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Video students overcome challenges to earn spot in national competition
By Ralph Pokorny
Nevada Daily Mail
In April, Joe Souza and David Hamilton took on the big boys at the Missouri Skills USA competition and beat them, winning the opportunity to represent Missouri at the Skills USA championship that will be held in Kansas City on June 24 during the 40th Annual National Leadership and Skills Conference.
Using $500 consumer grade video cameras and an outdated I-Mac computer, Souza and Hamilton produced a television commercial that beat teams from five other Missouri high schools, including one from Kansas City that used $5,000 professional video cameras and state-of-the art computers.
Four post-secondary teams also competed in another division with the top two-person team from each division advancing the national championship.
"We expect to win," Hamilton, a Nevada High School senior, said of the national championship.
Stephanie Beckett, who teaches the graphics class at the Nevada Regional Technical Center, said that Hamilton and Souza have spent most of the last year editing as well as shooting some video for the Nevamo yearbook DVD. This will be the fourth year the school has produced a DVD yearbook.
"That's what they worked on all year," she said.
Most of their training has been hands-on rather than classroom lectures. The students from Kansas City also have classes teaching them how to compete in such contests, Beckett said.
Souza said that they went to a practice competition at Ozark Technical College and saw that they could do as well as other students.
"It's all about creativity. Anybody can shoot video, but it is about creativity in editing," Souza, who has played in several local bands and wants to be a songwriter, said.
Hamilton said that in addition to producing a video they had to take a written test over job ethics, and the SkillsUSA organization.
They were expecting the test to be about video production --things like camera angles and lighting.
There was none of that on the test, Souza said.
All of their video production knowledge and skills were tested with the video itself.
"We were given an envelope the night before with the instructions," said Souza, who graduated from Northeast Vernon County High School on May 21.
Armed with these instructions, the students had to prepare a storyboard outlining their video and turn it in at 8 a.m. the next day, before videotaping began.
At the national championships the students will not get to start work on their project the night before.
This is where Beckett thinks their experience in working with deadlines for the yearbook DVD will help.
"They are used to meeting production deadlines for the DVD," she said.
"I think the national will be more intense," Hamilton, who will be attending Ozark Technical College next year to study electronic media production, said.
According to SkillsUSA's Web site. contestants will have to shoot a one-minute VHS video on location that conveys the theme of the event, which this year is "Champions at Work."
The video is to look at how this theme relates to the Skills USA national program of work in the area of community service.
Skills USA is the successor to the VICA and serves teachers and high school and college students who are preparing for careers in technical, skilled and service occupations, including health care. The organization has about 13,000 chapters in all 50 states and in four territories.