Wylie Students Win Honors In Film Contest

Three short films created by Wylie High School students recently won numerous awards and more than $5,000 in prizes in a competition sponsored by Work Force Solutions of West Central Texas.

One of the videos won the overall grand prize in the competition. Students Eric Evans, Olivia McCain, Corban Gillilland and Jared Vos Winkle created the video, called Journey to the Healing World. You can see all the videos on our website, WylieGrowl.com.

“It was about exploring the career characteristics of health sciences,” Corban said.

“It follows a mentor bringing students along with him,” Eric said. “It was all in good fun. We were just having a great time.”

One of the judges commented on how much fun the group seemed to have creating the video, and Olivia said he was correct.

“Our favorite part of this was getting together outside of school,” she said. “We had a lot of fun doing that.”

The group filmed in various locations and included interviews with a school counselor and a doctor. Both talked about what high school and college work you need to take for a career in health sciences.

The students did all the filming and all the editing.

“I’m a big fan of the editing,” Olivia said. “It’s frustrating, but it’s really cool to see everything come together in the end.”

Eric said the students are familiar with acting so that made the filming pretty easy.

“We are all theater kids,” he said. “This is what we do. We didn’t really have much of a script. We were seeing what would work in different situations.”

Corban said filming is different from theater because you get to do retakes.

“We fixed many problems in editing,” he said. “We were just having a great time filming it together.”

The other two award-winning short films, were called So You Want To Be A Firefighter and What The Health.

The firefighter video featured an Abilene firefighter talking about what route a student would take after high school to be a firefighter. Kathlyn Messer, Marley Gamble, Sarah Wolfe and Megan Jones created the video.

Messer said the four came up with the idea during brainstorming.

“We were just talking about what resources we had,” she said. “Several of us in our group had firefighters in our families, so we decided to do that.”

The subject of the video, Lt. Jeremy Wolfe, is Sarah’s brother.

“He showed us around the inside of the fire station, and he explained what classes he took in high school,” Sarah said.

She said because the video had to be very short, they could not use most of the video that they filmed in the fire station.

“We lost a lot of cool footage,” she said.

Anna Javins, Alexis Gomez, Christa Thomas and Kilyn Smith created the third video, What The Health.

“We had our main character stuck in high school and asking where do I go after this?” Anna said. “It ended with her going to school at Baylor to be a dermatologist.”

Anna said her group studied previous films and tried to come up with an idea that was completely original.

Alexis agreed that filming is much different from theater.

“We aren’t performing in front of an audience, so we can do retakes,” she said. “It was really fun.”

The students received their awards in a ceremony at the Paramount Theatre. Congratulations Wylie theatre students on this accomplishment.