Oh boy . . . making this video was an entire experience. This video represents my first time making a video that’s more than a glorified slideshow, my first time working with Adobe Premiere, my first time filming anywhere other than my house, and my first time getting towed!

November 12th was an entire day and half for me.

I’ve been a volunteer for the Oregon State University Marching Band since fall 2021, and when this project was announced, I immediately knew I wanted to make a video about my day as a volunteer, in part because it’s one of the only interesting things that I do. A gameday as a volunteer runs anywhere from 9-12 hours long; the November 12th gameday in the video was about eight hours thanks to the circumstances, while the November 26th rivalry gameday was almost fourteen hours long. My first concern was condensing those eight hours down into a short video. Luckily, there were a number of circumstances that preemptively shortened my video for me!

The first complication: due to it being Memorial Day weekend, OSU’s ROTC program rolled out the field-sized flag, which due to the semantics of tradition is actually a patriotic prop and not a flag. We (the volunteers) were not aware that this was going to be happening, and they (the ROTC people) were not aware that we were already in the building! All of our tables had to be moved and our preparations confined to the storage room.

Feeding the band went off without a hitch; the ROTC had gathered their folks and moved their prop prior to the band’s entry. The meal was brisket sliders with coleslaw, macaroni salad, potato salad, and a surplus of chips, cookies, and water. Between the band, cheer, dance team, and staff, the volunteers feed over 300 people on any given gameday.

The second complication: due to a number of miscommunications that left nobody in particular at fault but everyone involved annoyed, I had parked in an invalid spot and got towed. I had originally planned to film a timelapse of the migration from the Truax building to the stadium, but it got choppy and cut short when I realized that my van was very much missing. The backing audio in my video is from the tiny portion of pregame that I actually got to attend and film.

But hey, the Beavers won!

By Kaitlyn Harper