Kavli Video Contest Top 10 Finalist

Entry: Science Knows it All

Belén Mella
What is your age?
I am 13 years old.

Where do you go to school?
I go to school at Sunny Isles Beach Community School K-8, a public school in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

What do you plan to study in college?
At 13 years old, my mind changes faster than I can realize (science will probably have an explanation for why exactly that happens), even on matters as transcendental as what I want to study in college and ultimately what I want to do for the rest of my life! Nevertheless, precisely as I answer this question, I want to study communications or journalism, with the dream of one day being a famous reporter or journalist. I took making the video for this contest as a journalistic challenge: to take all my passion for science and express it in a video! If my viewers felt even one percent of what I feel about science as they watched my video, I know I accomplished my goal.

What is your favorite subject?
As a self described nerd (I actually went on the thesaurus to find another way to put it, but I'll just keep it at that), I have to admit that I love every subject! I love language arts for how it teaches us to express ourselves! I love history for how it serves as a daily time machine into our past and our future! I love math for the feeling I get when I solve a seemingly impossible problem and the moment when I picture myself applying that solution to something bigger than life! And of course, I love science for being the golden key to unlock every world of questions and wonder that pops up in my mind! Finally, I can't exclude Multimedia Production, the incredible start to my day: a small class with which I produce the morning announcements and put the world of science through technology to the ultimate use!

Can you tell us what inspired you to make this video?
At about 9:00pm sometime in July, I came across the name of a video contest that would soon become the theme of my summer. Little did I know as I scrolled through the guidelines and printed out the rules that for the next two months I'd be reciting "Science Is Cool" in my sleep. Little did I know that for the next two months my camera and I would become one, in hopes of getting good footage. Little did I know that at 11:00pm August 30th I'd be going crazy trying to convert the format of my video so I could upload it to Scivee. Microscopically did I know that at about 2:15pm September 15th I'd be opening an email letting me know that I was one of the finalists for the contest! But what inspired me to go on the journey that was making this video?
True inspiration surged through my body about two days after hearing about the contest. I specifically remember walking home from the beach and trying to chase my shadow. I was studying how long it was, where it fell, and how it looked in comparison to that of my mom and grandmother. I thought to myself, "Shadows have so much science in them!". Then, like a bolt of lightning striking a tree, I remembered the prompt I read about two days prior to chasing my shadow that afternoon walking home from the beach. The prompt read: "Why is Science Cool?". At that moment, I knew it was my mission to make a video that expressed my passion for science through the mere fact that science is behind everything! My mind was racing with ideas that wouldn't let me sleep at night, yet as the ideas grew and grew and slowly took shape as a plan, I realized more and more just how "everything" science is! I've always had a passion for science, and I think that even if just subconsciously, everyone admires science for always creating questions and being the answer. However, before the video, I never truly noticed how everything in life was related to science. It all started with the line "When you chase your shadow", a line that wasn't even used in the final cut (it was a bit hard to rhyme)! Nevertheless, I'll always give my shadow the credit for inspiring me and leading me to the revelation- science isn't just fascinating and intricate and everything I always knew it to be... it is also really cool!!!

What are your interests or hobbies?
Until recently, my greatest interest and my only hobby was to pour my heart and soul and love of science into my video! Nevertheless, I assume that you are wondering what I do when I'm not making movies about the coolness of science. Answering that question, I would have to say that one of my favorite hobbies is still to edit movies. My mind constantly has ideas and often times, I fall asleep to the sound in my head of a cool soundtrack and the sight in my imagination of an awesome frame! My real excitement is when I finally get all my thoughts into the camera and finally the computer, bare and ready to be made into a real, homemade movie! A hobby of mine that is a world apart yet so incredibly similar is writing. Though you don't need computers or cameras to write, both hobbies do share the need for our most prized possession: our mind: the world of imagination, knowledge, ideas and of course, the always present, always pertinent, always cool, science.

What inspires you about science?
If there is one theme in my video, it is that "when anything thats anything does anything at all, science was behind it, science knows it all!". That is precisely the concept that fascinates me about science! Science can be as tangible as a rock -with which you can potentially discover centuries worth of information and history-, to something as complex as our thoughts -the basis of everything we do-! Science saves lives every single day! Science helped 100 students make a video about science itself! Science is correcting my spelling as I write about how undeniably, fascinatingly, incredibly cool science truly is! It is astonishing when we think about everything that science has helped us accomplish from the first time we asked ourselves "Why?" or "How?" to today! Even more-so, I wonder with fascination and awe about the scientific discoveries and innovations to come! What does the future hold for us? What are we going to accomplish in the next two-thousand years? Only time will answer these questions. What I know for sure if that science will lead us every step of the way. I can only hope that I can be part of the discoveries to be made, whether inventing things in a laboratory or reporting them as they happen!

Anything else you want to tell us about yourself?
My name is Belén Aurora Mella and I am 13 years old and I am Chilean-Cuban and at this moment I consider myself to be one of the most excited people in the world!
P.S. In the picture I am taking ocean samples to measure the pH! Isn't science COOL?