Day 9: STN

Hey guys! So today marked the first day of STN- the Sweet 16! We woke up bright and early (well actually dark and early, at 6:15) and headed downstairs for breakfast. I was super anxious to find out what our topic was! As it turns out, I quickly learned that our topic was the International Drive, a 11.5 mile highway in Orlando that has many different shops and attractions to visit along the strip. As well as being an anchor for the Sweet 16, I also has to get out and create a news story about the topic with Marlena and Javalynn in maybe like 6 hours or so. We decided that we would drive along the International Drive and stop if we saw any small foreign business that looked successful and once found ask what it's drive to succeed is, so that we could tie it in with the topic International Drive. Our first stop was at this small cafe called World Cafe. We talked to the owner and soon were interviewing him and getting b-roll of his restaurant, and we were finished with the filming part at about 11ish I believe. However, we still wanted to get another story because even though we had one that was okay, we wanted to see if we could get something better. Next, we stopped at this Brazilian Steakhouse, but just as we were getting out of the car with our equipment we saw that another school was already interviewing them. That was actually the case a few more times, or the owners were just too busy or didn't want to be interviewed. Finally though, we came upon this store along International Drive called the Brazil Center, and the owner was super nice and let us interview him right there and get b-roll of his store. Since he had a better story than the first guy we interviewed, we decided to go with his and head back to the hotel where we could start editing. When we got back, Javalynn and Marlena recorded all the voice overs I had written out for them, while I started laying out all the sound bytes in the story. When they got back, they put in the broll so that I could start writing the anchoring script with Leanna. We had to make lots of little revision, but finally around 6ish we went out to film all of our anchoring lines. Then, after that, I helped to make the final touches to our Brazil Center Story. We were all working super hard, but the final thing didn't end up getting turned in until 10:45, which was fifteen minutes before the deadlines. We cut it pretty close, but I knew we could do it. Hopefully, the judges will see our hard work when they watch the video and we can maybe place!