2014 Winners

When a teacher told Andrew Demeter, a sophomore at Notre Dame-Cathedral Latin in Chardon, Ohip, about the World of 7 Billion video contest, he knew he wanted to take part. Andrew has done many video projects for his school – from filming sporting events to creating promo videos – as well as personal videos sharing his views on a variety of topics. For this contest, he chose to focus on Water Sustainability because “water is one of those things we really take for granted.”

He began his work on “Water: Privilege or Right?” by storyboarding his ideas and keeping in mind that he wanted a relatively simply structure, “something people can easily digest.” Because this wasn’t his first video project, Andrew had a strong idea of how to bring the final product together but even so, he admits there were challenges. Coordinating all aspects of the film – from the information, to the animation, to the voiceover – needed a lot of time and close attention. As for consolidating the information and doing the animation, he reported that it’s “still challenging to take what’s in your mind and manifest that on the computer.”

Video, media, journalism – these are the areas where Andrew likes to spend his free time. In fact, while he’ll save his prize money for now, he acknowledges that it might go towards purchasing stock footage for future video projects. But his passion is paying off as he was recently chosen as one of five winners in the C-SPAN StudentCam documentary contest, a success that came with both prize money and a trip to Washington, DC.