When it came to the Greek Olympics Homecoming, Hillsdale students gave it their all in the arena and established Athens on campus in their Olympic trailer videos.
“I almost lit my hair on fire, and it singed the hairs on my arm,” sophomore and New Dorm Resident Assistant Sophie Schlegel said, describing the filming process behind New Dorm’s homecoming video. “The worst part was we had to keep refining it to get it right.”
This year, Hillsdale students went all out in the homecoming video competition, dousing torches in lighter fluid, borrowing high quality camera equipment, traveling to Nashville, and spending hours poring over clips to produce action movie trailers for the first Olympic games.
“I heard a lot of people saying never, in Hillsdale history, have there been such good homecoming videos,” said senior Ewan Hayes, one of the masterminds behind the BLOC’s video. “You wouldn’t expect college students to put in so much effort and so much equipment for a single short film.”
Kappa Kappa Gamma won the competition with a video captioned “Ancient Housewives,” a twist on the “Real Housewives” franchise. The Kappas scrapped their first attempt and reshot the video the following day in front of their white, pillared sorority house, playing up the reality TV angle.
“We initially thought of doing fun games on the lawn. But after we filmed it, we just didn’t feel like it captured the essence of Kappa, and it just wasn’t as on theme or as on brand as we wanted it to be,” said junior Sarah McKeown, director of Kappa’s video.
McKeown estimated Kappa spent 20 hours just filming because they essentially filmed two different videos.
New Dorm’s video centered on the line “We dare to be first,” and included one cut of Schlegel running with a tiki torch wrapped in a rag and doused with lighter fluid to make a bigger flame.
“Annalise, one of our RAs, drove my car while our girls did our running scene, and I was shooting it in the passenger side,” junior Marina Weber, a New Dorm RA, said. “ It was so much fun and the first time I let anyone drive my car next to some girl running with a lit torch.”
Weber said she thought the effect turned out perfectly for the video.
The fire made her think about using other elements in the video, like water and earth, Weber said.
“When we were filming on the soccor field, I thought, ‘Where’s our sprinkler,’ and then luckily enough, the sprinklers actually started going off while we were there, which was like literal God coming,” she said.
Weber said she spent about four hours on the video, but much longer learning how to use the video software.
“I took way more shots than I needed. So then afterward, it was all a matter of finding the music and mapping it out on iMovie,” Weber said.
Theme-fitting music made all the difference to the aesthetic of the video, Weber said.
“Especially at the end, I wanted it to be super hype and dramatic, so I literally looked up on YouTube dramatic hype war music in Greek,” she said.
After the controversy surrounding New Dorm’s banner, winning second in the video competition helped New Dorm rally for the rest of homecoming, according to Weber.
“It really boosted our morale,” Weber said. “We had a rough start, but this proved to us that we could bounce back.”
Although it placed third, BLOC’s video, full of dramatic black-and-white action shots, was a crowd favorite. It had just under 5,300 views in the first 24 hours posted on Instagram.
“Everybody loved it,” Hayes said. “Granted, at least 10 to 15 of those views were me, but we got a lot of people watching the video, and it was usually the most liked one out of all the videos on that hashtag.”
The BLOC acted out ancient Greek myths as precursors to the Olympic games. They featured Theseus wrestling the Minotaur and Atalanta chasing possible suitors. Filming in Hayden park, BLOC students wrestled, sprinted, and threw discus, returning late at night for special lighting effects.
“We later added archery, even though it wasn’t technically one of the original sports but we thought it looked cool,” Hayes said.
Charlie Cheng filmed the BLOC’s video using the film and production club’s camera equipment for about 15 hours, and then spent about seven hours editing the clips. He agreed with Weber that the more clips made the overall effect better.
“It’s very heartwarming, all
the people coming up to shake our hands and telling us ‘You guys did an amazing job,’” Cheng said. “That’s been really encouraging.”
The video leaders of Kappa, New Dorm, and the BLOC all said the quality of the videos this year impressed them.
“I hope that when people watch the film, it’ll inspire them to push their potential and try to make something even better,” Cheng said. “We’ve raised the bar on the future years.”
