Every student at East Leyden watches the video announcements every other Friday, but few actually realize the detail and work that goes into each 5 minute clip.

Each week several students and Social Studies teacher Dominic Manola, who is in charge of the video announcements, look for input from teachers and faculty around the school.

They look for anything big to announce and as Mr. Manola said, “We record far more than we can use. We could go ten minutes easily no question.”

After working on gathering all of the information, Mr. Manola writes a script for the students to read as they are being recorded.

“When we do our anchor section, they read off a teleprompter on a computer, it scrolls with the script,” he said.

Mr. Manola and the students spend about 15 minutes actually recording the video. Then, they go on to producing and editing which takes anywhere from one to two hours. The videos are edited using a program called Imovie, which is used on MAC computers by a few sophomore students.

Senior Rachel Conley, an announcer from the videos, mentioned that this is a very new process to the the announcers, so they often make mistakes. They are simple mistakes that can be easily edited out and replaced, making the video look flawless.

The video announcements are very new to East Leyden. Last March, 30 West Suburban Conference students who are currently seniors came up with the idea that the announcements would be a “cool” and fun way to get important and interesting information across.

Conley added how impressive the final product is: “It looks real to me, it looks like a real news [broadcast]. It changed a lot of the spirit and culture around here.”

Mr. Manola really enjoys doing the Video Announcements and added, “I just like watching the reactions from all of the student and even the teachers.”