I found out about this contest during the week of PAH in October, and fellow Madonna student Sara Simnitch and I teamed up to make a video for the competition. Sara is a graduating Madonna student in the Broadcast and Cinema Arts program in December 2010, and has a lot of experience being on camera, so her and I were a good fit. We brainstormed over the idea for the video for a couple weeks, and with what started out in search of good movie quotes, turned finding "I don't think we are in Kansas anymore" to "I don't think we are in Detroit anymore" to a Wizard of Oz-themed video. Sara was going to be the Dorothy-like character and Detroit will be the Land of Oscar. Sara got her wardrobe and makeup all set, and we embarked on a cold day to shoot in downtown Detroit. There were only a couple obstacles that stood in our way the day of the shoot. A couple were getting their engagement pictures taken, so they were in a couple of our shots. And, a lot of people liked to come by Comerica Park to get their picture taken in front of the huge Tigers statue, but we were able to work around that.
The following week, Sara and I drove around the outskits of Plymouth to find a dirt road that would fit "Kansas" in our video. Things got a little grim for the perfect setting, until we found a backroad that had a farm in the background with horses! It was a perfect find.
The editing of the video proved to be challenging with the final scene in the video. We wanted to only see Sara's microphone and her lips red in the color, and the rest in an old film look. After great advice from a Madonna graduate student, we dived into eight-point matte cropping and it worked like a charm!
WATCH "SARA AND ADAM'S LAND OF OSCAR" ON YOUTUBE
We were done and set out on a comfortable Thanksgivings with our families. I drove 8 hours to Indiana to spend time with my Mom's family, and within 30 minutes of arriving, Sara called me and dropped a convincing bombshell: we have to do a different video.
Sara spent some time watching the prior year's winning entries and they did not fit the story-based video that ours did, and her and I agreed that, even though our video was great, we had to do a video that was what MTV and the Academy Awards were looking for. It was a tough decision to make with starting over, but we wanted to succeed in the competition and we had to do it.
Luckily, Sara kept all of her on-camera work she did at Madonna and her internship at a Flint news network and we used a lot of that in the video. We shot several scenes around the campus of Madonna to tie in with the video. We had a great time shooting around campus, especially in one of the edit suites using Photo Booth on a school's Mac.
The day before the video was due, we decided to grid out the edit and submit it in order to give ourselves enough time in case there were any issues.. and just so happened, there were! We finished editing the video, gave each other high fives, and hit submit. But, there was no Internet connection! Comcast's network in Metro Detroit went down. But we didn't let it bother us, so we took my MacBook and went to Madonna to upload the video.
WATCH "MTVU ACADEMY AWARDS STUDENT JOURNALISM CONTEST" ON YOUTUBE
MTV announces the top ten finalists on January 10, 2011, so we have our fingers crossed in anticipation.
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