Made by Social Justice Pathway sophomores Brendan Giang, Emily Tang and Max Reiter, The “Threads of Change” documentary won first prize in the High School West Division of the StudentCam 2024 competition. The annual contest is hosted by American cable company C-Span.
The six-minute documentary details the effects of fast fashion on climate change. Social justice and social studies teacher Austin Davis said while the C-Span competition was announced in July, he introduced the project to SJP in early November.
“This year, the competition had two prompts: ‘In the last 20 years, what has been the biggest change or the most important change in America,’ and ‘In the next 20 years, what will be the biggest change in America,’” Davis said. “People did a whole variety of topics for my class, including homelessness, international relations, health care, school shooting and other big issues of the day.”
Giang said the group immediately thought to look to the future after reading the prompts, preferring topics with solutions where people could participate with minimal inconveniences.
Eventually, Giang said the group settled on tackling fast fashion, addressing how wasteful spending on the latest trendy wear has a negative impact on the climate and urging others to be more conscious in their purchases. Their documentary also proposes a possible legislative solution.
“It really came down to something everyone interacts with every day: the closet,” Giang said. “Everyone wears clothes. Everyone buys clothes. But there’s a difference between conscious purchases and simply splurging on fast fashion brands. In fact, if every American bought one fewer piece of clothing every year, it would be the equivalent to removing the carbon emissions of half a million cars off the road for that year.”
Giang also said the project was his first documentary, and the process presented a lot of challenges, including scheduling interviews, shootings A-roll and B-roll, editing the footage, balancing the sound, setting up lighting systems, working the camera and animating scenes with Adobe After Effects.
“This is definitely the biggest filmmaking or documentary project I’ve done,” Giang said.
Davis said he was happy with the competition results.
“This is my first time doing the C-Span project,” Davis said. “There were so many aspects to making a documentary, and they put together some really good videos. I’m super proud of them.”
You can watch the documentary on C-Span’s StudentCam website at https://www.studentcam.org/.
