Two Revere High School seniors created a public service announcement that has advanced to the final round of judging for the Ohio Attorney General’s Take Action video contest.

Seniors Henry Wathen and Ryan Nadzam created a video that educates young people about student loans and preventing debt. Their task included clearly explaining the statistics revolving around student loan debt and raising awareness for the issue, while also creatively presenting the information. Wathen, who has entered the contest in the past, explained their purpose for creating the public service announcement (PSA).

“Our main focus when making the video was to be informative, but also have a personality to the video,” Wathen said.

Nadzam, who has also entered in the past, explained why he believes this year’s video has had more success than his previous entry.

“This year we definitely had more facts. Last year’s [entry] was more a focus on the animation itself, but this year was definitely more factual and we stuck more to the curriculum,” Nadzam said.

Wathen and Nadzam chose to use stop-motion animation to present the information, which they spelled out using pennies. Nadzam explained this filming technique and its challenges.

“[Stop-motion] is when you take a picture of your frame, and then move the objects in the frame slightly. Then you repeat the motion, so that it gives the effect that everything is moving. It’s a multi-step process. To actually take all the pictures, it took about five to six hours. It was definitely one of the hardest projects I have worked on this year,” Nadzam said.

Wathen further described the stop-motion filming technique.

“Every single time the pennies or something moved, that is another shot we had to take. One of the [obstacles] we ran into was we could not move the camera at all, so that was a lot of stress making sure we built a strong mount that would not move if we bumped it,” Wathen said.
Video productions teacher Nicholas Kos teaches his students many different PSA techniques, and he also requires his Video II and advance video students to create, but not submit, a video for the Attorney General contest. Wathen and Nadzam’s video has gone on to become a top ten finalist out of over 200 entries, and Kos believes that they created a video worthy of this honor.

“I have [had students enter] into this contest for four years in a row now, and they are the first to ever be honored as a top ten finalist, so that is pretty unique in itself. I am very, very proud of them, and I never doubted them for a second after looking at this video.They did a really great job on it,” Kos said.

Wathen and Nadzam will find out whether or not their video placed within the next couple of weeks, and if they come in first, second or third place, they will receive scholarship money.