Wow, incredible friday anyone?

I am in the middle of doing work so I'll just re-post something I wrote on a coldplay site and I'll elaborate more tomorrow about this amazing event..

Here's a video I recently directed and edited with a team for a contest in Canada, to win technology for our high school's history department. It was quite random how this video came about, but we spent more than two months just stripping down one big complicated video. We then found ourselves having two hour-long philosophical discussions about technology, with it's pros and cons.

The goal of the contest is to show how you use technology in your classroom, also how technology affects your life and the lives of those around you. My friend Amanda and I spent two and a half weeks working diligently everyday to complete this video, we are going to find out the results of the contest this Friday.

I'm sharing it with you all because, honestly we all agreed and many who have seen the video have told me that the song really completes it. The song is a mix between life in technicolor and life in technicolor II, I just used the first part of life in technicolor from Viva la Vida and the whole song of Life in Technicolor II, my new favorite song which I hum everywhere I go.

Feel free to leave your opinions on how much you hated it, or if you liked it, and what messages did you interpret from it?

Here's the video on youtube, please watch it in HD, it's hard to see it when it's normal quality. If you don't know what I mean there's a little link at the bottom right of the video player which says "Watch in HD".

Here's the description of the video from youtube,

HTML Code:

Markville Secondary School History Departments' submission to Canada's 21st Century Interactive Classroom Contest.

Camera: Nikon D70

Entire video consists of around 2,287 photos.

Actors/Actresses:

Amanda Perkins
Samantha Hutchinson
Kirsten Andersen
Nick Francis
Rachel Laird
Mark Melnyk
Rob Cotey

Here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG2EM_tZPDI

and also on vimeo:

http://www.vimeo.com/2565637 (this ones instantly HD)

Update to the video results.. About 50 minutes ago we just got a call from Mindshare Learning report, our two teachers, myself and the team all sitting in our history classroom waiting for the results to come in at 1:00pm EST. My heart was beating about 500bpm, I was pretty pumped, I can safely say the same for the rest of the team who were desperately waiting for some sort of update to the contest.

The phone rang and who was it, the mindshare learning head, he started talking about the contest and how they collected all the video submissions for the entire 3 rounds of the contest and decided to choose the overall number 1 video.

"Mr. Melnyk you and your team were by far the top submission we recieved."

I screamed, everybody screamed.

We won and we are now the proud winners of $10,000 dollars worth of technology for our History department at Markville Secondary School in Markham.

Look for the video and reaction on CTV AM, over the next week, I'll update if anything else happens.

I really hope that Coldplay somehow comes across the video! Their music was inspiring and fresh. I love Life in Technicolor II for the video and I wouldn't change it for the world.

So yeah.. Super pumped! Thanks everybody for your encouraging comments.