The Challenge

Youth for Technology Foundation, an international non-profit that partners with low-income communities, hired me to create a pitch video for 3D Africa, their first ever Indiegogo campaign. 3D Africa encourages African girls to get excited about STEM subjects through 3D printing. Although I had no previous experience with video production and only one week to craft the film, the project turned into one of the most rewarding projects I’ve had the opportunity to work on. The client was extremely happy with the deliverable. I started the project by recruiting a talented writer, Dianna Bai, who wrote a beautiful script within hours. After she wrote the original script, I added minor touches -- for example, I changed students’ fictitious names to African ones to make it sound more authentic, and moved the focus away from a generic gender gap to a more STEM-specific gender gap to better explain the program. After I edited the script, I did quick but extensive research on pitch videos. I watched a number of nonprofit video campaigns, crowdfunding pitch videos, and companies’ video ads. I liked Apple’s video ads in particular for their simplicity, aesthetics, and effective use of music, and decided to create a video in that style. I used Keynote to create the video. Here's the final deliverable:

The campaign was a success -- TechCrunch featured the video, which helped the campaign surpass YTF's goal of raising $10,000.