JRN 423 - Online Visual Storytelling

Final Assignments

Video Story #4: In Depth Profile

Nicole Hill - CMU Residence Life Custodian

Nicole Hill works full-time as a Central Michigan University residence life custodian. She starts her day around 4 a.m. and starts her shift at 5 a.m. in Wheeler Hall, part of CMU’s Towers living community.

Everyday, she works from bottom up, mopping floors, wiping down surfaces and making restrooms usable.

Swiftly moving up and down the halls, Hill’s goal is to get her work done before students are up for the day- which typically is around 8 a.m.

Hill is technically only responsible for cleaning one, eight-floor building every day. But recent cuts to CMU’s custodial staff have her and others covering more surface area.

If even one custodian calls in sick, that leaves Hill with at least one more eight-story tower to clean. More often than not, she cleans two-three residence halls a day.

“Going from staffing of 100 to just the 62 that we currently have on staff, we have, or rather management has decided to do a team clean approach, which has its challenges,” Hill said.

The staffing shortage also leaves Hill and her colleagues at the mercy of mandated overtime.

For all the work she does, Hill often feels invisible to the students in Towers.

“As far as anybody acknowledging, you know, hey, thank you for doing this job or anything like that, it's very rare in few between,” Hill said. “So, the students that I've connected with this semester and last semester, they definitely say thank you a lot, but the rest are kind of silent on it, unfortunately.”

I feel like this video project did a better job with storytelling and narrative than my last. It was really hard to arrange and allocate time for the points I was trying to make, because there’s a lot going on with CMU custodians right now. One thing I made a point of including in a majority of the b-roll clips was timestamps and locations. I really wanted to make sure that anyone watching could see how fast Nicole moved from building to building. She covered so much ground in only 3 hours; it was astonishing. Doing this also added another challenge in selecting the footage I wanted to use, because I used the timestamps from the metadata to help progress the story. Each clip you see is truly organized chronologically throughout the morning I spent with her. There are parts of the video that just were not working with me in Premiere Pro, so some of the transitions didn’t work- or there’s a weird popping sound that I couldn't figure out how to fix. I also feel as though I have a good variety of shots and b-roll angles to keep interest. At the very least, I hope people appreciate their custodians more.

Video Story #1: Feature

26th Annual OBU Fashion Show

Central Michigan University’s 26th Annual Organization for Black Unity Fashion Show entitled Careers: From Caps and Gowns to Suits and Ties," in Plachta Auditorium, on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2026.

Broken up into career scenes, the show featured models sporting outfits that represented different careers. The theme was a direct follow up to last year’s show, which showcased ensembles rooted in classic high school stereotypes such as jocks and nerds.

Models, taking on personas of mechanics, popstars, military, first responders and CEOs strutted across the stage to an amalgamation of popular songs. Scenes not only showcased fashion, but also coordinated movements that furthered the thematic narrative.

Morgan Mayberry, junior director for OBU, said the show offers black students at CMU a space where they can build confidence in their skills and their identity.

“It’s really hard to, as a black individual, really be open minded and showcase yourself in different ways,” Mayberry said. “This is a really great way to get everyone who wants to do that out on stage to do that.”

The show also highlighted a few multicultural registered student organizations, including CMU’s Appeal Dance Team and ReaXioN Dance. A young violinist performed for the show’s intermission.

This being my first ever time shooting and producing a video, I was incredibly nervous about how it might turn out. Shooting was very trial and error based. I tried to vary the position I was in and the angle I was shooting from, which was at points difficult because of the presence of an audience. My biggest concern was definitely the audio quality, which was difficult to manage due to the ever-changing volume of the crowd. I ended up having to constantly check my levels in between shots while using the shotgun microphone. Another challenge that I faced was the lighting of the state in Plachta Auditorium. I eventually inferred the models were not aware of how to best be in light (as you would expect of a theater performer, for example) so my subjects were often moving in and out of the light’s glow. My best results were when they landed upstage. In post-production, using Premiere Pro was not super difficult to use despite it being my first time. I was able to kind of fix camera shake on certain clips of b-roll, incorporate photos, and adjust light levels to improve the visual quality. I also tried to use a few transitional tools, and I think they worked as well as they could have.