Media students at Holy Rosary took Skills Canada Regional by storm recently with three big wins.
The skills challenge, held virtually this year, saw students from the Holy Rosary win all three awards in the video production category. Students, in pairs, had seven hours to write a treatment, plan out a shots storyboard, film the video and edit it without any instructor help.
The students also went head to head with schools across the Lakeland region, which stretches as far west as Vegreville and down to Camrose. They were only told the theme the morning of the competition, which ended up being “Most Valuable Life Skill You’ve Learned.”
Media Teacher Skye Ferguson said students did a lot of preparation even before the day of so that they could be ready going in.
“It’s definitely a competition that you cannot go into blind, it’s quite a few hours even going over the scope, practising skills, watching other videos, coming up with an idea. I like to train them so that they have some sort of idea of what they’re going to do on the day, even if we don’t know the topic until that day.”
Ferguson adds that along with putting their technical skills to the test and getting a feel for working to a tight deadline, winning this competition could be the catalyst that a student needs if they’re deciding to make media a long-term career.
Grade Twelve student Sierrah Bennett says making the video was a lot of work, but the extra steps they took, like using CGI and other camerawork or post-production tools, really made them stand out.
“We kind of went out of our comfort zone a little bit, we tried a lot of new things because this is our third time competing in the competition, and we brought a gold medal for the third year in a row, and that was exciting, it was awesome, and we’re all really happy with that.”
Bennett added that after going into the challenge for multiple years, it was interesting to watch their abilities improve and grow over that same time.
The awards played out that Bennett and Mackenzie Decrescenzo took the gold, Jerico Manaloto and Lucas Feeley took silver and Emjay Hein and Hannah Barnes took bronze.
The gold and silver winners will also move on to the Provincial Skills Canada competition in the near future.
