Service is a mandatory after school activity at the Overseas School of Colombo. Each semester, students are presented with multiple service groups with unique goals to choose from. My first service group was called Reef Keepers, we made an effort to transitioning our school into an environmentally stable school as well as organizing beach clean ups. After this, I joined Housing & Habitat, a very hands on service group. We made chairs and tables for schools and lesser fortunate kids that may not be able to afford them. We also organized a Home Run which was a fundraiser for a local school in which participants payed 500 Sri Lankan Rupees (or more if they wanted to) and did a 5km run. The next year, I joined Peer Helpers, or Student Ambassadors, a service group which made sure that everyone in the school felt welcome. From kids struggling socially to new students, we made sure that everyone had a friend and learned as much as possible about techniques regarding listening to people’s problems respectively. Today I am in the service group called Gecko Network. Gecko Network is a service group which runs all of the film making and helps with event organization for the school. Me being very into videography, sports and editing, I felt I like that was the perfect service group for me to demonstrate my abilities. I was tasked with creating the 2020 recap video for the end of semester assembly and was given footage from various events during 2020. I included footage from the Home Run, our sports teams, Sri Lanka’s independence day, OSC’s founders day, the MYP5 personal project, last year’s DP art student’s exhibitions, screenshots from zoom classes to show that everyone is in the same boat and also a short video of Anuda Weerasinghe’s (2019-2020 valedictorian) graduation speech.
LO1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
I learned that I can edit videos well but struggle when incorporating images in videos. This shows that I was able to identify and develop areas for growth as I was forced to incorporate images, which I was unfamiliar editing with, in a very important video broadcasted to the entire secondary school. Although, I did make the most of my strengths by making the video footage section of the video highly and sophisticatedly edited. I will continue to be an editor in this service group and I hope to improve my skills in editing both video footage and images in one video.
LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
I only had one day to edit the video due to ISTA and summative tasks so I was under a major time constraint. This forced me to edit efficiently while still creating a good final product. This shows that I was under quite a challenge but also developed a new skill in editing more efficiently than usual. I spent around 2 hours editing this video instead of my usual 4-5 hours on other videos. As said before, I have also never edited both video footage and photos in a video but I found a way to make it work by putting the video footage at the beginning and the photos at the end in a slideshow fashion.
LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
Lastly, I had to plan out the video and had to make sure that it made sense. I did this by taking the role of a spectator and how they would enjoy the video. I figured that most people wouldn’t watch the entire video unless they were older and had enough patience (staff and parents for example) so I put all the exciting video footage at the beginning and the images at the end.
Supervisor: Rachel Jackson, Vinuda Weerasinghe & Praneeth Jayasinghe
