STN 2015 Day 7: Crazy 8's & Opening Ceremony

     Hey Everyone! Today was a very long and stressful day. I woke up at 5 in the morning, and ate breakfast at about 6. Thank you chaperones again for the great meals! Then I met up with Taylynn and Raine and went down to the 2nd floor. Raine, Taylynn, and I went into the Seaport Ballroom to hear the Crazy 8's contest briefing.  I thought it was really nice that Mr. M let me come along to the briefing too. I was pretty excited, yet nervous, since it was only eight hours instead of sixteen. Mr. M was actually giving the briefing for the Crazy 8's briefing, so we got to see him there. The topic was, "Historical San Diego". I immediately thought of all different possible story ideas. It really did help that we did the scavenger hunt yesterday, because we went to a lot of historic landmarks and places in San Diego! I think we should do that on every trip. All three of us ran into the editing room to tell the broadcast team the prompt. We all contributed to a list of all the possible story ideas we could do. After some time with ideas that fell through, Raine, Nicole, and I decided to do a story in Little Italy. We took the trolley there but had to make a few stops. Also, thank you to Uncle Don and Uncle Dean for coming with us! We walked around little Italy and found a pizzeria named, "Filippi's Pizza Grotto". The owner of it, Danny Filippi, was very kind and let us do a story on it. The pizzeria was our central character, and we talked about the history of Little Italy/San Diego, and how it ties into the history of the pizza grotto. Did you know that Filippi's Pizza Grotto along with Amici Park and Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church, are historic landmarks in San Diego and Little Italy? Did you also know that you cannot destroy historic landmarks? Well you can't, and Filippi's Pizza Grotto has been going on for 65 years now. The history behind it all is this. San Diego was big in the fishing company, so lots of tuna fleets would come in. While the fishermen were waiting, they'd get hungry and ask Mr. Danny Filippi's Grandmother to make them something to eat. His grandmother would make them sandwiches, and they were so good and the demand was high, so they opened up a market. All of the Italians would come from Italy to America, and open a bunch of shops and restaurants, and so, it was like a little Italy. That's what I learned today! We got back from filming on time, and I started to edit while Nicole and Raine did voice overs. I finished the main outline of the video, and handed it off to Nicole and Raine to finish it up and make some changes. While they did that, I edited along with Dalson and Kaden the final video. Here we took everyone's individual video and put it all into one. At first, I thought being one of the main editors would be difficult, but it was surprisingly a bit easy. Most of the stories were turned in close to the deadline, but there were some that went over. At the end of it all, we got everyone's videos in the final. We were 10 minutes until the deadline at 4pm, but we still had some mistakes. The time before the deadline was probably the most stressful since a lot of the team were yelling and hurrying us up. It was mostly minor errors, but they were still noticeable. But since time was running out, we exported it and put it onto the flash drive. Then the main editors, Kaden, Dalson, and I, ran to the drop box basket out the door. We dropped it in and everyone was happy and cheering! Film team made the deadline too! I think we did okay, for sure much better than our practice, but all we can do is hope for the best. Remember what Mr. M said though, winning is just icing on a cake. It's good that we met the deadline. After all of the high-fives, we met with Castaic /CMStv at the Old Spaghetti Factory. I ate an Alfredo, and we got the opportunity to bond more with our pen pals! My pen pals, Susan and Alexa, are very nice and funny. After dinner, we walked back to the hotel for the STN Opening Ceremony. There was flashing lights and loud music and 2,700 people in the room. It was pretty packed. They had a bunch of speakers, including Hari Sreenivasan, this years keynote speaker, and Gabe Gallegos the Student of the year. They both shared some inspiring stories and advice like Gabe's story on homeless veterans and Hari's advice for doing your best. Then we debriefed and went back to our rooms for our blogs. Well, that's it for my blog! Tomorrow I'm going to STN breakout sessions, so I'll keep you posted! Thanks for reading! Bye!