Ryan Kawahara is a student at New York University studying Integrated Digital Media. He is skilled with video editing, creative coding, and visual effects. He is an avid tennis player, hiker, and moviegoer. He loves creating cool videos and helpful tools for VFX artists.
Lancer Productions is a school video club that I co-founded in 2017. I served as the lead editor and producer for three years.My main job was directing the process of transforming raw footage into a polished final product. Since the publication of the first video in 2017, my team has produced over 30 more, each focusing on topics ranging from Homecoming Week to academics. Our videos garner hundreds of views, with the most popular reaching 2.5 thousand. I worked on all of the videos shown below from end to end. I started by planning the shots, coordinating people to film, and setting up interviews. All of the below videos were edited in Premiere.
Feature Videos
This video was shown at the 2020 Senior Honors Assembly and was meant to help the St. Francis Class of 2020 remember the memories they’ve made in high school. Edited in After Effects and Premiere. Worked with other students to write a script and original music. Coordinated with teachers and administrators to record their lines. The video was received very well at the assembly.
Shot this 360° video with a Ricoh Theta camera and edited in Premiere Pro. Used motion graphics to add to the virtual tour experience. This tour was used in St Francis’ admissions outreach in place of typical in-person campus tours.
I pitched this video idea to my school admissions director in the fall of 2017. I knew that my school lacked an admissions video, so I wanted to create one to show prospective students how great St. Francis is. I gathered a team of five others and formed a club called Lancer Productions. My team and I spent months working with the school admissions and marketing departments, collecting B-roll from various campus events, and interviewing students and teachers. This video was the first major project I edited with Premiere Pro, and served as a training ground for the videos we would go on to make. This video gained over 2.5 thousand views before I made some changes and uploaded an updated version in 2018. The version shown here is the original 2017 version.
This video focuses on the academics of St. Francis High School. I felt that it was important for prospective students to hear from both students and teachers, and wanted to convey what being a student at St. Francis is like. I combined some interviews from the general admissions video as well as some new ones to provide a variety of perspectives.
Admissions Acceptance Videos
This video was emailed out with letters of acceptance to the 8th graders who were admitted to the St. Francis class of 2022. When I was accepted to St. Francis, my admissions page showed only an outdated slideshow and didn’t make me very excited about attending. Because of this, I decided to create a video that would make accepted students excited about attending St. Francis. The way that the music in this video shifts from loud and energetic to calm and quiet and then back to loud allowed me to divide the video into three parts—school spirit, academics, and then more school spirit.
Created to be sent out with acceptance emails for the St. Francis class of 2023. I drew from the many events that we filmed over the course of the year and edited them together to create a fast-paced and engaging video.
Created to be sent out with acceptance emails for the St. Francis class of 2024. Used After Effects to create a custom introductory motion graphic. Used footage from the past three years to create a video that would show recently admitted students all of the awesome things that St. Francis has to offer.
Graduation Highlights
Graduation is a very important moment in the lives of high school students, so I decided to create a video that would sum up the event. This video was the first time I applied a color LUT and was my introduction to color correcting. I cropped the video and added in slow motion moments to make it more dramatic and cinematic.
This graduation video improved on what we created the year before by adding in multiple camera angles on speakers and more camera operators to capture candids.
Club Features
SF Talks is my school’s annual TED-style speaker event. Every year, Lancer Productions is tasked with filming and editing every speaker’s talk. Over the past two years, I have edited 28 talks, each about 10 minutes in length. This event was how I learned multi-camera editing in Premiere, as well as how to color correct to compensate for theater lighting. This short highlight reel showcases both how many speaker videos I edited and the editing techniques I used to make the long talks engaging. The full talks I edited in 2019 can be found here.
I was asked by St. Francis Campus Ministry to create a promotional video for the school Youth Group. I set the video to a song that was performed live by one of the teachers attending. This project was good practice in filming an event and then producing a polished video in a short period of time.
School-Spirit Videos
Lancer Productions was asked to create this video to introduce our new school president. I pitched the idea of styling the video like an MTV My Cribs episode. It was shown in front of the entire school at an assembly about a month later. My biggest takeaway from this video was learning how to add subtitles through Premiere, and I have since added subtitles to all videos shown in front of a large audience.
I edited this video to show off St. Francis’ Homecoming Week to prospective students. To create this video, I used footage gathered over the course of the week by Lancer Productions videographers.
Spiral Moon Media Summer Internship
I applied the video skills I acquired from Lancer Productions in a corporate setting by interning at Spiral Moon Media. During my two month internship, I honed my editing skills in Premiere and learned new techniques in After Effects. The projects I worked on developed my After Effects skills to the point where they are nearly the same as my Premiere skills. My main projects consisted of producing short videos for Instagram based on national days.
Editing
Participated as a production assistant at Spiral Moon Media for 6 weeks over the summer. In addition to helping out on shoots, I pitched, acted in, and edited short videos to promote the company on social media. I designed this capstone project to explain how I contributed to each short video. This was edited with Premiere Pro and the visual effects were created in After Effects.
For this video, I was responsible for assembling the rough cut. My colleagues showed me the process they use to create promotional videos for their company. I first laid out all of the footage in an assembly sequence, and then pulled out all of the good takes and put them into a new sequence. I found this method of editing videos to be very useful and have implemented it in my more recent videos. My rough cut was passed on to another employee to be color corrected and further refined.
I collected outtakes for the videos I and my fellow intern had acted in and assembled them into a blooper reel for Intern Day.
Visual Effects
In this video for National Hydration Day, I created the VFX portal shown at the beginning. I worked with my colleagues to develop a better understanding of After Effects, and discovered a plugin that generated the portal and smoke effects.
This animation for National Moon Day was my first experience animating a scene entirely from scratch. I used keyframes to create a path for the moon with the company logo superimposed on top and the lunar lander.
For National UFO Day, I used keyframes and masks in After Effects to superimpose the Death Star outside the office window. I built on an existing preset of the Millennium Falcon to make it look like it was flying towards the Death Star.
This video for National Coloring Day was the first video that saw from planning stages to completion. I worked with my colleagues to make a script and shot list and then edited the footage together. I also did the visual effects for the project, like the filter that made all colors except for the colored pencils black and white and the effect transforming black and white objects into color. I passed my draft on to my colleagues for further revisions, but the one shown here is the version that I edited.
Personal Projects
Short Films
I made this brief documentary at Boston University’s Academy of Media Production in the summer of 2018. Over the course of a week, my team and I researched the supposedly haunted Omni Parker hotel in downtown Boston and interviewed people knowledgable about the hotel’s history. This documentary was my first project that involved research of a location and consulting with experts.
Worked with a team of four other NYU students and an NYU faculty mentor to produce this short film for the NYU Production Lab Zoom Fest showcase. I edited the assembly cut and trimmed down the rough cut to fit within the 5 minute timeframe. I was also in charge of adding visual effects and sound effects, which I did in Premiere and After Effects.
Modern Trailers
Created this modern trailer for the movie Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, originally released in 1942. Edited in Premiere and made the title sequence in After Effects. Thumbnail made in Photoshop.
Created this modern 30 second teaser for the 1942 movie Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon. Edited in Premiere and made the title sequence in After Effects. Thumbnail made in Photoshop.
Informational Videos
I was asked by a family friend, Maria Yap, to help her nonprofit Peninsula Food Runners by producing a training video for volunteers. I worked with her to develop a shot list for the video and visited a farmers market to collect footage. I also added in text to make the video as informative as possible.
Coding
I have experience working in C++, Python, Processing, and P5.js.
This was my final project for my Creative Coding class. It is an interactive documentary that tells the story of Japanese Internment in the 1940s. It utilizes external JSON data, several third-party libraries, image and pixel manipulation, and text art. Coded in P5.js.
This project was for an assignment in my Creative Coding class to create an interactive piece that represented an adjective. Utilizes functions, classes, conditionals, and user interaction. Coded in P5.js.