It’s 7:00 pm, and the Friday night lights illuminate Bob Wilson Stadium. Students are eagerly piling into the senior lot and racing to get a spot in the coveted Red Sea section. Players are warming up, the pep band readies their instruments, cheerleaders entertain the crowd, and students rise for the national anthem.
But there’s one other group on the field preparing for an evening on the sidelines. Armed with lenses, tripods, and expensive cameras, the photographers and videographers are primed to capture the game. Although small in number, this tech-savvy team turns out Instagram edits and highlight reels the second after kickoff.
For decades, Campolindo has put forth an athletic caliber unmatched by other high schools. It’s earned us state titles and the #3 “Best Public School for Athletes in California” in 2026, according to Niche. But only this year has the video-making scene truly levelled up.
Senior Kyle Chang is among the crew of student videographers who cover Campo sports events. “I’ve always liked filming and recording. I got into the drone stuff first when I was 10 years old… I kind of went down that rabbit hole of cinema and then from drones, I transitioned to handheld video work and then the ground camera work. Over this summer, I was working as a videographer. So [filming] football was pretty natural [for me].”
This year, Chang has posted several edits of Football and Girls’ Volleyball to his @kylec.media account – each garnering over 5,000 views. “The most successful was the first one I did, which was the second game. It got [14,000], so the most amount of views, I think, because it was something new and fresh. My favorite one was probably the Acalanes one, because I had the most fun filming it and editing it. It was more of a longer cinematic type of video.”
In addition to Chang, juniors Claes Bell and Richard Wei often tag-team their edits under their respective @claes_bell_photos and @bigrichproductions_ accounts. Bell, who’s been taking photos and videos for his account for over a year, explained how he started. “I had a camera, I was [doing edits] for Stanford, and I wanted to get some practice for the off-season. So I thought it’d be fun to go to all the games and film them.”
For Wei, it was “because I saw all these terrible edits that people were making, and I thought that I could do better. So then I did.”
The students collaborated this year on arguably their biggest success, which was the football compilation edit shown at the end of the Homecoming Rally. Bell explained that “I filmed most of it, and then [Wei] edited it,” conceding that “The filming is the easy part but the editing is the hard part and usually takes twice as long.”
As members of Campo’s boys’ volleyball team, Bell and Wei have also covered the girls’ volleyball season, with an edit on the Cougars’ defeated Acalanes earning over 10,000 views.
Wei explained the process of creating an edit in greater detail. “[Claes] will put [the footage] into a drive and then I’ll go through them, sort them out, and see what’s good and what’s not good. Next, I put them into different categories and scenarios where I want to use them, and then I just put it into the software and start editing.”
After filming football, girls’ volleyball, water polo, and girls’ flag football, Campo’s photographers and edit-makers are excited to move on to a new batch of sports. Chang, Bell, and Wei all expressed interest in making edits for basketball this winter – as long as they can keep up with schoolwork.
For those wanting to take up photography, videography, or video editing in the future, the trio also offered their advice. “I’d say do your research on learning to use the equipment you have. I don’t think you need to go out and spend a ton. A lot of people tend to view equipment as the end-all be-all, or that ‘This better equipment will get me better footage,’ but I don’t think that’s the case. I think creativity and what you do with it works a lot better,” said Chang.
Wei added, “I’d say hop on TikTok. There’s a lot of good examples and the more you watch, the better you can get. It’s like practicing an instrument, the more you do it, the better you’re gonna get.”
In an age where sports, like all things, are consumed in 30-second social media clips, this new group of photographers and videographers are meeting the moment with modernization and style.
