May 8, 2008  

Pellissippi State students win grand prize in Scripps Video competition

At 7:30 on the morning of April 14, Ella Ruggles, assistant professor of Video Production Technology at Pellissippi State Technical Community College, sat nervously at home at her computer.

She was watching the votes come in.

Ruggles had encouraged the students in her script-writing class to enter an online video contest sponsored by rootclip.com, a subsidiary of Scripps Entrepreneurial Ventures. But would they win the grand prize? She would know when the contest ended at 8 a.m.

“I was a little bit like a mother,” said Ruggles, “because every day I’d been checking the scores to see where they [her students] stood.”

Ruggles needn’t have worried.

Videos were coming in from North Carolina, Arkansas, South Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania, but Pellissippi State students already had been dominating the biweekly submissions.

To her relief that morning, VPT students Cody Beeler and Nephi Shafer won the grand prize—with more than 1,100 votes for their tense video, “Hayden.”

The contest rules were simple, and the competition was open to the public: Watch the brief video produced by Rootclip, and submit a one-minute video that continues the story line. Every two weeks, competitors submit a chapter. The first is the Rootclip video, and the final one is chapter six. Then they watch to see how many votes they get, as viewers pick their favorite chapter.

The Rootclip drama that Beeler and Shafer competed in starts with two men sitting on a park bench reading the paper. One man is kidnapped, leaving his cell phone behind. The remaining man, “Michael,” is bewildered, but he answers the cell phone when it rings. Thus begins a series of strange events for Michael, as he becomes embroiled in a struggle over a jump drive.

“The contest had been going on for two weeks before I ever found out about it,” Ruggles said, but she shared it with her classes anyway. Several students decided to compete, in some cases with each other. The contest prizes were $250 to each biweekly winner and $2,500 to the grand prize winner.

The first chapter was the beginning of the Rootclip story. Chapters two and three were won by participants from out of state. But once Pellissippi State students got involved, they dominated the rest of the competition.

VPT students Greg Rains and Matt Cikovic competed against each other in the fourth round, with Rains winning with his suspenseful clip, “Revelation.”

Rains, a 30-year-old insurance agent, is pursuing a career in video. He operated the camera and recruited his friend Scott Blair to play the part of “Michael,” who leaves his house at night for a heart-thumping car ride.

“We spent three days throwing story lines around,” said Rains. “I was trying to incorporate all the elements of the three previous clips.

“I was going head to head with Matt. I thought he would win. I thought he had the better clip, but I’m not complaining.”

“Every time you do a video, you learn something more,” Cikovic said, “especially the video that I did with [fellow student] Jeremy Lowery. It was a very complicated video, with me talking to me.” Cikovic and Lowery created “The Meeting,” in which they used a split screen to stage Cikovic meeting with himself.

“I did all the shooting and he acted,” said Lowery, who works at MS Technologies doing video conferencing and plans to graduate this summer. “I uploaded it onto my computer and used Adobe After Effects to combine the two shots into one where he’s talking to himself.”

Students Beeler and Shafer got in on the action in the fifth chapter. They submitted “The Unexpected Call”—and won. In that round, Michael rendezvous with a bad guy and is shot in the arm.

“I did the camera work and lights. Nephi was the main actor,” said Beeler. The pair worked together using storyboards and stick figures to come up with plot ideas.

The final round, chapter six, allowed only submissions from previous winners.

Two weeks later, Beeler and Shafer learned “Hayden” had won that round and the grand prize of $2,500. “Hayden” brings the two original characters back together. A nerve-wracking scene in a living room leaves three characters dead.

Shafer said that having access to Pellissippi State’s Avid software and learning to use VPT’s cameras really helped him create a prize winner. Now he’s putting his winnings to good use.

“My brother’s getting married in Alaska over the summer,” Shafer said, “so that’s our plane ticket—me and my wife.”

Beeler says he thought about buying a new unicycle, but instead he plans to use his earnings to pay bills.

The next contest on rootclip.com started April 28, and Ruggles says her students are planning to compete again.

To learn more about Pellissippi State’s VPT concentration or the Media Technologies degree program, call Ron Bellamy at (865) 694-6444 or Ella Ruggles at (865) 539-7061.

Search Pellissippi State News Releases.

Pellissippi State Technical Community College
2000 - 2007©