2015-2016 High School Winners

Bryan Sturm, a freshman at Foothill Technology High School in Ventura, CA, created a video as an assignment for his English class. He wanted to learn more about deforestation and its impacts on the planet, which is why he chose the topic. Bryan was surprised and shocked to learn how agriculture effects forests, especially in countries like Brazil where forests are being depleted at an alarming rate. “It’s really nice for me to learn more about the situation of our planet because you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what the problem is,” he said.

Bryan loves to draw and decided to take this opportunity to practice his drawing. All the images seen in his video are originals created in Adobe and he taught himself to use editing software, a skill he’s found useful outside the contest as well. There was a lot of information Bryan wanted to convey in his video and prioritizing what was most important was the most difficult part of the filmmaking process. “Take a step back and look at the big picture and don’t wait until the last minute,” is one of Bryan’s suggestions to future contest participants.

This summer, Bryan hopes to improve his figure drawing skills and gain more coding experience. He really enjoys math, science, and art and plans to attend an engineering workshop at the University of Berkley to learn about different careers. He is on his schools Robotics team and this year the team advanced all the way to the world championship. Bryan’s super power of choice would be to have the ability to have any super power he wants!