Annenberg hosts screening on adversity

On Thursday night, Impact, the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism’s award-winning television news magazine, held a screening of its 75th episode. Impact began producing 30-minute episodes in 2002 under the guidance of professional documentarian and professor Dan Birman.

Thursday’s episode, the first of the academic year, takes an in-depth look at people facing adversity and difficult life decisions. It will also serve as Impact’s submission for this year’s College Television Awards. The first piece follows BARK, a nonprofit organization that uses therapy dogs in schools to ease children’s fears of learning to read.

The second full-length piece visits a CrossFit gym near Skid Row that helps everyone from a blind man to children at risk of obesity exercise in less conventional ways that are more conducive to individual needs. The final piece told the story of a young transgender man and an older transgender woman and takes a look at their decisions to undergo identity changes.

Undergraduate students in Birman’s nonfiction television class — which focuses on documentary and long-form storytelling — produced all of the full-length pieces in this year’s screening.

“I like this show because students decided to take on stories of heart and compassion,” Birman said. “When you look at what it takes for transgender people, that’s a very serious story. This is a story that goes in-depth into the lives of two people and for undergraduate students or any student to invest the time to get to know these people and get to know something about their lives, that’s pretty darn cool.”

Each Impact episode also includes a “short” three to four-minute segment. This episode’s short chronicles the story of the Hollywood Zombie Walk and was produced by a student in Birman’s graduate documentary production class.

To create each episode, the five-member team of journalism graduate students at Impact collaborated with Birman and line producers Megan Chao and Lee Warner to select stories that demonstrate a unified theme and fit concisely in the final product. The team added various elements including teasers, a host to introduce each piece and music.

In past years, graduate students interested in Impact had to make it a yearlong commitment. Because the graduate program will be reduced to one year, starting next fall, the structure of Impact will also change. Supervising producer Grace Lim, however, said having two years on the team was beneficial as a student.

“I’m still a student, too, but taking on that role as a manager and being able to do coordinate with faculty — being that liaison has been a really great learning experience” Kim said.

This year’s Impact team had its share of technical difficulties, such as when the edited version of the CrossFit story disappeared and the teams had to begin again with the raw footage.

“To this day we don’t understand what happened to it,” senior producer and second-year graduate student Kaysie Ellingson said. “It was really heartbreaking to come in and figure out we couldn’t find it but luckily we still had all the raw footage.”

Layne Kaplan, who earned her undergraduate degree in broadcast and digital journalism from Annenberg in 2013, was part of the original team that created the CrossFit documentary in Birman’s class. Kaplan came to the screening with one of her fellow group members, Annenberg senior Nick Burton, and said she was pleased with the final piece but noticed many of the changes that were made.

“It’s your piece and it’s your baby so you get very attached to it,” Kaplan said. “You understand why changes were made but sometimes it’s hard to realize.”

Lauren Spencer, a senior majoring in communication, said she was unsure what to expect when she came to the training, but was surprised at how much she enjoyed it. Spencer added that she might want to get involved with some of the causes discussed in the episode.

“There were some cool organizations, and I loved the segment about dogs,” Spencer said. “They’re there and they support the students. I think it’s awesome and I have an emotional support animal myself — he’s my little therapy animal — so that really touched me.”

Birman said pulling at heartstrings and making a difference is part of what makes Impact a unique long-form journalism opportunity for students.

“If you look at our episodes, we’re searching for stories with heart that answer big questions and take hard looks at things,” Birman said. “There are very few subjects we haven’t covered and every year students come up with news ideas to pitch and work really hard to make them happen.”