East On Tape: Students in Video Production Leadership pursue their passions in film while enjoying a close friend group

In the box – the opening in the gym wall across from the student section – seniors Hayden Manning and Emilie Elmore peer down at the bleachers 20 feet below, jam-packed with students in white “BEAT ROCK” T-shirts chanting furiously — it was the biggest basketball rivalry game of the year, after all.

But Manning and Elmore aren’t worried about the score. 

“Did Avail finish that weird band player graphic?” Elmore asks. Manning laughs. “The one with the guy’s head photoshopped onto a cartoon drummer?” 

As the game starts, Manning clicks the laptop resting on the ledge to play a graphic on the two big screens across from each other on the gym walls — a spinning ball shimmers in rays of orange, yellow and green and is captioned by “MAKE SOME NOISE.” Feet stomping, hands clapping, the gym erupts into cheers.

Students in the Video Production Leadership class enjoy their own tight-knit community behind the scenes while learning more about editing, camera shots and design through their video boards and open-ended projects.

“There are people in there that are just complete film nerds and some who love drawing, and others love anime,” Elmore said. “I think it’s just special that even though we are very different people, we all really enjoy making videos.”

As two of five students in the class, Elmore and Manning start sixth hour at one of the rows of computers in the library video room. After their teacher Jennifer Hunter goes over the plan for the next couple of weeks – lately Rockhurst vs. East video graphics – the students are free to film, animate and edit. 

“Video class is just a bunch of us bickering at each other and then scrambling to get things done,” senior Avail Whitaker said.

The day before the Rockhurst game, class started with the Pokémon theme song and junior Han Mellenbruch reading jokes off of his phone. “What has to be broken before you use it? An egg!” Next to him, Manning sat animating a person flipping around and around to show when a defender lost his man, and to his left junior Daniel Au was building a booth in Minecraft to use in a graphic for when concessions were open.  

“You don’t want to see some random stuff up on the board, right?” Whitaker said. “You want to see something that’s funny. [The process] is a lot of just moving stuff around.”

But beyond the graphics, the class is juggling a ton of other projects — just check the lists and calendars on the classroom’s three whiteboards. From features on the elementary and middle feeder schools to the “monthly shows” where they direct and edit their own films under a common theme, the students are testing their camera work and Premier Pro skills year round.

“I’ve always loved our film unit,” Hunter said. “We watch the films at the end of each semester in seminar, and they can bring in their friends or anybody who was in their film. It’s one thing to watch it, but it’s another thing to get to watch it with a group of people.”

Because of the size of the class, students collaborate on each other’s projects throughout the entire video-making process — Elmore can add guitar to someone’s intro or Mellenbruch can animate their transitions. And with the open-ended nature of the assignments, finished projects represent both the creativity of the student and the skills of the class. 

“For my video last year, me and my friends made a racecar parody, but the whole joke was that we had to squeeze into little toy cars,” Elmore said. “And although it definitely had its flaws, I was really proud that I got really creative and put in a lot of thought and effort.”

Everybody has their own niche — Elmore’s spent years perfecting voiceovers, Manning took writer’s workshop to work on his screenplays and Mellenbruch is a wizard with Blender, a 3D graphics software. But despite various focuses they’re alike in more ways than they’re different — they all share the same love for YouTube, dry sense of humor and childhood obsession with making videos.

“I took video production because when I was a little kid I always made stupid iMovies with my cousins,” Elmore said. “And then all my cousins grew out of it, but I never did, and I had no way to do it at home. Video production is a chance for me to do that.”