The Key Club Video Contest

The project began with three men in a school cafeteria. Our club's editor Victor Ma, our website committee chair Jensen Cheong, and I were hammering out ideas for the club video contest over lunch. Our club had never submitted a video in the past and we were excited to try it out. The three of us had resolved in the beginning of the school year to really change Key Club. This was the year we would really modernize by improving our website and creating multimedia projects other than traditional photo collages for the benefit of our members. Some members had already brought camcorders with them to events and sent us some videos, which we quickly edited and put on our website, but we had never done anything as formal and professional as the video needed for the contest.

We brainstormed different ideas. Jensen's idea was to film a skit, where three members would be helping a homeless man. We liked the general idea, but it wouldn't be able to last 30 or 60 seconds. We wanted to create a video that would be able to embody as many aspects of Key Club as possible. I remembered a clip I saw in an Arthur episode. Some kids had created a video with a red ball traveling between different people and places. I also remembered Jay Leno doing something similar in his "Pass the Mike" segments. I started talking about these clips, and the idea struck us. What if we replaced the red ball or microphone with a Key Club logo? It would promote Key Club and its message of community service, and the effect would look pretty cool.

We communicated through email. I sent Victor and Jensen a list of possible three-second shots we could use. The list was based off events we went to in the past year. The baking shot was based off our work in a soup kitchen, the cleaning shot was based off our work in a community garden, the homeless shot was based off an event where we personally gave bagged lunches to the homeless in Manhattan, and the fundraising shot was based off our teddy bear sales for March of Dimes, just to name a few. These short snippets and the passing of the Key Club logo highlight our way of life and show how we are all linked as a community and as a club.

Shooting the video proved to be difficult because each quick shot needed to be precise. We did takes, more takes, and several more retakes until we had enough to be confident there was one we could use in the editing room, which was essentially my living room. In the end, we had nearly 10 minutes of raw footage for the 60-second video. We took one week to do the shots, with Jensen helping with scheduling and finding locations, Victor providing many of the materials needed to do the scenes, and me working with filming the shots and editing the final product. We worked with different members in our club to film each shot, and thanks to these collaborative efforts, we ended up spending only 28 dollars on the entire project: 12 for the tapes, 12 for the DVDs, and 4 on a rake (strangely, no member was able to provide one).