Classmates produce winning Power Your School video
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Ira ISD junior Lasey Johnson used the new virtual reality equipment in technology teacher Walt Burt’s classroom. The equipment was purchased with money won from the Careers in Action video contest in September.
A group of Ira ISD juniors won $2,000 from the Power Your School video contest sponsored by Coca-Cola and Powerade.
The juniors are students in Ira ISD teacher Walt Burt’s audiovisual class and have spent the semester learning about different aspects of filmmaking and production.
“The students are really moving into skills that will be needed in the next 10-20 years,” Burt said. “There’s a place for textbook knowledge, but the Internet has everything you could need and we’re moving in the direction of creativity. They can explore and they can figure out how to do things. They have already done some great things.”
To enter the contest, students created a video that showed an athletic department in need of an upgrade. The students focused on the school’s weight room, which appeared rundown and in disrepair. Video director and Ira student Grace Highfield said that they were creative with the scenes.
“Just by looking at the video, you can tell we need a new weight room,” she said. “As far as directing goes, I just winged it and let everything fall into place. We got creative with adding a cricket to the weight room and not showing the room’s actual lighting to bring out that it’s rundown.”
It was a team effort, she said.
“We all get together, talk it out and brainstorm,” Highfield said. “We’re not trying to cut people’s plans out, but we’re trying to work together to make the video better.”
Ira student and narrator Alyssa Cowan is proud of her classmates’ success.
“It was really cool proving we could actually win something, even though we’re a small school and using what little equipment we had,” she said.
The prize money will go directly to Ira ISD’s athletic department for use at their discretion.
The Power Your School video contest is not the first contest Ira students have won this year. In September, 30 Ira students from the junior high school and high school produced 10 videos for the Careers in Action video contest hosted by Workforce Solutions of West Central Texas.
Collectively, the students won $4,400 for their videos, which highlighted the 16 career clusters in Texas. The video contest was part of Careers in Texas Industries Week, a statewide initiative connecting youth around the state to high-demand job fields.
With the award money, Burt purchased a virtual reality set, a video camera, gaming headsets, a drone and a new iMac computer.
Now, students will have more access to technology, better preparing them for future careers.
“In my opinion, the equipment brings out the creative side in us,” Highfield said. “It also prepares us for future video contests.”
With two contest victories under their belts, Ira ISD students are continuing to make more videos with their new equipment.