Digital Design students at the Delaware Area Career Center recently walked away with two Emmy awards from The Ohio Valley Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
The first award was for a Short Form – Fiction video created by Chris Skomra, Gibson Davis, Cyrus Adkins and Avery Latta. The video is titled “Deprived.”
Skomra said the students created the video for a Business Professionals of America (BPA) competition and submitted it for Emmy consideration afterwards. Skomra said the video was created to show the benefits of teenagers getting regular amounts of sleep.
“We had high hopes, but however far we get, we are very thankful and grateful,” said Adkins.
Davis said the award reaffirms that the team works well together.
“We’d only worked on one video before we worked on this,” Davis said. “So throughout the course of eight months, we’ve grown a lot as friends and collaborators in video production.”
Latta said as the group goes forward into their senior year at the DACC together, they want to become more efficient.
“I think this definitely opens up more opportunity for us as a group and more opportunities to get better,” Latta said.
Skomra said the award is a great boon to their resumes and shows “we know how to get stuff done.”
“It’s important for us all to stay as humble as possible,” Davis said. “We don’t want to start off this year thinking ‘we are the seniors, we’re better than the juniors.’”
Skomra said his group wants to spend their senior years helping out the junior class.
“Personally, I want to be the seniors that we didn’t have,” Skomra said. “It’s going to be great to interact with them and learn from them and teach them because if you can’t teach it, you don’t know it. We learned it from somebody, and we have to teach it to somebody else.”
The team thanked their instructors at the DACC, Josh Gallagan and Wil Rowland, and praised the work of Grant Brooks, the actor who appeared in the short. Brooks was also awarded an Emmy.
Adkins thanked his family and said some thanks must also go to Taranto’s Pizzeria, where the group met every day during production of the video.
“We met there once a day every week for two months, and they were happy to host us,” said Davis.
The group also helped create a music video that also won an Emmy award along with fellow DACC students Delta Clark, Louis Dykstra, Jake McComb, Casey Campbell, Alex Kropp, Michael Guzman, Matt McKay, Hannah Peterson and Noah Fisher.
Clark said the music video was titled “3-on-3 for DACC,” and said the project was “really crazy.” Clark said the project began by Skomra inviting basically anyone who was interested in helping making this music video about the DACC to come work on the project.
“We were strangers,” Clark said. “We’d known each other for a few days and three months later, we walked out of it all as friends and a big video crew.”
The video was created for the Ohio School Board Association and its “Stand up for public schools” competition.
“We lost the competition!” Peterson laughed. Clark said one judge from the OSBA gave them a “zero” for their video.
Peterson said everyone learned from the feedback from the video.
“It kind of got archived and when they brought up the Emmys, we thought ‘what about that music video?’” Clark said. “And somehow we won a student production award. When we found out that we won we thought ‘is this real?’ because this video did not win the other contest.”
Clark said the video was shot in a single take that involved moving the camera on a tripod with wheels, and an entire day of rehearsals. Skomra said the next day the crew nailed the video on the sixth take.
According to Clark, the video, its production and success, changed her life.
“For me, I came into this class thinking I was going to be an animator and (Skomra) if you have a slight interest in video, come over,” Clark said. “And it wound up being this project we went into and now I know I love video and that’s what I like to do and that’s something I can literally do with my life, and I wouldn’t know that if it wasn’t for this project. It completely changed my life and my life’s direction.”
“Deprived” and “3-on-3 for DACC” can be viewed on YouTube.
