2019 High School Winners

Ali Ransom is a senior at Poolesville High School in Poolesville, Maryland. Ali loves insects and wanted to create a video where she could inform people about how important they are and how much we stand to lose when insect populations are damaged. After creating her video as an assignment in her AP Environmental Science class, Ali was encouraged by her teacher to submit her video to the World of 7 Billion contest.

Though she had never made anything like a stop motion video before, Ali was inspired to use the technique after seeing a music video using that style. She says that she now has a lot of respect for animators: her video involved over 900 photos and took 36 hours to complete over the course of a week. The most difficult part was working out the logistics of how many frames went into each second of animation and how to line up what was on the screen with what she was saying in her voiceover narration. Despite all that work, Ali believes that making a video is much easier when you’re already passionate about a topic, and advises future participants to pick a topic that they’ll want to learn a lot more about through further research.

Ali will be attending Dartmouth College in the fall and dreams of pursuing her interest in insects through working as an entomologist. Of all of her experiences, being a part of the global ecology magnet program at her school has had the most impact on her. Taking special courses about ecology and applying her studies through hands-on field trips out in natural settings has been a huge and memorable part of her high school life.