Editing Club is one of many student groups at the high school, founded by sophomores Hashim Ahmad and Aariz Ankolkar, it allows students to further their niche interests. They began this club during the 2021-2022 school year when they found a group of people who wanted to learn how to edit—whether it be for school projects, social media or just for fun.
The club’s advisor, Brent Keemle, has enjoyed getting to see the club’s projects come together and can’t wait to see where this club goes in future years. “My role is really just to facilitate the students who run the club. I work to provide an encouraging presence for the students who are interested in video editing as they continue building their editing skills,” Keemle said.
There are currently 11 members of the club, but they are always looking to expand. Though this club is relatively new, they have already completed many projects. For their first endeavor , they partnered with Spartan Assembly to make a video for the City of Bettendorf’s “Zip Code Day” in May 2022. The club has also created promotional videos for local charities.
The members of the club were familiar with creating edits for fighter jets and football, but hype videos were an uncharted territory for most. In addition, the process of creating their new basketball project was unique to their regular editing projects.
Recently, the club decided to branch out and create content for PV athletics. There had been interest last season to begin a project on basketball, but it didn’t come together. Sophomore member of the club Bennett Teitle brought the conversation back up this year to make it happen. “During fall break, I had the chance to go visit my sister Lila at Duke University, and watching their hype videos on the big screen had me sold. I showed the club the videos I’d seen from Duke and everyone was excited and ready to get started,” Teitle said.
This project was something entirely different from their typical video edits, but they were excited to step out of their comfort zone. Taking inspiration from collegiate and professional teams around the country and gaining approval of athletic director D’Anne Kroemer, the club was eager to edit hype videos for both the girls and boys basketball teams.
Teitle said, “We had to film all of the content ourselves aside from substate games, which meant members had to show up to film courtside for home games in order to have a sufficient amount of content for the video.”
The leadership of the club was vital to the success of the project as they had to help many newer members learn the software to create effects and assemble the videos. Creating this basketball project was inspiring because of the atmosphere in the gyms while they were filming. This made the members even more excited to produce a quality video for Spartan Nation to enjoy.
