Alyssa Bish
Feature Spotlight:
What makes athletes great
This is the project that makes me proudest. The amount of time and dedication that I put into this feature emphasizes my work as a photojournalist. Two other classmates and I collaborated to make a multimedia package capturing the stories of multiple student athletes. The intense hours of work that I put into this feature paid off as it won first place for sports story in the NSPA Clips & Clicks contest.
Making the story
The vision
As a student athlete myself, I wanted to articulate the amount of time and effort that students put into both academics and athletics in order to succeed. My partners and I decided to identify who we thought were the most successful and promising athletes at our school. We investigated what they did that helped them succeed among their peers and concluded that they each had different reasons and qualities. We decided that we would tell their stories in a series of individual profiles full of photos, videos, and infographics to create an ultimate multimedia package.
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The execution
The easy part was the writing. I wrote profiles for two of the four athletes, emphasizing their upbringings and athletic success. The hard yet impressive part was creating the digital components of the story. For the feature photo, we wanted to find a way to incorporate every athlete into one image while still showing what sport they played. For this, I organized a photo shoot with the athletes and cropped each person into a larger photo. I used the extra photos from the shoots to create collages for two of the athletes, and for the other two, we inserted photos of them performing their sport. The article looked pretty good, but it was missing something. I decided to add in a black background, which made the article pop.
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What I learned
The process of writing this feature was simple, find an athlete, tell their story. However, making the article look nice was difficult. I had a vision in my head and wanted to execute it perfectly. I spent countless hours perfecting every detail of each image to produce the perfect feature package. This hard work paid off as the article won first place in the NSPA Clips & Clicks Contest for sports story.