Film students attempt to write newspaper article for the first time

By Shay Mishra and Jake Spelke

Our names are Shay Mishra and Jake Spelke, and we’ve never written a newspaper article before. Yes, we’re a part of La Vista, the program that produces the newspaper you hopefully read: our writers and editors pour their hearts and souls into it each month. But we’re different.

We’ve been a part of the video team since the start of the school year. You may have seen our work and heard our broadway-performance voiceovers on the La Vista Instagram or website; that’s what we’ve worked on since joining the class in August. When our Editors-In-Chief, Lauren and Clare, asked us to write a newspaper article about our experience on La Vista this past year, we faced a problem. We had an amazing story to share but no experience putting it into words. So here we are, two film students who are going to try our absolute best to tell a story about our journey as video editors for La Vista, starting with how we pursued the idea to create a La Vista film program to how much we ended up loving our jobs and the family we made in the process.

It all started with a nerve-wracking call with Mr. McAvin in early March 2020. Lauren had spoken to us just days before that La Vista was looking to create a video section. Since we would have had an open space in our senior year schedule that could be filled by La Vista, we thought it would be a great idea to lead the project. That morning, we called Mr. McAvin to discuss the idea, and as soon as he answered with a warm, enthusiastic “HEY GUYS!” we knew this is where we wanted to spend our senior year.

Figuring out the logistics of how our idea would work on the phone was simple, and we were so grateful that Mac gave us his full support. When he jokingly promised us some filet mignon steaks (or T-bone, we can’t quite remember) at the end of the year as a celebration, we looked at each other and knew we were in. From there, our love for videography and storytelling was reignited. That summer, we spent hours reaching out to students interested in La Vista to recruit them and improved our videography and editing skills so we were ready to create captivating projects for the upcoming school year.

August 27, 2020: We entered the La Vista class Zoom for the first time with our hands shaking. We realized while looking at everyone’s tiny screens on the Zoom call that we were the only two boys in the whole entire class. This would be an interesting year: A new advisor and new classmates, but we were definitely ready.

We were fortunate enough to have the freedom to not only cover what stories we wanted to tell, but we also had two brilliant students willing to help us, Natalie Wong and Dolce Prieto. The four of us would make up the video team and we came out stronger than ever on our first project, a video dedicated to raising awareness on the impact COVID-19 has on students’ mental health. We interviewed world-renowned psychologists, students, therapists and parents; it definitely boosted our confidence and made us realize we had the power to make an impact with our videos.

As the year progressed, our team kept producing films for our audience to enjoy. We have worked to create videos on a variety of topics, such as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts and Manhattan Beach’s outdoor dining rules. The experience has been nothing but life-changing, except for a couple disagreements between the video team, which were usually solved by a follow-up late-night Zoom discussion. By joining the La Vista staff, we were lucky to learn so much about the world around us, visit unique places and meet amazing people who we’ve kept in contact with to this day.

Our platform has been an outlet where we could share our voices on the issues we found significant and connect with our audience in a more profound way that sparks conversation and change. So we would recommend you all to join La Vista, and if you love filmmaking, we’re sure the video team would love some extra staff members. We hope we did a good job sharing a story near and deep to our hearts, but at the end of the day, we’re going to stick to what we know best: producing videos.