Snowboards, skis, and movie posters line the walls of Joe Dockery’s Mount Si High School classroom, where dozens of this year’s award-winning films got their start.
The posters came from the North Bend Theatre, which showed the films at the Wildcat Film Festival in May. The skis and snowboards, they’re mainly for inspiration.
A lot of the students in Dockery’s film production class got on a snowboard before they got behind a camera. Eythan Frost said his successful video career—he’s had several freelance clients this past year—“started with me just wanting to snowboard, shooting videos of myself.”
Spencer Aston, who’s actually sitting at a computer editing video of himself snowboarding, started with the camera first. “I just got into it a long time ago,” he said, but he also likes to snowboard.
Frost and Alex Pease are watching over Astin’s shoulders as he replays the images, while Dockery talks with another student about the final components of his graded portfolio. School is almost out, which may contribute to the relaxed atmosphere, but Dockery’s room is definitely more collaborative space than study-centric classroom.
The class counts up their combined entries into the Northwest High School Film Festival and the awards they earned, as a group, and they talk about the Wildcat Film Festival as a combined effort, although most of the entries were individual projects.
“We all help each other out here and there, but there’s usually one person who says this is my project, this is what I’m going to work on,” explains Xury Greer.
Competing with more than 20 other schools, the Mount Si students won collaboratively and individually in the Northwest High School Film Festival—“I like to think of it as the state championship of film,” Dockery said—with two awards of excellence, and two honorable mentions.
Pease earned an Excellence Award for his animated public service announcement on recycling. “He animated all of that. We shot just the bottle going into the (recycle bin) and the rest of it, he did all on the computer,” Dockery said. Pease was able to do most of the animation and editing during his class time, but Frost, who won for his video for the Snoqualmie Valley Schools Foundation, had to do most of the shooting outside of class.
Even with classmates Aston, Greer, Tyler Stewart, Parker McComb, Mac Mason and Austin Green helping him, it was a huge project.
“I was shooting for weeks!” he said.
Another team effort, the Frankie’s Pizza Zombies commercial, received an honorable mention at the film festival, and won a school contest for Frankie’s Pizza earlier this year. Members of that team included Alex Stokosa, Steven Nelson, Mitchell McGhan, Kelsie Gustafson, Zach Polson, Tyler Hildreth, and Torsten Cannell. Ethan Seneker also earned honorable mention for his “Alone.”
All of these films were highlighted at the Wildcat Film Festival, and added to students’ portfolios. And a little more inspiration was added to Dockery’s walls. “See all those tropies?” he asks, pointing to a couple of shelves loaded with various awards. “Those are ours.”
For his creative teaching and use of technology in class, Dockery has earned a trophy too, the “Making IT Happen” award from the Northwest Council for Computer Education.
