2014 Winners

Rachel Reichard, a senior at Mililani High School in Mililani, Hawaii, first heard about the World of 7 Billion while searching online for possible video contests. She and her team decided it was the best option for her filmmaking class. “We didn’t want to do one that just advertised a product; we wanted to do one that impacted the community.” Living in Hawaii, Rachel thought Water Sustainability seemed like an obvious category, and the project allowed them to learn something about the topic and then share that knowledge with others.

Rachel has been taking filmmaking classes at her high school for about three years. Her preferred style is to integrate typography with live action, as she does in “Save Water, Save Our World.” However, live action presented its own set of challenges, not least of which was how to represent billions of people on screen. Rachel came up with the idea of having seven people pop up on the screen one by one and then taking her viewers through clips of various everyday uses of water. “We didn’t want to do the typical people turning off the facet. So we thought, how can we show this in the limited amount of time that we have?”

Rachel is considering pursuing filmmaking in college. “In the future, I want to make videos that change people’s ideas of things going on in the world and advocate for things they can actually contribute to.” When she’s not behind the camera, you may find her acting in plays and musicals in her community.