Visual learning took its toll on the students at Cor Jesu Academy during the pandemic, especially for the junior and senior class as one after another school tradition had to be canceled.  Although there was initially hope that in-person learning would return before the end of the 2019-2020 school year, unfortunately this was not the case.  To soften the blow when the decision to complete the year with virtual learning was announced, I created this video showing the portraits of every student which we released on social media.

The video process began with collecting the yearbook portraits of each student to generate the strip photos.  As a webmaster, one of the first considerations was to remove the photos for any student who we did not have permission to use on social media.  After I had collected the photographs I used the Photoshop Tools in Adobe Bridge to batch process all of the images to be the same size.  I then divided the photos into 4 equal groups and pulled each group into Photoshop. After creating the individual strips, I then combined them to form the top and bottom strips.

After I had the photo strips created, I moved to After Effects.  The first step was to add in the audio track so that the timing could be created around the music.  When the school switched to virtual learning, it was very difficult for the music teacher to teach her choir classes as group practices via Zoom just weren't practical.  So to keep her students singing, this teacher encouraged her students to record themselves singing at home.  When a current student and her sister produced this beautiful recording, it was a given that it would be used in the video.  The Marketing Director at Cor Jesu supplied the majority of the captions used in the video and the final result is shown below: