In 2018, Hempfield High School (HHS) teacher Matt Binder and Chris Schwalm from Cedar Crest High School were discussing ideas for new media programs in the area. Local schools typically only have one media or journalism teacher per district, so the two brainstormed how they could find a way to unite students across the region.

Binder, who teaches CommTech at HHS, wanted to create an event that would stray from a typical film contest that focuses on students' competition with each other. "Usually in our field, contests pit school against school. But when students get to college, they'll need to learn how to work with people who aren't their friends," Binder said.

Binder and Schwalm came up with the idea to host a film festival for students and partnered with Elizabethtown College, which agreed to have the event on its campus. The first contest was held in the spring of 2019 and returned last year after taking a break due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students returned to Elizabethtown College on May 22 for this year's event, which included middle school and high school students from Hempfield, Solanco, Cedar Crest, Donegal, Eastern York and Waynesboro school districts. Upon arriving at the college, the students were divided into groups with kids from different schools and were assigned a prompt that they needed to use to make a video. Certain students in each group were assigned roles such as director or editor.

For the first portion of the day, the groups dispersed across the campus to come up with an idea and find a location to film. While the director and other group members shot the footage, the editors got to tour Elizabethtown College's communications facility, which includes a radio station, an editing room and television studio. Once the director and company were done filming, they handed the footage to the editors and took their own tour. After about an hour, each group's editor submitted their group's video for the contest.

"This is great experience for students to work with people they don't know yet and to meet new people," said Tony Mendez, the technology education teacher at Solanco High School. "They'll have to do this in college, and it was awesome to see them so excited and working together."

At the end of the day, the students gathered in the college's auditorium for a screening of the videos. Some groups created advertisements for items that would be important for one to take to college; others were tasked with making a music video with a part of a song. After watching each video, each student voted on his or her favorite one, and winners were named in the middle school and high school categories. "The main goal was to get students and teachers together at the end of the year by using the subject or hobby they love to bond," Binder said. "Since our programs are relatively small within each school district, the kids get to meet and find people like them from other schools."

"Overall, it was a great day for not only my students, but every student who participated," Mendez added.