While we were busy teasing him for his boyish looks and making him take out the trash, our intern Seth Tanner was busy creating a short documentary that won him a student Emmy. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recently awarded Seth an Emmy for Student Production for his investigative piece “The Malik Perry Story.”
Seth created the film while in the Sports Link program at Ball State University, where he just completed his junior year. Sports Link is the first undergraduate program in the nation catered specifically to sports production, and students typically work closely with the athletic department. Last year when Seth approached his instructor looking for an in-depth project to work on, his instructor told him about a former Ball State basketball player who was the subject of a recent book, titled Black Men Can’t Shoot.
Seth eagerly devoured the book, loved Malik’s story, and immediately contacted author, player and coach. All were happy to participate, so Seth gathered a couple fellow students and set about the arduous task of scripting and planning the film.
Nick Yeoman and Ben Wagner, also Ball State students, assisted with scripting, interviewing and editing. Although Seth created all the storyboards, he credits Nick as “phenomenal” at taking his “ideas and putting them into words and a cohesive story.”
An entire semester’s worth of work resulted in the final six-minute piece. Seth, however, still wasn’t confident in the finished project. “I shot it on a PD150 and I was concerned the camera quality wasn’t good enough,” he explains. But an encouraging professor gave the students the money for the entry fee and a few months later Seth was “blown away” to find out their film had been nominated for the Emmy.
Some three months later, Seth was, like most college students, paging through Facebook in the wee hours of the morning when he was tagged in a post congratulating him on the big win. The award comes with a $3,000 prize, though Seth professes, “I don’t even care about the money, I’m just so excited that I get to put it on my resume. I never even thought I’d come close to winning a student Emmy as an undergraduate.”
So what was the most rewarding part of the filmmaking process for Seth? “When we finally got to do the sit-down interview with Malik. We had written out about 40 different questions and we still weren’t really sure where the story was going. And then I was looking through the monitors and the lighting was really cool and I could see it all finally coming together, that this story wasn’t actually about basketball. That’s always the best part of any project you do – when you realize that you actually have something.”
Seth insists that right now his “focus is really just working at videobred and absorbing as much knowledge as possible.” But as with any aspiring filmmaker, for Seth there’s always another project just around the corner. “I’m working on a new script now,” he says. “What’s it about? Oh, just the cliche indie script that all college students write.”
Congratulations on this much-deserved award, Seth! We expect to see many more great things from you in the months and years to come!
But we’ve still gonna make you take out the trash.
View Seth’s award-winning “Malik Perry Story” here.
Written by Videobred on July 9, 2010
