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Students once again showed an inspiring appreciation of their UCI Libraries with entries in our fifth annual Student Video Contest. The entrants' ability to create humorous, artistic, and informative videos is remarkable, particularly since contest winners are usually neither Art majors nor Film and Media majors. This is true again this year: The Judges Award went to Nezar Eltal, a Computer Science major, and the Audience Award went to Andy Ha, a Pharmaceutical Sciences major.
Nezar Eltal is now an expert on the UCI Libraries. Not only is this his second time entering the Libraries' Student Video Contest, it's also his second Judges Award. In this year's video, "Langson Library: The Movie" a student researching Alexander Hamilton is introduced to the wonders of Langson Library. Throughout the video is a catchphrase about various resources being "free," including study rooms and computers. The video takes a humorous turn when the student learns printing is not free, but at only 12 cents a page. After a tense pause, the characters relax and agree the cost is "not that bad."
Nezar says that, for this year's video, he and his friends used 1990s action movies as their inspiration. They improvised quite a bit and did not rehearse. "We would use cheesy, insane voices and pull off our sunglasses every other scene and my friends were like, yeah, I'm down for that, so we just kept rolling with that, improvising as we went along."
Nezar and his friends filmed over two separate weekends. They used cameras they checked out from the Libraries' Multimedia Resources Center (MRC), and Nezar commented that "you can tell where the camera quality is really high and then really low, because we checked out two different cameras from the MRC and I didn't realize there was such a range of cameras until I got the second one and I was like, wow, this is beautiful."
Last year, when asked what he learned about the Libraries while filming, Nezar talked about the resources in the MRC; this year he learned about the Libraries' printers and our 3D printer in the MRC: "I had never 3D printed before and so I've been using the MRC's 3D printer to make things for friends."
Andy Ha's video "UCI Libraries: The Key to Success" won the Audience Award, collecting the most votes from hundreds of UCI students, faculty and staff who viewed this year's entries. Andy chose to make his video like an infographic with someone narrating and advertising the library as the place to be as Finals approach. Amazingly, Andy says he was able to hire someone for only $5 to do the narration imitating Morgan Freeman's voice.
Andy's video shows off both Ayala and Langson's study spaces, our numerous computers, and the contrast between purchasing a textbook at the Bookstore and checking out books from the Libraries. While his major is Pharmaceutical Sciences, Andy says that he has always been interested in making videos and creating special effects. The video showcases Andy's skills, including a Star Wars droid and fast-motion clips of people passing by and through the Libraries. The narrator finds humor in textbook pricing, bleeping out the narrator's reaction to a $200+ textbook in the Bookstore, and it's hard not to grin as the scene-stealing BB-8 droid replica zaps a student for failing a test.
Be sure to checkout their award winning videos, as well as past videos from the Library Student Video Contests here.
For more information, please contact Cynthia Johnson, Head, Reference and the Grunigen Medical Library at cynthiaj@uci.edu or 949-824-0081 or Jeff Schneidewind, Emerging Technologies Research Specialist at jhschnei@uci.edu or 949-824-7099.