Field Changing Ideas - Erick Sanchez by Erick

Field Changing Ideas - Erick Sanchez by Erick - June 2020 Scholarship Essay

Hello. My name is Erick Sanchez and I am going into my fourth year of college, and I am changing my major completely. I started as a freshman computer science major at the University of Dallas back in 2017. After a semester of computer science, I quickly found out I wasn't passionate about it. So as any college athlete does, I decided to be a basic business major to then "figure it out later" as I went along my years at Dallas. I have taken some very useful and fun classes while being a business major, but I was still longing to study something I have been passionate about for a large part of my life. Film-making. I have always been naturally talented with video editing. I have had various successful film-making ventures throughout my life.

The only reason I went to the University of Dallas was that I was recruited to play soccer there. I knew coming in that they did not have anything related to film-making or digital media at school, but eighteen-year-old me was just happy I could keep playing soccer at a higher level. Anyway, let's go back to my middle school days. I was addicted to making lego stop motion videos, and for my age I was good at it. A couple videos of mine got past one thousand views back in those days and I knew I had a knack for film-making. Fast forward past a failed Minecraft lets play channel, I have a semi-successful channel that I rarely upload on, but still get thousands of views on every video (most views video have over 300k views). I also had a rapidly growing soccer-based Instagram page where I made original edits of professional players. My most successful clip being one about a player named Paulo Dybala. It amassed over 80k views and it was 'liked' by Paulo Dybala himself. I even have my own video editing business for high school and college athletes. The athletes send me their film and I edit it down to a well-made highlight video to send college, and even pro coaches.

Ok, time to stop bragging about myself. Throughout my years of video editing, I find myself wanting more. I find myself wanting to tell better and more impactful stories than just a video clip of a professional soccer player. I have been limited to my budget though. From paying for school, soccer, and helping with around the house costs, I have not been able to do what I have in my head. We live in an ever-growing and crazy world. There are very important stories to tell around the world, and I want to help tell those stories. Too many companies are too scared to dive into controversial topics such as race equality, poverty, addiction, etc. I also want to bring back a video format that was popular in the early years of YouTube. It is a "choose your own outcome" type thing, where as you watch, you make choices for characters in big moments to steer where the story goes. The TellTale series for the Walking Dead is a perfect example for this. It is a video game where as you play the game lets you choose how the dialogue goes and how the story goes in general. I want to make films or short series where they are based on this idea. Schools could use this to show the impact of bullying has on people. My ideas might end up being duds, but I atleast want to try.

Thank you for reading.