2018 High School Winners

Joshua Romer is a senior at Jenks High School in Jenks, Oklahoma. His film class teacher told him and classmates about the contest but it was optional whether or not to participate. He decided to focus his video on Preventing Pollution noting that, “I felt like this was an issue I could come at from an interesting angle.” Josh had heard about a plan by Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson to get the planet to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 and used that as the inspiration behind his video. He shared with us, “All I can hope is that it’s my generation or the next generation that cracks the code on switching over to renewable energy and that we can figure out how to reverse some of the damage that we’ve done. I am hoping this is more of a challenge we can solve than a challenge we’ll have to face.”

When it came to deciding how he would structure his video, Josh spent a lot of time brainstorming the best way to display the information. He knew he’d need a creative way to share the information he’d learned if he hoped to keep viewers interested. Josh, no stranger to the world of filmmaking, has been making movies from a young age and has already won several awards this year including second place in C-SPAN’s StudentCam competition.

In his free time, Josh is very involved in clubs at his school including the National Honor Society, Student Council, and the Family Career and Community Leaders of America club as the treasurer. Josh’s summer plans include attending a two-week film camp at the Oklahoma Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain, and in the fall, he’ll attend the University of Oklahoma to pursue his film career by studying Creative Media Production.