This story was originally published in the fifth edition of The Lion’s Tale (March 27th, 2018).

Every year, WROR-TV students travel to the Student Television Network (STN) convention, and they hit the ground running with a Crazy 8 contest.

“The Crazy 8 contest, which is the first thing we do there, is an eight-hour contest where we have eight hours to write, shoot and edit a either broadcast or short film, depending on the category,” said TV production teacher Kevin Patterson. “This year, for the first time, we had two teams, one team doing broadcast, and the other team doing a short film.”

Junior Blair Brown took part in the Crazy 8 Morning Show and Spot Feature.

“For the Crazy 8 competition, our prompt was ‘We got the bea,’  Brown said. “Our team instantly began to bounce ideas off of one another, and within the first hour we were calling businesses around Nashville for our potential story.”

One of Brown’s team members for Crazy 8 was aspiring college film student senior Jaiden Doddapaneni, who viewed STN as a great experience before graduation.

“It offers networking opportunities, and it’s just a great place to meet like-minded people that have the same interests in TV production,” Doddapaneni said.

STN is a convention which “supports, promotes, and recognizes excellence in scholastic broadcast journalism, creative video, filmmaking and media convergence,” according to studenttelevision.com.

“STN is a way to gain networking and national recognition,” said senior Parker Davidson. “While we were there we did competitions, so that also allowed us to gain more experience.”

Along with gaining vital experience to bolster future endeavors, those who attended also obtained significant memories through their travels to Nashville.

“The memories and experiences I had in Nashville are ones I will forever cherish throughout high school,” Brown said. “Experiencing a new city alongside a team of dedicated students made the trip worthwhile. My favorite part of the trip was the abundance of different culture in the city. Our team was privileged to meet people from around the world and encountered many diverse art, music, traditions and more.”

Prior to arriving at the convention, Davidson and senior Tanner Roberts submitted a film for art direction and visual effects, for which they hoped to win a Film Excellence award.

“Our video was ‘Kaiju, King of Coffee,’ and it was a video we made about a small business owner,” Davidson said.

The category they were up for was jam-packed with other entries.

“We were up against 400 other people just in our category, and we won out of those 400 other people,” Roberts said.

Besides being very competitive, receiving a Film Excellency award in general was limited.

“There were only 10 awards they give out to the country, and we won one of them,” Patterson said.

Although WROR-TV students did not place in any of the competitions at the event, Patterson won STN’s Teacher of the Year award, which is based on a teacher video contest.

“What they do is they open up entries for teachers to send in,” Patterson said. “They’ll announce a prompt and they give you about a month to make an entry.”

This year’s prompt was “Figure it out.”

“My video was sort of Sci Fi-ish: it was like one of the guys was going in for a medical test and the other guy figured out a cure, and he went through this medical procedure and started experiencing different supernatural-type things,” Patterson said. “He was having superpowers, or there were different things happening to him. By the end, he’s kind of left with a, ‘Well, I need to figure out what to do with this.’”