Two Summer Universities, two New Years Event and one Youth Rights video are amongst the nominees for The AEGEEan’s Choice Awards “Best Video” category. The AEGEEan interviewed three of the nominees about the process of creating the movies and discovered how a precious AEGEE flag was almost destroyed in the process.
The AEGEEan talked with Ksenia Lupanova about the nominated AEGEE-Moskva video, which had the aim to entertain people and consider going to Moscow for a crazy event to see all the sights during winter time. “Me and Dasha Onohova came up with the idea for the video. She was main coordinator of the event. Since we started to be active in AEGEE-Moskva it was clear that shooting a promo always brings only benefits: it is a great local activity where everybody has fun, and of course it helps a lot with the promotion of events. Our event was New Years Event (NYE) Noviy God po-russki (Russian New Year), so we got the idea to make a short, fun and memorable video, with an element of action, Moscow beauty sights and a pinch of humor,” Ksenia tells The AEGEEan. The video was shot at Ded-Moroz and Snegurochka during the creation of the AEGEE-Moskva calendar 2014, so everybody at that moment helped Dasha and Ksenia with creating it. There weren’t many challenges for the girls when making the video. “Just to not die from laughing, and to keep a balance with humor. To be honest, Putin came as an element of fun already during the process of cutting the video, it was like “Why not, he is funny here”, and people reacted really cool in Agora Zaragora.” When asked about why this video should win Ksenia says, “It’s really hard to say who has the best video, because every video is so different from each other with different ideas. All videos can be winners. But the best video has to make you emotional and give you positive energy. I think ours got this.”
AEGEE-Gdansk is also nominated for The AEGEEan’s Choice Awards for the promotion of their NYE event. The AEGEEan interviewed President Tomasz Kowalski who came up with the idea. The script was written together in a project meeting through an incredible and fantastic brainstorming. Some improvements and ideas with stunt actions were added during shooting the movie. Later on everyone from AEGEE-Gdansk helped creating it. The cameraman and the director was Krzysztof Warzała from their fellow organisation Academic Culture Center (Akademickie Centrum Kultury). In the movie the NYE’s team and those who just came to the main meeting occurred. Everyone had the opportunity to try and show their acting skills. The aim of the movie was promotion of the New Year’s Eve in AEGEE-Gdansk and to show what the future participants could expect: Bond’s climate and good fun in AEGEE style. Small chills of excitement, incredible tasks and a final ‘battle’ with a happy ending. The challenges for this video were different than what you would expect. “We only had one problem… our President’s distraction. After shooting the first part of the cut scene, we went to McDonalds. I was proudly carrying our precious flag in a suitcase, which can be seen at the end of the video. Unfortunately, I left it in the restaurant. After an hour, at home I realized that I did not have it and went back to the restaurant to get it. Unfortunately… It turned out that the staff thought the suitcase (with the flag in it!) was a bomb. The whole McDonalds was evacuated, the police came and the bomb squad was almost called. They told us that the flag was gone forever and destroyed. Our Bond not only had the mission in the movie to recover the flag, but also had it in real life. Especially since the next day the final scene had to be shot and two days later we wanted to take it to the Agora in Zaragoza! Fortunately, the morning after, it occurred that the suitcase was on top of the trash-bin and Tomasz managed to take it back. The mission was completed and the flag was in the hands of AEGEE-Gdansk again. The whole story is written down and has five pages if anybody is interested.”
Another interesting event to promote are Summer Universities. Lídia Garcia Serra, Promotion Manager of AEGEE-Barcelona, is the master mind behind the video of AEGEE-Barcelona and AEGEE-Las Palmas that got nominated for The AEGEEan Choice Awards. The idea of the video was based in all of this: being Promotion Manager of her antenna, video maker and organizer of the SU. Most of the video was recorded and edited by Lídia and she explains The AEGEEan the aim of the video: “The video was created for different reasons: its first aim was to sum up the Summer University that took place in 2013. We wanted it to be a souvenir for both the participants and organizers. I had made other videos about specific parts of the event, but I wanted to create one last video that showed the places visited and the feelings and emotions experienced by participants and organizers. We also wanted to make a video that served to show what a Summer University is in order to get new active members. So, we really wanted to show the AEGEE spirit.” The biggest challenge in the process was the lack of good material “to create an attractive and professional video with our resources and to record material while we were organizing all the activities at the same time was difficult, but I’m so proud of the result and I’m sure we’ll achieve our aims,” Lídia says. She was also asked by The AEGEEan about why the two antennae should win the best video category: “Our Summer University from last year was one of the challenging ones since the two locals are so far away from each other. It was difficult at the beginning but we finally built an awesome event that all of us will bear in our memories forever. It all started with a promotional video (which has a similar structure and the same song) and ended with this last one. Indeed, videos were a very important part of our Summer University as we also organized a lipdub and we obtained fundraising thanks to a promotional video too. That every participant and AEGEE member involved in the event -and even others who weren’t- think of our Summer University and our videos when they hear the song I need your love from Calvin Harris ft. Ellie Goulding is something that encourage us to think that we really contributed to the success AEGEE, its project and its aims.”
The Comité Directeur is nominated for the “Youth Rights” video which was developed by the participants of the Youth Rights event, but it has unfortunately not been possible for The AEGEEan to get information about the video.
AEGEE-Dnipropetrovsk is also nominated for this category for this video. Unfortunately, it has not been possible for The AEGEEan to get in contact with the antenna and hear about the idea behind the video. In case that The AEGEEan obtains more information, this article will be updated.
In the meantime, don’t forget to vote! You have until April 10th.
Written by Patricia Anthony, AEGEE-Zaragoza