2020 Wrapped

Highlights:

Worked two campaigns
Met a bunch of new people and made more friends! Yay!
Helped kick Trump out of office
Took a nice vacation to a cabin in the woods
Didn’t die

If I were to describe 2020 to an alien that was curious about what it was like, I would compare it to the Greek myth about Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a king who had transgressed so his eternal punishment was to roll a giant boulder up a hill. Every time he got near the peak, it would roll back down. He was forced to repeat this for an eternity. Over and over again. That’s what 2020 was like in a nutshell.

I started out the year by moving back to my college hometown: Boston, Massachusetts to work on the Elizabeth Warren campaign! I worked directly out of the campaign headquarters in Charlestown as their motion graphics designer. The Warren campaign was my first foray into politics and it was a completely different experience from my previous work as a freelancer in the entertainment industry. Things moved fast in politics but also there was a lot of red tape about what we could and couldn’t make content about. This was a pretty interesting change since in entertainment, we just kind of... made cool shit and didn’t have to worry about the ramifications of our graphics to people? I certainly never had to get legal notes until joining the Warren campaign.

Working for the Warren campaign was a great experience though! I got to work with the most diverse team I’d been a part of and my entire team was all women - except for one guy (sorry Eric) - which contrasted with my experiences back in LA where I would often be the only woman in the room. We were encouraged heavily at the Warren campaign to canvass and phone bank. I had my first experience canvassing up in New Hampshire where we got to meet Elizabeth Warren at a rally. She was an extremely lovely person to meet.

The first few primaries came and went and we had not performed well in the first few states which had me feeling nervous. Everyone in the campaign had felt so confident Warren would go far but she was underperforming. Super Tuesday was a resounding nail in the coffin for our campaign. The campaign had hedged all of our bets on Super Tuesday and we had started out that morning with nervous yet excited energy. My coworkers and I went into the center of Boston to hold up signs for Warren and encouraged people to vote. We did have a few altercations with people who were, hmm to put it politely, not pro-Warren. That night, my friend Morgan and I ordered takeout and watched TV while we waited for the results to come in. As the night went on, it became clear that we were not winning any states. With a horrible sinking feeling in our stomachs, we returned back to the campaign headquarters that same night where people were drunk and depressed out of their minds, calling the event a “funeral.” It truly felt like one.

Two days later, she dropped out of the campaign and we were all out of jobs.

I was still in Boston and was wondering if I should stay there or go back to California. Then all of a sudden, everything started shutting down due to coronavirus. Overnight, shops shuttered and people were hoarding food and supplies. I decided to go back to California and stay with my parents.

After the Warren campaign ended, I quickly updated my portfolio and posted the work I had done for the campaign. People responded very positively to it and I got a few job opportunities as a result of it. I got a contract role at Acronym where we worked to create anti-Donald Trump ads. It was interesting to create content that was targeting a certain demographic that was aimed to persuade.

In July, I moved to New York and I joined the Biden campaign as a full-time motion designer. If you had told me back in January that I would eventually work for Joe Biden, I would’ve thought that you were insane. Admittedly, Joe was not my first choice to become the president but he was definitely our best shot at kicking Donald Trump out of office which really, was my ultimate goal.

Working on the Biden campaign as a totally virtual campaign was a great experience weirdly enough. Working a campaign is a high pressure situation but since we were all physically removed from each other, it gave us the distance to take a step back and take a breather. The Biden campaign was also very open to experimenting and doing different types of content which gave me room to play around. The video directors, in my opinion, did a great job of allowing the people on the video team to flourish and create content that suited their abilities the best.

Not to say that it was a perfect experience. I’ve had a few interactions with people who’ve asked me what the process was like on the Biden campaign and I’m just like… what process? Truly, our team had no right to work as well as it did since ideas for videos usually came out of thin air or as a result of the news cycle which meant we often had very fast turnarounds. Working on a campaign means long hours - hello 12-14 hour days - and weekends? A mere concept. My team was unique that each person had a designated day off (so we worked 6 day weeks). Other teams simply worked 7 days a week. You definitely don’t work in a campaign for its good work life balance.

Some random shit that happened during the Biden campaign:
Barbra Streisand replied to an IG Story that I had made
The complete trainwreck that was the Avengers livestream
Working through so many different moments - Kamala getting picked as the VP, RGB dying, the fly on Mike Pence’s head, the DNC, the RNC, Trump getting COVID and so on. So much happened during the campaign, it was truly wild
A stupid video I made got a million views in 1 hour. That was crazy
Dropbox went down and we all (temporarily) lost our files for several days
Obama’s three pointer
Joe Biden’s train tour set to royalty-free lo-fi hip hop music

In the end, we won and Joe Biden was elected president. The day that it was announced was such a surreal experience. New York City had felt so muted to how it usually was but the day it was announced, people flooded the streets and were cheering for hours. It was truly a magical experience feeling so united with other people for the first time in a really long time.

2020 was a shitty year but I am so fucking happy that all of the hard work I put in - all the late hours, all the weekends worked, all the blood, sweat and tears - paid off. However small it was, I played a part in electing the next president of the United States. That’s an incredible feeling.

So what’s next? Well, who’s to say.

2021 goals:

Actually make a short film (this has been my resolution every year and I’ve failed to make this happen yet lol)
Study a second language
Move to another country…? 👀
Make more tutorials and release more content on Youtube
Work less
Don’t die