High schoolers finish promotional video

    A couple of high school students have just produced a video about the city of Washington. Juniors Alex Thode and Brock Kimball filmed the city?s schools, houses and retail outlets, all in an effort to attract families to settle in Washington. Within the next week, they will upload the video to Youtube. Chamber of Commerce director Tim Coffey said he is working on a way to host the video on the chamber?s Web site.

    The Chamber of Commerce hatched the idea of a promotional video during a planning retreat of the Visitors and Tourism Committee. Veta Thode, Alex?s mother and a member of the chamber board, asked her son if he would like to do the project, and he agreed. Alex enlisted the help of his friend Brock, and the two began filming in August.

    ?We filmed things like the skate park, the pool, the golf course and the baseball fields,? said Alex.

    ?It was stuff we knew was going to look a lot better in the summer,? added Brock.

    The two filmmakers recorded images of all the schools in town including the A.S.S.U.R.E. Center and the central office. The video contains footage of a football game and a volleyball practice.

    ?The only school we really went into was the high school,? said Brock. ?We filmed in the gym and stuff like that.?

    The video is 15 minutes long. Coffey told the boys that the video would get more views on Youtube if it were divided into shorter segments. They cut the film into four sections, each about two to four minutes. Each section focuses on a different part of town. One section focuses on the aforementioned schools. The other videos are on subjects such as housing, entertainment and shopping.

    ?It?s a little bit of everything,? said Alex. ?For housing, we filmed places such as Timber Ridge and Water?s Edge.?

    ?We also went to Halcyon House and the UP Home,? said Brock. 

    Alex and Brock decided not to narrate the film, opting to let the footage speak for itself. That does not mean they produced a silent film. In the editing process, they added background music. Alex discussed the use of music with Mike Roder, who teaches video production at the high school. Roder advised them to get the songs off a Web site called freeplaymusic.com.

    In addition to music, Alex and Brock inserted visual effects in their film.

    ?We have transitions between the frames,? said Brock.

    Alex has taken a few of Roder?s classes, and said the classes taught him useful skills which he applied to this project.

    ?We learned how to use the software and we learned about transitions,? said Alex.

    Brock and Alex spent a few weekends at the high school editing the video.

    ?We went in on Saturdays and Sundays for about four hours at a time,? said Alex. ?We spent 15 hours editing the video. We used a program called Final Cut Pro, which is really good software.?

    Brock commented, ?Alex did most of the editing. I was there for moral support.?

For more, see our Jan. 28 print edition.