Last week, Pine Crest’s very own PCTV participated in the national Student Television Convention. This convention featured a variety of film and television related events, including panels, shows, and competitions. The panels featured people from universities or even people involved in the media industry talking about their experiences and giving advice on how to improve their storytelling, editing, and camerawork. Meanwhile, there were two main competitions – Crazy 8s and the Individual Contests. 

Crazy 8s is called Crazy 8s because students have eight hours to plan, shoot, and edit a complete video in a specific category. Every team was given the same (rather open ended) prompt. Pine Crest participated in three categories. Both the Middle School and High School submitted pieces for the Broadcast category, a style that may be familiar to anyone aware of a certain morning show called PCTV. The pieces jumped between individual packages and the anchors, all themed around the prompt “Talk of the Town.” The other category was the Short Film, which featured a complete fictional story told in only three minutes. The film team had to work with the theme “Off the Table.” 

Individual contests had a bit of a misleading name since they were not actually individual (with one notable exception). Students worked in teams to complete their projects but were not allowed any outside help. In addition, these contests were stringently structured. If you were not editing by a certain time there could be some major problems, and the contest moderators were extremely strict about letting only two people from each team edit, leading to a mad rush to finish filming. There was also Action Sports Edit, who only had one participant from Pine Crest. For this contest Pine Crest participated in a much greater variety of categories: Action Sports Edit, Anchor Team, Human Interest Feature Story, Movie Trailer, Music Video, Nat Package, News Story and Short Film. 

The competition ended with Pine Crest getting an honorable mention for the Middle School Crazy 8s and third place for the High School Broadcast Crazy 8s. In a competition of 2,500 people, that is a massive accomplishment. Congratulations to everyone involved!