By Meijer Great Choices Film Festival
Are you an educator looking for a creative, fun opportunity for your students to practice their filmmaking skills? Or a student excited about the possibility of using your talents to compete for thousands of dollars in prize money?
The Meijer Great Choices Film Festival each year challenges high school students and K-8 classrooms across the state to create 30-second Public Service Announcements focused on either Healthy Living, Building Character orCelebrating Diversity. The goal is to encourage students to focus on positive, great choices that can be made in daily life. The PSAs can be as creative or as simple as competitors choose. Today’s technology makes filmmaking possible utilizing anything from a small video camera to a cell phone camera. Animation is also an option.
Individual student PSAs are judged anonymously based off technical merit by a panel of college judges, while PSAs produced by K-8 classrooms are judged through an online public voting process each spring. Those involved in the classroom competition are encouraged to get their friends and families to vote.
In the competition for individual high school students, six 1st place awards of $1,500 each will be given, along with six 2nd place awards of $1,000 each, and six 3rd place awards of $500 each. Additionally, 42 finalists (4th-10th place) will each receive $75. Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in May 2020. In the classroom competition for grant money, there will be three 1st place awards of $500 each, three 2nd place awards of $200 each and three 3rd place awards of $200 each for top vote earners. There will also be three Judges Choice $200 grants awarded.
Participating K-8 classrooms are invited to register and upload their PSA videos online between Feb. 1 – 28. An online public voting period will run from March 4 – 29, with winners announced after. There are no submission fees in the K-8 classroom competition. Videos can be submitted through 11:59 p.m. Feb. 7 for the full $10 fee.
The Top 10 PSA films in each category will be made available on the Meijer Great Choices Film Festival website for schools to use as tools for their character education, health and diversity programs. We encourage teachers to showcase students’ PSAs in peer-to-peer education on these important topics.
For a complete set of rules and guidelines go to www.meijergreatchoices.com. Any further questions may be directed to Heidi Tunison at htunison@bcpsk12.net.
