NCHS’ library wins national library music video award

Lily Kazemi
News Editor

On May 25, the American Library Association announced NCHS as the winner of  their “Why I Need My High School Library” contest, composed of students who created original music videos for a prize of $3000 to improve their library. The contest was divided into two categories, one for 13- to 15-year-olds and another for 16- to 18-year-olds, with New Canaan winning the honor for the latter. The Think Inspiration Media (TIM) video was created by seniors Nick Howard, Nicola Scandiffio, Stewart Taylor, and Nick Zanca with featured appearances by junior Katayoun Amir-Aslani and sophomores Ashley Feldman and Isabelle Herde.

According to Library Department Chair Michelle Luhtala, the boys only had a couple of days to get the video together before the deadline. Nicola, who directed the video, said that they were slow to start in the beginning, but finished in just two days. “We gave Stewart only a day to write [the lyrics]and Nick [Zanca], who had composed the music, made the beat before just for fun, so we used it,” he said. “We basically had only one evening after school to film.”

Having written the song lyrics, Stewart said he was successful in conveying the purpose of the video. “Writing lyrics is always a lot of hard work on my part because I’m a perfectionist, but I was really happy with the way the library lyrics turned out,” Stewart said. “I was given a little information about what [Ms. Luhtala] was looking for, and then I had to work really hard to construct that information into a one verse, well-constructed pop song.”

“Why I Need My High School Library” is just one of the many TIM videos directed by Nicola. “I love directing music videos, as each one brings new challenges and ideas,” he said. “However, for this one, we wanted to make the library look different and make it stand out. We walked the library during a free and pointed out things that would look cool on film and we went through the song line by line and tried to visualize. But with a project like this, meaning we needed to do it in less than 24 hours, we only can prep so much. Most of the stuff in the video is done on the fly and thought of randomly.” Nicola also said that the three minute video took two hours to prep, three hours to shoot and two hours to edit.

As an extra in the video, Isabelle said that she had a great time filming her cameo. “Nicola and Nick put a lot of hours into something they cared for and it paid off,” she said.

The producer of the video, Nick H., admits that he never expected to win the contest. “We did not expect to win, as our video was not the most educational exactly,” he said. “We have high production quality and the lyrics were fairly relevant so we had a good chance, but it was really unexpected actually.”

Stewart described winning the award as a humbling experience. “It proves hard work truly does pay off,” he said. “Now our video is even being shown to an estimated 30,000 people at a national library convention in New Orleans! To me, that’s mind blowing and it goes to show that you never know where you’re work will end up going.”

Nick H. said the prize money will go towards buying new iPads, featuring special engravings to remind students of how they were earned, for our library. “There will be eight iPads ordered for the library that will be engraved with Think Inspiration Medias and the music tech class’ names.”