Corps: Portland (High School)
Ravens: Venus and Naveah
What were the goals for your Operation?
Our goals for the Brandy Melville video were to expose the company’s lack of racial diversity, unhealthy body ideals, and promotion of exclusivity.
Describe your Operation and how you prepared for it.
For our Operation, we wanted to make a micro documentary exposing Brandy Melville. We spent a week gathering research from articles, Instagram, the company’s website, and videos. Using this research, we wrote a script explaining what we found. We took footage from Brandy Melville and reviews. We also recorded some things we found from their site. The final step was to edit the clips and record a voice over using our script.
What were some “Aha!” moments? (Things that happened throughout the course of planning or implementing the Operation that were surprising or noteworthy)
We struggled a bit at first with recording our audio. The voice over sounded a bit rough, but Nevaeh remembered she has a professional mic for recording, and it made all the difference. We also spent a lot of time finding background music. We had to search through several Royalty-free music sites to find a good fit. After uploading the video, we saw a message asking for us to send the script or add subtitles because they were hard of hearing. We found out that YouTube has a feature where you can upload your own closed captions, and they will automatically sync up with the video 🙂 Super helpful and important!
If you could share 3 pieces of advice with your past self about this Operation, what would they be?
1. Add subtitles!
2. Create a way for more discussion beyond the comments section.
3. Spend more time promoting the video.
What advice would you give to other activists who would like to plan a similar Operation?
1. Before making a video, be sure to have a specific goal in mind. It’s interesting to delve deeply into one topic.
2. Open up communication! We had so many questions and comments, there will be a lot of opportunities for discussion.
3. Spend plenty of time gathering research. It is important to understand your topic from every perspective.
Click here to watch “It’s Time to Unfollow Brandy Melville”
