Original High School Production, An Enchanting Holiday.
Would you enjoy seeing a spectacular high school video production? Take a break to enjoy An Enchanting Holiday, posted above, a delightful 10-minute Christmas video created by my advanced video production students.
This is one of my favorite video projects of all time. And since I made a million-bazillion, that’s saying a lot.
It was a ball to make, and the finished product wowed people. I had the opportunity to stand at the back of the room and observe several large crowds view this video, which is the best way to gauge audience reaction, of course. It can be very nerve racking since for all you know they’ll hate it, and this video went out on several limbs. I was always so gratified to see people laugh throughout the video and then cheer at the ending.
We made Enchanting Holiday several years ago when I was working as a high school video production teacher in a rural Tennessee high school. It was a massive undertaking for this small class of 9 kids. We spent about 3 months planning, creating and producing this ten-minute video. It was their third year taking video production, so they were way past the basics.
As a group, we came up with all kinds of original characters, costumes, settings and story lines. I stretched their imaginations to infinity and beyond by asking questions about why characters wanted to do what they did.
Making this video was tons of fun and a fantastic experience for the kids because each one contributed something unique straight from the heart.
Much to my surprise, Enchanting Holiday ended up winning about twenty regional and national awards, including a high school Emmy. We won a free trip to New York City and got on the local TV news. Even the school board and county commission gave us all medals! It was an amazing experience.
Here we are at the Emmy Banquet in NYC. Two of my students, their parents, and I won free trips courtesy of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, NATAS, the group that sponsors the Emmy Awards and this high school version. Students Branden Anderson and Chloe Blom (and several others) worked magic in this video and deserved the accolades. I never wore the dress a second time. 🙂
You never know which projects are going to take off and achieve extreme success. Honestly, when we were working on Enchanting Holiday, I wondered if we’d EVER get it to come together. Sometimes it seemed like nothing but a big fat mess of crazy ideas. But we kept at it, evolving the project, adding layers and improving the overall story. In the end, it worked!
No project comes together with one idea or thought. Good stories build a solid foundation using multiple ideas. One idea can lead to another, then another. This is how you build a complex story audiences will enjoy, one idea at a time.
Audiences cheered at the end when we tied the story all up with a bow, using a technique call “coming full circle.” Coming full circles means you put something at the end that is relevant to something at the very beginning. In the case of Enchanting Holiday, we had several loose strings to tie up, and all of them came together at the very end.
Never give up! 🙂
Thanks for reading Video Production Tips. Merry Christmas and happy video making.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
- How long did it take the students to make this 10-minute video?
- What does it mean when your story comes full circle?
- Did you enjoy watching the video Enchanting Holiday? Why or why not?