"Teams submitting for the Regional Chairman’s Award must provide a DVD (see note 1) to the judges at the event. The content of the DVD should explain what the team has done to earn a Regional Chairman’s Award."
(Chairman's Award Criteria, 2012)
As the head of the Media and Spokepersons deparment in our team (Ha-Dream Team #3075), I was responsible for the CA submission and video production. For us, the CA video is the best way to show what our team has done in order to win the prize, to show the spirit of our team and the technological abilities regarding video making. Here are some useful tips that will help you making your CA video.
During the season, be sure to take photos and shoot short clips of your activities. The raw material will help you later while setting down and producing your video.
After submitting the written part, take your essay and discuss these subjcets:
- What are the main things that you would like to present? keep in mind that the video can not be longer than 3 minutes, and if you would like to present it in the competition to the judges, it will come at the expense of your presentation time.
- How would you like to present it? shooting a general video is nice, but a concept would be nicer.
- How would you produce the video? do you want to use a special location? special people to talk? How the final thing will look like?
The time between the end of building season to your regional is the best time to shoot the video. Your team members will be less stressed and probably more willing to help.
So, after deciding what you want to say in your video, decide where would you like to shoot it. We have decided to do it in our lab, turning it into a small 'living room', taking it into a direction of a talk-show. Write the actual script, and see how long will it take to say it (remember - you've got only 3 minutes). Contact the persons you'd like to speak and make a shooting timetable, like this:
See that we gave about 30 minutes for every scene as people probably won't do it right in the first take.
After you've got all the shooting material along with the raw material from your activities, the editing part begins. Today, you can find a mac in almost every team, so iMovie will definately do the job. It's a simple program that can give you professional results if you know how to work with it. For adding music (remember - it must be original), you can use GarageBand and get pretty satisfying results.
We advise to present the video to the judges in the competition. It is the best way to show what you have done, and it also helped to 'break the ice' between the judges and the team members that were chosen to present our chairman's submission, in the competition.
Here is the final result of our 2011 CA Video: http://youtu.be/UUt1kqHiNzg
Our equipment included just a camera on a tripod, whiteboards as teleprompters, a lighting and a mac for editing. This year we've got some extra budget and bought new equipment for the Media department, so the 2012 CA video will be much better
You can find the complete criteria of the 2012 CA submission and video here:
http://usfirst.org/sites/default/fil...d_criteria.pdf
Good luck! and feel free to ask any questions you've got. In addition, you can put a link to your own team's CA video, so everyone would see who you are and what you do for your community