Education
Special Recognition We would like to take just a moment tonight to celebrate the theme for our film festival this year: Making Our World a Better Place. This year we wanted to take what we learn in our classes and use that to make our world better. Making the movies to show you tonight is a tremendous amount of very hard work. Making these movies make a difference is even more challenging. Taking what we have learned in school to the big screen in the hope that it will cause everyone in our audience to help us all make our world a better place is what this festival is all about! It takes very special people with very special gifts to be able to go from an idea to a real finished product. For the past five years, we have been privileged to enjoy a very special collaboration with a real genius, an actual director and producer in the commercial film industry who has done just that: guided us in taking our ideas to the bring screen, turning them into the finished products that you see tonight. His genius is his amazing ability to help each team of students shape their ideas, to focus on making one compelling point as powerfully as we can possibly make it. He gives each team of students his professional advice, which we can choose to take or not. Each movie team gets to spend about 20 minutes with him 6 times throughout the course of our 5 month project. So not only is he a genius, but he is also amazingly generous with his time. Dr. Tyson says that Mr. Ciralante is not a person; he’s an energy field. He takes time out from his busy production schedule to freely give his professional guidance to the students of Mabry to help us make our world a better place. We will present a small token of our appreciation, a $50 gift certificate to the iTunes store for him or his son. While Mr. Ciralante could not be with us tonight, we wanted to publically say, “Thank you, Mr. Ciralante.” iPod Awards The iPod is such a powerful media player device. I love mine! I love listening to all of my music on it. But when Apple announced the video iPod, it got even more outrageously cool! Dr. Tyson will place all of the movies in each category of the Film Festival on our website in Podcast Central. That means, that in the next few days, anyone in the world will be able to download the movies you have seen tonight from the iTunes Store or from MabryOnline’s Podcast Central! To think that every movie seen tonight will be in global distribution–that’s just amazing! Anyone, anywhere in the world can watch our movies on their computer and can even download them onto their video iPods. NAM: So tomorrow morning someone riding on the Tube in London might be watching our movies! That’s just way cool! And because of the generosity of Apple Incorporated, who is donating 3, 80 gigabyte video iPods to Mabry Middle School, three Mabry students are about to win a state of the art video iPod. So they will be able to download all of our movies, including their own, onto their new video iPod! The judges selected three movies they thought should receive the iPods. The students on each team then selected which student would win the iPod if their movie was selected by the judges. Best Picture Category The most coveted category award is winning the Best Picture Category. The criteria for this category is to combine all of the elements of the movie to bring a powerful emotional impact that convincingly conveys a significant message, leaving a lasting impression. But before we announce the winner for the Best Picture category, we will not only watch each of the movies that have been nominated for this coveted category, we will hear some very brief comments from each team about the movie they made. You will hear that each team of students gives great thought and care to the product they produce. They sincerely want to make our world a better place. Final Award And we have one final award made possible by the generous sponsorship of a very prestigious organization. The International Society for Technology in Education, commonly referred to as ISTE, hosts an annual international technology conference attended by over 20,000 educators from around the world. That conference, the National Educational Computing Conference, is actually being held here in Atlanta this summer, and the closing keynote presentation will be Dr. Tyson and selected Mabry students talking about this very film festival you are attending tonight. That’s an incredible honor that recognizes our students’ exemplary work. Leslie Connery, Deputy CEO and Conference Chair for ISTE has called our film festival “a national treasure” and wants educators the world over to know about it. ISTE has therefore chosen to be one of our Mabry Movie Academy sponsors and has donated an Apple MacBook and a Mini Digital Video Camera to be awarded to a single student tonight. For this unbelievable award, the judges could select any movie from all of the movies submitted in the film festival to receive this amazing gift. Each team had to select the one student on their team that would win the computer and digital video camera should their movie be selected by the judges. Conclusion The Mabry Film Festival is an incredible event that has earned our school prestigious international recognition. We hope that our movies tonight have challenged you to make our world a better place. It sounds like such a difficult thing to do. But it’s really fairly easy. Simply be nice to the people around you. Help others. Go that extra step to attain your personal best. Several of our movie teams wish to solicit donations from you tonight, including your bodies organs! We encourage you to stop by their tables, or take their fliers, as you leave and consider how you can help them attain their goal to make our world a better place. It has been our pleasure to be your hosts this evening. Thank you for coming, and goodnight.