This morning, C-SPAN’s Meredith Rapp announced the top winners of the 2009 “Studentcam” Video Documentary contest on the network’s “Washington Journal” program.
First Place in the High School category went to Charlie Greene and Eliza McNitt for their short film on Colony Collapse Disorder called “Requiem for the Honeybee.”
Read local “Greenwich Time” coverage here.
See the complete documentary film here.
It was Charlie’s video-production instructor at Greenwich High School (GHS), Richard Detmer, who suggested entering the C-SPAN contest. The only problem, Charlie wasn’t sure what topic to use for a contest designed to create “A message to the new President. What is the most urgent issue to address after taking office, and why?”
“I asked Eliza in English Class what topic she thought was best,” he says. “She shouted back: ‘Colony Collapse Disorder.’”
Charlie knew Eliza had won the 2008 Connecticut Science Fair as well as a Grand Award at INTEL for her honeybee research. What he didn’t know was that as part of her NYU Film School application, Eliza had already prepared a film storyboard about how Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) imperils American agriculture and, ultimately, the global food supply. The storyboard opened with interviews of beekeeper David Hackenberg and entomologist Diana Cox-Foster.
Although Charlie and Eliza couldn’t begin filming until their college applications were wrapped up in December, they at least had a well-scripted roadmap ready to go.
The weekend before Christmas Break, I drove the kids to Pennsylvania where they videotaped interviews with Dr. Cox-Foster in her lab at Penn State–as well as David Hackenberg, the beekeeper who first reported CCD in November 2006. Hackenberg, in turn, connected them with Dave Mendes, a commercial beekeeper located near Fort Myers, Florida–an hour’s drive from Grandpa Jim’s house where Eliza has spent every Christmas since she was born on August 23, 1991.
As it happens, Charlie was born the same day–about an hour earlier in the same room of the same hospital. They were even delivered by the same obstetrician. Occasionally, their paths would cross, like when Eliza went to apply for a drivers license on her 16th birthday, and found Charlie in line ahead of her. Still, this was the first time they had worked together–and it proved to be an auspicious pairing of ability and temperament.
Charlie’s video production skills were the perfect complement to Eliza’s scientific expertise.
And his calm disposition and keen sense of organization were an ideal counterpoint to Eliza’s immense, but sometimes chaotic, creative and improvisational gifts.
Over Christmas Break, while Eliza interviewed Dave Mendes and did macro footage of bees and beehives from inside a protective bee suit, Charlie edited the Pennsylvania interviews and tracked down video news clips on rising food prices and the food riots of April 2008 that threatened political stability in several Third World countries. Charlie was always one-step ahead when it came to anticipating what they needed and when they had to have it in order to meet their production deadlines.
During a week of 12-to-14-hour days in early January, the Charlie and Eliza wrote and narrated the “Requiem” script and condensed dozens of hours of interview footage, B-reel scenes (pun intended) and news broadcasts into an eight-minute documentary.
Along the way, they developed a narrative technique that on first viewing seems almost deceptively simple. But watch closely, and you will see how Charlie and Eliza employ a complex and creative interplay of overlapping video and audio edits to tell a compelling story from multiple viewpoints and perspectives.
Meredith Rapp told The Greenwich Time why Charlie and Eliza did so well in the Studentcam competition: "It [‘Requiem for the Honeybee’] is wonderful -- a very sophisticated look at an interesting topic... It was very well-put together. All of us learned something."
Colony Collapse Disorder was only recognized for the first time in the Fall of 2006. Although most people are vaguely aware that something is happening to the honeybees, few know the details–and fewer still understand the implications in terms of the potential impact on global food prices and food shortages. Simply put: they picked the right topic at the right time.
As for why it was so well put together, even before they began interviewing, I noticed that Charlie and Eliza had established that their overall theme would be the implications of CCD on global food supplies and political stability. This was surprising, since Eliza’s previous work had been with the scientific aspects of CCD, but the choice made good sense given C-SPAN’s mission to cover Washington, DC’s political decision-making. I can’t speak for Charlie, but clearly Eliza’s four years in Student Government and Theater Arts at GHS have taught her how to shape a message to reach a specific audience.
Before their first interview with Diana Cox-Foster, Charlie and Eliza established a core set of interview questions which they then used in all subsequent interviews. As a result, the kids were able to address their main topics through multiple voices expressing multiple points of view. Although they couldn’t travel to China’s Hunan Province to film what life would be like without honeybees, they did have their interviewees narrate the situation in Hunan while showing B-reel footage of hand pollination in Hunan that was provided by PBS.
Above all, I suspect the secret to their success, was simply hard work. In addition to the days spent researching, interviewing and shooting bee footage, Charlie and Eliza devoted at least 60 to 70 hours each to editing and re-editing the eight-minute video.
While it’s nice to think that students are motivated by the sheer joy of learning, in the case of the C-SPAN Studentcam Contest, there’s another factor that I recently realized should not be underestimated. And that’s the $3,000 cash prize!
Click on the image below to see “Requiem” at C-SPAN’s “Student cam” web site
Click on the image below to read one beekeepers reaction to “Requiem”
And his calm disposition and keen sense of organization were an ideal counterpoint to Eliza’s immense, but sometimes chaotic, creative and improvisational gifts. 
