Two students, Tiffany Smith and Evan Zarkadas, decided to find out about their school. They just wanted to find out the history of their university, why buildings and certain things got their names and learn about why things are the way they are. They did a search on Google and YouTube and surprisingly they did not find anything about the history of UMPI. That was the initial spark that started a project that will be appreciated and viewed in the future, but also bring a presence on the history of UMPI to social media.
Smith and Zarkadas had all the skills required for the completion of a project like this. The combination of videography and history is what made the project possible. The first step was to create a story around the history of UMPI and establish a manageable script that they could follow. Then the videography part took charge and through a lot of research and digging up old pictures, stories and interviews, they revealed a history that could be shared with the world once more.
The documentary itself is about 19 minutes long and covers everything from when UMPI was still the Aroostook State Normal School, all the way up to the present day.
What Smith and Zarkadas found while working on this project was that UMPI did and still does have a very rich and fascinating story. Smith said, “It was really intriguing to see how the legacy of UMPI led up to how things are today.” While on the process of the videography, Smith said, “Creating the video was challenging. But I think we overcame the challenges and found success. We wanted to be very accurate with the video and that was one of the biggest things that we wanted to stay true to. Because we really wanted to represent UMPI accurately as much as possible.”
Smith and Zarkadas presented the documentary for the first time on University Day. A lot of school officials and professors attended the event and really enjoyed the final product. Max Bushman, a junior student who attended that showing, mentioned, “It was very interesting seeing the history of UMPI, since it is not out there a lot, and nobody knows about it.”
The documentary is available on YouTube and can be found at https://youtu.be/NyEZFV4CWX4
