May Day: COVID Across America

As COVID-19 started to affect the United States, I found myself "pondering" how to be a helper during this pivotal time in history. How can we be a bridge and uniquely connect with fellow Americans experiencing this across the country? This project "COVID Across America" gives the spotlight to authentic American voices as we attempt to find the answers to questions about how we begin to move forward - together. As Digital Media Producers at iPondr, Georgia Fort and I (Krysta Rayford) compiled weeks of touching base with people across America and got to work. I focused on composing the soundtrack, which includes two instrumentals that I produced. Additionally, I also mixed the audio of the interviews that Georgia helped to arrange and edit.

Our team wasn’t really sure about this piece at first. We gathered responses from people of all walks of life from across the country. Even then we weren’t sure. It wasn’t until Krysta edited down responses and I pieced them together as a montage that we truly understood how powerful this collective group of voices would be. Once we had the audio pieced together I began to visualize symbols and images that could help tell this story. My favorite part visually is the part toward the end where you see a variety of people walking, jogging and running. To me this symbolizes “all walks of life” and the continuous journey we are all on. One challenge we faced in creating this piece was the fact that there are stay at home orders in place and government mandates on social distancing. This made it hard to capture footage of people. As you see in the piece that is why we took the approach of focusing on aerial footage, images of nature and footage of people that is a bit inconspicuous.I think this type of authentic storytelling is critical to the broader narrative of our country. I am grateful for the opportunity to amplify these voices by creating and publishing this piece.