BY JESSICA STEELEY
Clarkston News Staff Writer

Campers learned studio production, editing, and effects at Independence Television’s (ITV) first ever summer camp last week.
“They all learned how to use all of our cameras, they learned how to use our tricaster switcher, which allows them to do live productions,” ITV’s Media Producer Kevin Smith said. “We have been doing a lot of field production stuff, so, we showed them how to use our field cameras, we took them outside, we filmed some simple Scooby-Doo style effects, stuff like that, and then we showed them how to edit that.”
Smith oversaw the camp with two other ITV employees, Matt Bleau and Stephan Merk, for 17 students going into grades seven through nine.
One goal of the camp, Smith said, was to reach out to kids in this age group so they would have knowledge of the media program at the high school.
“It’s always been kind of something that they’ve wanted to do here, is have some kind of summer camp for kids, and so this first year of doing it is very much figuring out what works, what doesn’t, what we might need to fine-tune for the future,” Smith said.
The campers had a range of production and editing knowledge coming in, Smith said, and it was interesting to work with the varying levels of base knowledge. Some are beginners whereas others have their own YouTube channels.
“I had a pretty large amount of knowledge with cameras,” 14-year-old camper Matthew Rozman said. “I’ve worked on cameras before, I’ve worked with cameras, I’ve worked on field cameras before.”
Though Rozman was familiar with visual production equipment, he didn’t know as much about audio production and visual editing before taking the camp.
Trey Wood, a 13-year-old going into eighth grade, had some editing knowledge before the camp from making videos for his YouTube channel, but he wasn’t familiar with studio equipment and methods.
“In this camp, I learned a lot about like using the green screen and like recording and how to edit and it’s just, it’s been fun,” Wood said.
Rozman said the camp was a great way to help build confidence, both with the equipment and with performing and speaking in front of others.
“It’s like a kid in a candy shop, it’s always fun to have a large amount of technology that you can use and you can use very efficiently if you know what you’re doing with it, so all around it was pretty fun,” he added.
It isn’t all about technology, either. Throughout the camp the kids played improvisational games to help with script writing, produced skits and even worked on their own projects, Smith said, such as one kid made a ghost hunt parody video.
“We’re really happy with how it went,” Smith said, “and we’re definitely going to continue to re-tool it for the future and hopefully it’s a good annual thing we do here.”