Debunking the Myth of the Midlife Crisis
Background
This video was created as part of a group project that I created during the summer quarter between freshman and sophomore year in Introduction to Psychology. This is one of my roots as the first explainer video that I've ever created, which I fully hand-drew and animated using a mixture of Procreate and iMovie and narrated by my groupmate. This is important to me as part of my roots as a science communicator because it affirmed that I had the ability to make educational content like the ones I watched on YouTube regularly during high school, and was one of the inspirations that drew me to the Notation the year after.
Reflection
Looking back on this video, I find that it is a great example of my upper limit, where I had an abundance of time and energy to put into drawing and animating every single frame in this whole five minute video (as I took it during my 5-unit flex quarter in the 2020-21 school year). Before creating this video, my artistic abilities had not developed much farther than the doodles that had littered my high school notebooks. Having the space to develop my skills across animation and video editing for this added a wealth of tools to my skillset that I have built upon in later video assignments.
This project was also an interesting lesson in learning how to debunk misinformation—in this case a myth—with research and statistics, a skill that will only become more important as the world becomes more prone to believing falsehoods. Developing this skill early in my college career has set me up well for a future career in paleogenomics, where research is often misconstrued to push harmful narratives. While this is only one such example, I can look back on this project to get inspiration for effective science communication when it is most necessary.