By Jessica Fontenot
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In this year’s 10th annual Youth Xchange video competition, sponsored by Sony and hosted by Olelo, MHS and its students stacked up their winnings by placing first in two categories, an add on from last year’s winners who only placed in one. Overall, MHS’ participation it showed that its students recognize important issues that are arising in Hawaii.
“I think they did really well. They spent a lot of time making sure (every video) was well done and they did a good job,” said Industrial Arts teacher Jason Tamura, who not only encouraged the students of his Digital Media classes to participate in the contest, but helped lead them through the competition process.
The winners of this year’s competition were Senior Conrad Wolfe and Junior Rachel Reichard, in the Energy Conservation category, and Seniors Rayce Rojas and Dustin Camarillo, in Healthy Living.
The focus of Reichard and Wolfe’s video was the importance and the ease of turning off light switches to conserve energy. The sounds made when switches are flipped were edited into a rhythmic beat, a critical aspect of their video. “The process was really complicated because we really didn’t think of downloading the sounds of lights and electricity off the Internet, so we filmed it all ourselves,” said Reichard, “There (was) all this static.” The final product, however, turned out to be a success. “Our teacher, Mr. Tamura, was saying that it reminded him of the Kit-Kat commercial,” said Wolfe, “So that might have had some influence (on the judging).” The contest itself calls for high school students from around the island to create a video no longer than 30 seconds that addresses an issue from one of 14 possible categories.
As for Rojas and Camarillo’s video, its focus was the variety of ways to stay healthy, featuring the two students doing various activities such as walking, jogging and riding a bike. In their video, the students would be seen doing a different activity each time they passed by a tree. “Some problems we came across was that we had to set up the tripod in a certain way every time or else it didn’t match (with other scenes),” said Rojas, “Same thing with the lighting, and editing the video overall was a challenge.”
As MHS keeps up their wins each year, they give the students of Tamura’s upcoming Digital Media class an advantage by winning them better HD cameras that they hope next year’s class will use to help them win in more categories next year.
