Winning the Directing Change Competition
In the beginning of this year, my Mental Health Matters club and I took on a project to spread awareness about mental health through video production. Thus, we entered a state competition called the Directing Change competition. Coincidentally, the category we entered had the same name as our club: the Mental Health Matters category.
I am really proud to say that we won 2nd place in our region and were team picked to go on as state finalists. There were hundreds for our region and thousands of submissions for state. As a result, we were showcased during the award ceremony (at 2:32:45) and won a trophy as well as a check for $250.00 for our club.
What I Did
When our club advisor, who is also our school’s mental health counselor, first presented this idea to me, I was really intrigued. I had no idea that such an opportunity existed in the world, and I was really excited to take on such a big project.
When I showed this to my club, they had the same reaction as me. We immediately started brainstorming for ideas. We came up with a big list; the idea that we stuck to however came from me. It is about this person who is being dragged down or held back by baggages of burdens (the metaphor that I pictured was Atlas holding Earth on his back [on the left]). After explaining my idea and coming up with a skeleton of the script, we all helped finalize a script.
Then, we found our actors through connections to theater and friends. Before shooting, I came up with a setting and where the recordings were going to be held. The first day of the shoot, I directed our video by taking in our environment and telling where the actors were going to go and what they would be doing. Using a camera, I filmed the whole thing. The second day of shoot, we had a better idea of what was going to happen and that day went by faster. At the end of the second day, we were ready to start editing.
I used the simple IMovie app for editing. I also recorded my own voice-over to overlap and narrate the video. During this process, I held several meetings with everyone involved to get their feedback on the video and if I needed to change anything.
Finally, once we were all satisfied with our video, I submitted it along with everyone’s forms of participation.
After a couple weeks, we got an email announcing that we were our state region’s second place winner! We are all so excited and held several meetings with our club and club advisor to announce the news. Then a couple days later, we found out that we were the team pick to go onto the state-level judging. We were ecstatic.
Because we were going onto state-level judging, Directing Change invited us and the other state finalists onto Zoom meetings to go over how the announcing ceremony would look like. I met all the people involved as well as other students contributors and videomakers. I learned a lot from the other videomakers and I had a moment of “this is my why”. All of us were there for one sole reason: to spread awareness about mental health. I realized that with all of us youth working together, we could actually make an impact on society. Although my individual team was small and only created one video, once we all came together, I could visually see the impact of our work.
Reflection
This was a really great experience. I learned a lot about video production from directing our actors and background workers to editing movies on simple environments to filming scenes through the best view. I also learned a lot about working with people and learning as we go, and working as a team to pursue something we are all super passionate about. Once we established our goals and what we wanted to achieve and how it would happen, we immediately got working to set our plans in motion.
With knowing almost nothing about video production, I’m very proud of the way our video turned out. I had to analyze a lot of other successful videos and narrations to understand how to make the best possible product. I worked very hard to showcase my visions to my team, and I’m very glad they trusted the process. Overall, I’m glad we all persevered through these uncharted waters unexperienced; I definitely gained a lot of insight into the complexity of the visual world and how there is a meaning behind every action. This was a heck of an experience and I hope we can do it again this year.
