Three Chatelech Secondary School students' video about a young employee's angst over whether to risk workplace injury or confront her boss about unsafe working conditions has won WorkSafeBC's 2010 student video contest.
"It's crazy: we beat out 56 other videos," said Myesha Geoffrion, who put the video together and portrays the young worker, along with fellow Grade 11 students Maeve Talbot-Kelly and Terran Tasci.
The video, Me, Myself and I, shows a young worker who is asked to perform a dangerous workplace construction task without proper training and gear. The video uses a "good angel" and a "bad angel" to depict the worker's internal debate, as she weighs the risks of getting injured against her concern about the possible fallout to her job if she confronts her boss about the risks.
The students worked on the video as part of Chatelech fine arts teacher Paddy McCallum's video production class. McCallum noted that the students set themselves some significant technical challenges in their approach.
"They chose to go about it in a particularly tricky way in that they wanted to do a camera lock off and have multiple screens working to create the illusion that Myesha had a good angel and a bad angel, and that's a very hard thing to do because you have to do a lot of planning in order to be able to shoot that," he said. "And it took lots of different set ups in order to achieve that and then a tremendous amount of editing to be able to layer all of those images and manipulate those images so that they got the effect that they wanted."
But McCallum said the students' hard work, along with excellent creative and technical choices, quickly made their video stand out.
"As soon as I saw what they were doing, I was incredibly impressed and I thought, 'This could be a winner,' just because it was done so smartly and so creatively and with such thoughtfulness," he said.
WorkSafeBC's Robin Schooley called the video "the clear frontrunner," for the Grade 11/12 category.
But the students themselves were still reeling a bit from their victory, which involves a $2,000 prize for the school, plus $500 for the students to split.
"I was kind of like surprised I guess," Tasci said. "I knew it would be really good and professional looking and we had a decent story, but I guess I kind of figured somebody else would be like 'Oh we should do this' and kind of have a similar idea or something and better implement it."
