My story

As a freelance digital media specialist, I tell stories. My passion for communication began as a child. My mother used to joke with friends saying, “he knows every song on the radio,” as I belted out the latest hit singles over polite conversations whenever she had company. If I wasn’t singing, I was parroting back half the script to a movie I had watched, reenacting every joke for laughs, or reading aloud a work of short fiction from a composition notebook. She always said she knew early on that I was destined to be a storyteller. That passion for weaving tales and capturing audiences eventually found a new medium in photography when my father gave me a large box of early National Geographic magazines he had stored away for many years. I was immediately captivated by the images and the stories they told. I wanted to tell those stories. I wanted to capture audiences the way their photographers had kept me excitedly churning through their pages for hours in amazement.

On our next family road trip through Appalachia, I purchased my first camera at a drugstore. It was a cheap point-and-shoot with a fixed lens made of dull grey plastic that took wide panoramic photos on 35mm film, which was quite fashionable at the time. This meant the camera exposed multiple frames at once, which were then printed on extra-long strips of photo paper at the lab. As an overambitious amateur photographer destined for Nat Geo fame, this thought delighted me. I intended to capture everything I could see, so I figured I would need the extra space. I burned through my first few 24-count rolls as fast as I could load them—nearly driving my parents crazy. Every 1-hour photo along our path was an opportunity to develop extra long, fuzzy, overexposed pictures of mountains.

Throughout the entire trip, I can’t remember purchasing a single souvenir. I simply wasn’t interested. My sleeves of mostly blurred and poorly composed shots of hazy landscapes were all that I wanted. They may not have been worth the Kodak film they were shot on, but to me, they were more valuable than gold. For me, each photograph was like a time machine fueled by pure light. By transporting me back to frozen moments enjoying new spaces with people I had once known, strangers I had encountered, old friends I cherished and the new family I loved, my camera defied space, time, and eventually, even death.

As mass media technology progressed into the digital age, so did my desire to tell stories in new and more interesting ways. Over time, my hobby grew into an obsession with digital media in all its various forms, and I decided to pursue an education in digital journalism. Being a journalist in our rapidly evolving digital media landscape means I get to tell stories in ever more creative ways and gather audiences on a scale I could have never imagined as a child singing songs in the living room to a gathering of my mother’s friends. Today, my professional work blends the analytical processes of an investigative multimedia journalist with the aesthetics and spirit of a meta-informed contemporary creative designer to produce engaging informative digital media that captures audiences. Whether I am hand scribbling animations, or utilizing the latest in AI or VR tech to tell my latest story, my mission remains the same; to delight and capture my audience’s hearts and imagination, while inspiring them to tell their own stories.

Yes, communication is about being heard, but it is equally about listening, and it’s all about what you hear. As a child, singing to my mother’s friends was a way of forcefully injecting myself into the conversation. I wanted to be heard and, as time went on, I learned I wasn’t alone. We all as humans have an innate desire to be heard and, moreover, to be understood. The true joy of communication comes not from telling our stories, but from feeling as though we have been heard. It is that fleeting feeling of spiritual communion derived from feeling as though we have successfully expressed the intangible in a way that shares our inner experience with the world around us that we all desire. The subjective fallacies we create ultimately reveal deeper truths about who we are as humans. When our stories merge, and we share our experiences, we are no longer alone in the universe. Those moments are what I live for.

- Aiden