CMI 2020 Annual Report

Community Outreach
What’s scarier than fake zombies?
A real global pandemic
Actors and makeup helped us transform students for our Nov. 1 event, while COVID-19 kept
130 students from visiting campus in the spring.
By Stacey Federoff, CMI Graduate Assistant
In the fall, 192 students from 11 western
Pennsylvania schools took part in 10 sessions
covering different types of media, visual effects,
turning your passion into a career and more,
including zombie novel author and Point Park
alumna Lucy Leitner, who gave the keynote
speech about using zombies to enhance a
story.
For the spring event, we had expected 130
students from 12 schools (including one group
traveling from Erie). But that was just as cancellations
started taking hold in order to “flatten
the curve” and stop the spread of COVID-19.
High School, Point Park adjunct instructor
Richard Kelly and New York Times reporter
Sarah Mervosh.
In all, the series’ nine shows reached more
than 10,000 people on Facebook and
YouTube.
Instead, in mid-March, we kicked off weekly
virtual High School Media Day sessions with
Point Park alumna and KDKA meteorologist
Mary Ours, whose session has now had more
than 900 views on Facebook and YouTube.
Other participants included Fast Company
reporter Zlati Meyer, students from Saegertown
Photo by Stacey Federoff
Photo by Stacey Federoff
Preparing for High School Media
Day takes months of planning, organizing
and communicating, but the staff of the
Center for Media Innovation, student media
organizations and faculty of Point Park’s
School of Communications are happy to do
it. We want to inspire the next generation
of journalists, Point Park Pioneers and media
consumers with the different sessions
that make up the fall and spring day-long
events.
For the fall, the zombies were a part of the
plan, with the help of Point Park cinema
arts assistant professor Matt Pelfrey and student
makeup artist Maricela Valencia and our zombie
student volunteers. What the CMI staff didn’t
plan for – or couldn’t have planned for – was the
COVID-19 coronavirus and the campus closure
that cancelled our in-person spring event on
March 13.
Photo by Stacey Federoff
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