2021 High School Winners

Aidan Hurlock is a sophomore at Barrington High School in Barrington, Rhode Island. Aidan, who is interested in filmmaking, documentaries, and the environment was researching contests when he found the World of 7 Billion contest. He began watching past years’ winning videos and noted how well the videos portrayed information. “In school, reading articles and books isn’t too bad, but when I am watching a video I am more engaged in learning a new topic.” He decided to participate in the contest and debated on which topic to pursue. In the end, Aidan let his ideas guide him and then chose the topic under which they best fit. Aidan shared that the inspiration to create a video on reducing carbon emissions came from his previous exposure to climate change and the impacts of rising carbon emissions, “I feel climate change has become a by-product of capitalism. There is no way to remove capitalism from society, but I feel there is a way to engineer capitalism, to some degree, to limit emissions.”  His idea, to create carbon emission information labels on products, stems from the corporations that back capitalism, such as Apple, Nike, and other smaller companies, which all compete for consumers. By putting a label on a product, he figured, “people can compare the CO2 emission, and people may be more likely to choose items that have a lesser impact.” This could lead to consumers affecting change through their purchases, which could, in turn, inspire corporations to find ways to lower their CO2 emissions.

Although creating a video with an environmental focus was new to him, Aidan is familiar with filmmaking. He shared that, for fun, in 5^th grade he started a YouTube channel on which he would load short films he created and edited using iMovie (the channel is no longer active). The biggest challenge he faced was finding non-copyrighted materials to incorporate into his video. The creative process was fun for Aidan, who does his best thinking before bed, “I would picture how the video would play out and imagine how the first 10 seconds would look, wild fires burning in Australia, rising sea levels in Florida…” and in the morning, right after waking up, the creative juices from the night before would all just come together. For this reason, he suggests that future contest participants, “pick a topic that you’re really passionate about because in video creation if your heart isn’t in the entire project you’re not going to be able to create the best video and it won’t reflect your passions and strengths.” Aidan would like to see Sustainable Energy as a future contest topic, “I feel like energy is the leading factor in how we separated from our common ancestors, we started with fire, moved on to steam, and then coal. Energy defines life on Earth and it comes at a cost, air pollution, rising sea levels. Energy is great, but it needs to be re-manufactured.”

In addition to filmmaking, Aidan runs cross country, indoor track, and plays tennis in the spring. Just before our interview, he had been (virtually) participating in the LifeSmarts competition, a quiz bowl competition about consumer rights, health and safety, and other everyday factors. He is the proud owner of Summer, a Peach-Faced Lovebird. He points to Jane Goodall as a major source of inspiration, “I really admire her research on chimpanzees and watching her master class in 5^th grade got me into the environment.”