’s academic and career journey. I was on a team of five students that took an independent two-day trip to Cornish’s hometown in Baltimore, MD to record several interviews with people that knew her. We scheduled 13 shoots in 30 hours, one of which was with Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, President Emeritus of UMBC. Words cannot explain how surreal it was to stand in his driveway after the interview and receive an impromptu lesson in public speaking from a man who himself learned the art directly from MLK. Grant Johnson created a great recap of the trip.
One of the planned segments was a mini-doc about Cornish’s academic and career journey. I was on a team of five students that took an independent two-day trip to Cornish’s hometown in Baltimore, MD to record several interviews with people that knew her. We scheduled 13 shoots in 30 hours, one of which was with Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, President Emeritus of UMBC. Words cannot explain how surreal it was to stand in his driveway after the interview and receive an impromptu lesson in public speaking from a man who himself learned the art directly from MLK. Grant Johnson created a great recap of the trip.
On the trip, I operated a Sony PXW-X320 camera on several occasions and handled the majority of mic-ing and levelling. Once back in Ithaca, our team had a mad dash to edit the doc in the two weeks before Inauguration. I assisted with some story editing and handled the final audio pass.
It was such a cool experience and the final product is one of the best videos I’ve had a hand in making.
This video was played at La Jerne Terry Cornish’s Inauguration, which I was a floor manager for. I'll be making a post about that project soon.
