KAILUA-KONA — As an aspiring cinematographer and photographer, 14-year-old Trystne Nozaki said her favorite part of making a film is when she’s behind the camera.
“Because everything’s so beautiful if you just take a minute to look at it,” she said. “And I like documenting that.”
Nozaki said she’s a visual learner, and if she can put words into a film, then she believes it can help others similar to her.
Nozaki, a student at Kealakehe Intermediate School, is one of eight students from that school who recently competed in the 15th annual Student Television Network Convention in Tennessee, alongside students from across the nation.
The students, aged 12-14, competed and took first place in the convention’s spot feature contest, third place in the movie trailer contest and also competed in the public service announcement category.
The convention, held March 15-18 in Nashville, brought students four days of contests and professional sessions to give them an opportunity to learn and build their skills in digital media — and put those skills to the test.
For each of the three contests in which the students participated, they had just three hours to shoot and three hours to edit their respective films.
“It seems like a while, but it goes by really fast,” said Gavin Scarbrough, 12.
The quick turnaround meant the kids had to be constantly flexible and keep calm under pressure. The students said that during the competition, not everything always went exactly the way they wanted, whether it was missing batteries, computer troubles or something else.
But, the students said, they still had a responsibility to adapt to the circumstances and get the job done.
“If things don’t go your way or the way you planned, you have to have a back-up plan,” said Oriana Tremaine, 12.
Each of the competitions challenged the students to produce a short filmed piece with different parameters.
For the spot feature, the school’s students featured an employee of The Opry Shop, who spoke about the power of dreams. The movie trailer contest, meanwhile, challenged students to conceptualize a trailer for a film titled “In Bloom,” and the public service announcement asked competitors about the importance of music education.
Mathieu Williams, who teaches media at Kealakehe Intermediate School, said the students’ success was a group effort, also crediting the school administration and community partners who allowed the students to work with them as clients to prepare them for competition.
And whether the students plan to pursue digital media as a career or not, the students all said the class was teaching valuable lessons and skills.
For Tremaine, her favorite part was the editing process, taking countless clips and assembling something new.
“You can take your clips and put into something that, like, it’s yours,” she said. “You get to express your creativity.”
For a similar reason, Kulia Hookala, said she liked the scripting process.
“You get to come up with your own sense of the way you put the words into a sentence,” she said.
While some of the students in the program said they’re looking at careers within digital media, not all of them are. But that doesn’t mean they don’t see the value of what they’ve learned through working with digital media.
Kawena Haserot, 14, said she wants to be a nurse at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women &Children, and said one of the key skills she’s taking away from her involvement in the media class is time management.
“Because I want to work in the ER and normally ERs are very rushed,” she said. “So learning how to manage your time well would be very good for the ER.”
It’s also teaching her how to work in stressful situations, she added.
Tremaine, meanwhile, said she wants to pursue soccer in college and noted the importance of having a personal brand.
“Knowing how to carry myself well and plan out my brand and stick to it like a script,” she said.
And for Williams, he said the important thing is that his students find purpose in doing what they do.
“I think it’s so easy in this media world to get self-absorbed,” he said. “You can just flip your camera around and take a selfie, but how do you flip that camera around and focus in on the story with other people? And I think that’s important … bring light to issues and bring equity and all that kind of stuff, and then share it.”
