profile of a practitioner: anna oberg

 

Instagram @annacoberg

Last year I lived with University of Portland Athletics Video Production GA Anna Oberg. Anna is a former Pilots women’s tennis player with a supreme talent for video, currently pursuing an MBA at UP while holding a full-time position at Heart & Hustle Production. I met Anna through some close mutual friends of ours in the summer of 2019, as we were both going into our senior seasons at Portland. Soon after meeting Anna, you will quickly recognize her passion and pure knack for filmmaking. She will tell you that she was drawn to cameras from an early age, picking up and shooting on old camcorders as a child, who was later completely caught up by the creative flow of storytelling. Anna picked up a hobby for video in high school, and worked on freelance side projects starting from that time and continuing into college. One of her earliest undertakings, which she still produces annually every summer, is a short montage for the tennis academy she grew up at in Dallas, Texas. Over the years, she has only evolved her athletic grind into a side hustle developing the skillsets for filming and editing. Knowing Anna so closely in the most recent time has exposed me to the complex power of artistry which goes into video production. As a cinematographer, she seeks to find the frames that others might miss. While working at UP, Anna was hardly in the Portland Sports Network control room during live broadcasts. Instead, you would find her operating a handheld camera in a position closer to the event, shooting in order to capture the intimacy of competition for content utilized on Portland Pilots social media. As an editor, Anna is keen on linking stylistic visual and auditory components to highlight the emotional function of telling stories. I’ve watched her sit at her double screened Adobe Premiere setup for countless hours, headphones on and fully locked in on combining multiple camera angles with specific color balances, textual and transitional choices, and music levels to enhance her content. Anna’s personal and professional portfolio includes a variety of subjects now, from flashy vacation videos to crafty short documentaries and both Portland Pilots and Heart & Hustle produced projects. Anna would tell you that there was a time when she wasn’t sure if she wanted to or even could pursue videography professionally, and at one point came close to nearly writing it off entirely. A three-time college Emmy Award nominee for Short Form Non-fiction—one for Best Editor—who won Outstanding Short Form Non-fiction in 2020, and recipient of the SVG College Sports Media Award for Short Form Fan Engagement that same year, Anna continues her work as a video producer, editor, cinematographer/camera operator at Heart & Hustle, always scheming with big plans for future storytelling endeavors.