High School Video Production: What It Took for Small-Town Students to Win a National H.S. Level Emmy for Their Original Video Comedy, (Plus at least half a dozen other awards)

SCROLL DOWN TO SEE A HIGHLY ENTERTAINING, AWARD-WINNING VIDEO PRODUCED BY A GROUP OF FILM MAKING STUDENTS!

“I’d like to thank the Academy….”

How many people who work in TV and film get to say that for real?

Very few. With all the immensely talented people that work in TV, winning an Emmy truly shows that you can excel at the very top of your field.

A few years back, I had the privilege of being the teacher for a group of students who won a National Student Television Award for Excellence, an honor given to only seven videos produced by high school film making students nationwide per year.

The award was given to us by The National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences, NATAS, the group responsible for the Emmy Awards for New York and Hollywood show broadcast on TV every year.

NATAS is an incredibly prestigious professional group, so was winning this award was quite an honor for the small town high school kids. We were written abut in the local newspaper and local governmental bodies showered us with praise and certificates.

A group from my third-year media and video production students in a Tennessee high school won first place nationally for an original comedy Christmas special, An Enchanting Holiday.

Needless to say, we were all thrilled!

NATAS awarded us a free trip to NYC to attend the awards banquet held at Time Warner headquarters in Manhattan. Soledad O’Brien of CNN was the MC. Two students, both of their parents and me, the teacher, won this three-day trip.

The ten-minute show took nearly three months to produce. It wasn’t actually finished until after Christmas. Ooops. The Emmy people didn’t care. We finished up the editing process over the Christmas break. Obviously, the students were dedicated to the show in order to voluntarily work that hard. It was not entered into the contest until months after Christmas. It won multiple awards in addition to this national Emmy, including regional film festivals and University-level film school contests

In my opinion, Enchanting Holiday won because it was a great story. Yes, the technical aspects of the video are superb. (If I do say so myself!) The kids were whizzes on Final Cut Pro, (the editing software). Several of the effects required integrating Photoshop into Final Cut, which is extremely advanced editing. They also spent a lot of time making incredible costumes, sets and props. We worked hard on achieving quality lighting and videotaping everything from interesting angles. But what put Enchanting Holiday over the top was the STORY.

Here is the original video.  Below is a teacher’s cut version.  You should watch this original one first and evaluate it for yourself before hearing the behind the scenes stories of the teacher’s cut.

If you have read much of my video production advice, you know that I am a BIG advocate of story. A compelling story wins out over technical wizardry every time. Think about the movies you like. A movie can have all the special effects in the world, but if the story is boring, the movie will bomb.

The story for An Enchanting Holiday is quite complex. Even though ten minutes might not seem very long, to fill a ten-minute video, you have to have A LOT to say. In the video world, ten minutes is a LOOOONG time. If you don’t fill it well, your video will be boring.

Enchanting Holiday is actually four stories within one video. First, there is the story of the show host, Noel. As host, Noel introduces three other stories, much like a newscaster introduces news stories. Then, all four stories are integrated at the end to make them one. In my opinion, the show would not be NEARLY as good if we had not integrated all the stories at the end. This is a common technique called coming full circle.

Having observed lots of people watching the show, I can easily say that the point of integration is when the audience starts cheering and totally falls in love with the show. There is enough visual variety, fancy graphics, and well-selected music to be very watchable for audiences of all demographics.

Sound like a complex project? Well, it was. Sort of. But not really. For their level of expertise, a better way to describe it is meticulously planned and executed.  Most good videos are.

As a high school video production teacher, my third year students won a NATAS award, aka a high school Emmy. Only 7 high school NATAS awards are given out in any one year so it was quite an honor for this group of small town video production students.  They didn’t think they stood a chance competing against thousands of other larger schools.

With a lot of hard work and creativity, we managed to surprise everybody!

When we won the national award, it was a very big deal for such a small town high school. The local TV news did a story, the school board and county commission both gave us medals.  Myself, two students and their parents all went to NYC to attend the awards banquet held at the Time Warner headquarters in Manhattan.

For a high school video production, Enchanting Holiday is extremely advanced.  Some of the kids who worked on it were amazingly adept at video editing and the sheer amount of time we spent working on it, three months, guaranteed its quality.  Ms. Grula was quite a slave driver of a teacher!

Storytelling is the hardest part of video production and is usually the last thing beginners grasp. Most people new to video focus strictly on the mechanics, like what kind of camera they should use and where they should put the lights.

Video mechanics are all well and good, it certainly helps to know something about video production techniques, BUT, storytelling is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT FOR A SUCCESSFUL VIDEO.

In my opinion, your mechanics can suck but if your story is engaging, people will still like your video.

Storytelling is also a lot of fun.

I don’t think any story pops out fully complete in a burst of creativity.  Stories are built, layer upon layer. That is certainly true in the case of An Enchanting Holiday.   It was created one idea at a time.  Sometimes the ideas surfaced only half-baked, and I had to prod them to develop the ideas into something more complete.

For example, one story arose from the fact that one of my more hyperactive students thought it would be hilarious to take video of his favorite toy, a Tonka Truck, falling off a cliff.    From that one nugget of a visual idea, we expanded and expanded the story until it was worthy of a national award!

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, disparate 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.

Here is a teacher’s cut version of the video, explaining how we did it.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• 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? (You are not obligated to like it.)